It's been a while since I updated this goal, but I DID want to check in and do so. For starters, I got a little off track for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I got burnt out on poker last August, which depleted some extra income I had originally counted on. I had hoped I would just keep on trucking and put myself in a position to make 30k or so on poker in 2011. Because I stopped playing, though, I'll probably be lucky to get back on track and make ~ $10k as I did the past two years. As if that weren't enough, I'm dating this girl and if all goes to plan, I hope to get married in 2012, which will mean some big expenses related to a ring, wedding, and honeymoon. While THAT is actually very good news, for financial goals, it's technically a setback, but a good one

Long story short, the house definitely won't be paid off in 2011 and 2012 might not be enough time either. BUT, it's still just as much of a goal as ever and I'm going to do all I can to make it happen sooner rather than later and I'm not totally ruling out 12/31/2012 as a payoff date, but a lot of things will probably need to go my way for that to happen.

So, what was I able to do? I made a large extra $20k payment in April 2009. I made a nice $3.6k extra payment in June. A modest extra $2k was paid in July and finally $2.4k extra was paid in September. That's $28,000 extra thrown at the mortgage in 2010. At the START of 2010, my mortgage was $103,690.97 and at the end of 2010, my mortgage was sitting at $72,504.56. If I could keep my original goal for 2010 ongoing into 2011 of $1200 extra per month, it would get knocked down to $53,658.71 by year's end.

Fortunately, I'm playing poker again, although I've had to take two steps back and it'll be a while before I'm back to form assuming I can even get back to form. Also, I should get back a nice tax refund since my poker income didn't come to fruition as planned and I was witholding as if it would come so I would owe nothing. I can also withdraw some excess bankroll that has me overrolled. So, it's not all bad news.

Also, a lot of my success is tied to my girlfriend and her ability to get out of debt and help with some of these expenses. Unfortunately, she is still getting out of debt so she can't jump in feet first yet, but fortunately she's on schedule to be out of it this year and basically all of her paycheck could then be used towards all these other goals.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get the ball rolling in the right direction again. There's so many things we want to do with our money that we can do after her debt is gone and my house is paid. Number 1 on my list and HERS is a brand new poker room in my house

Stay tuned ...