Big Brood

… you get excited over cheap 25lb bags of Pinto beans at Sam’s club.

Since mid-October or so, Goosey and I have been maintaining a price book. We have found that the price book has been one of our most effective tools in fighting food costs. As our brood grows in age and numbers our food costs are beginning to increase. To keep on top of it, we have used a price book. Here’s what it has done for us.

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My herd has arrived!

For those of you who can’t tell what that is, it’s a handful of Eisenia fetida, red worms, red wigglers or whatever you like to call them. We like to compost and we’ve used red wigglers before. This is our newest herd.
You’ll note some white in that picture. That is shredded junk mail, finanical documents, etc. which will be eaten by my worms. I’d like to see some thief put together my information after it passes through the gut of a worm! Hah!

I also challenge you, intrepid reader, to find any other blog on the Internet advocating such innovative and eco-friendly methods to prevent identity theft!

Do you have any interesting methods for preventing identity theft?

Yahoo Finance has nice article entitled
A Fed Rate Cut Could Send Your Mortgage Rate Even Higher

that seems to correlate with my earlier analysis that now is a good time to get a refinance on our loan. Interest rates may get better in the future but inflationary fears will likely drive the long-term interest rates higher.

Since we’ll be looking for a 30-year mortgage, that’s what we’re interested in.

As a side note, this may seems like a repeat of our mistakes with our car as we refinanced that as well. In fact, the over all goal is the same. Reduce monthly payments and reduce overall interest payed. I think that this is still the right choice though because we are in a in a long-term effort to pay off all debt except for our house loan and I don’t currently plan to pre-pay my mortgage. Also, a house is a much longer-term than a car. We’ll essentially be extending our “overall mortgage time” to 31.5 years, but we’ll be paying less interest overall.

JD over at Get Rich Slowly has a great article on whether to pre-pay or not. His conclusion: Do whatever works best for you, but it seems it may be wisest to invest in an index fund. I think this is the way we’ll go once we get our stupid debt payed off.

Are you pre-paying or investing? Do you have any advice on what has worked better for you? I’d love to hear your Honk on this. Am I putting my foot into something I don’t want to step in?