Big Brood

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?

Back in early November gander and I took a look at our finances and decided we were at best going no where fast and more likely on a sinking ship. Together we headed down the debt reduction road once again. I say once again because we have done this several times before. We have taken tax returns, bonuses, etc and paid down credit card debt to zero (or nearly zero) only to be lured back into our consumer world thinking we should spend money on things we didn’t need and certainly couldn’t afford.

We are trying something a little different this time. We are communicating. It seems obvious but we have lacked this in the past. It is much easier to slip back into bad habits when you don’t talk about spending, purchases, etc with your spouse. It has taken us almost 12 years of marriage but I think we are starting to figure a few things out! I did say starting!

We also decided we would keep ourselves motivated by taking a special trip or buy something special to reward/motivate ourselves whenever we get a large bill paid off. Since our current endeavour began in November we have paid off 2 big bills and are chopping away at a third, Gander’s 10 year old rusting minivan (don’t ask why we still have an outstanding loan on this, sigh). Gander and I took a much needed overnight date night last night. We had the youngest gosling with us, but other than that it was just us. We had several “quiet” meals together and got a lot of chatting done. It was very refreshing and really helps us to keep our perspective.

So the other goslings don’t feel too burdened by our debt reduction plan (and the sacrifices they have been making like very few trips to the “big M”) we will treat them also, we will be going to an indoor water park next month. That will get us up to date until the next debt has been eliminated!