Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Big Changes

Outside of the whole growing a person thing there have been some big changes at Casa POMF. Last night we signed closing papers to refinance our house. Last week we paid off the Prius. Now we're just a wee bit broke.

The refinance will save us $300/month, cut out PMI, and cut our rate 1.67%. Sadly, refinancing was almost (if not more) complicated that originally purchasing the house. The biggest pain was the appraisal process. The short story is appraiser 1 committed appraisal fraud. In between appraisal 1 and 2 we were doing things like choosing paint colors, getting supplies/packages for baby, and just a general me being pregnant. Scheduling time off to meet people and keep things neat while trying to finish up at work was no fun. The up side of the crazy is our house appraised 20K higher than when we bought it. This was also 20K higher than appraisal 1.

We kept the mortgage in just my name due to credit reasons. Though I had no problem getting a mortgage the first time around this time our debt to income rations with just my income were too high. So after a few discussions of the options we decided to pay off the Prius. This wiped out the majority of our cash on hand. I just updated our spreadsheet/Networth IQ and we went from around 20K in cash to 6K in cash. Half of that is currently allocated to something specific, but liquid if we need it.

The upside is we should be able to rebuild our cushion pretty quickly. Making those two moves is saving us $810/month. For the next few months we'll send the money we would have sent to the mortgage/etc to our efund to get it rebuilt. This also reduces how much we need in case of emergency, because we don't have as many obligations.

While all of that has been going on we've also gotten the nursery painted, bought the last of the baby furniture, purchased carseats and gotten the carpets cleaned in anticipation of the baby/my mom's arrival. This weekend was my shower, so the living room looks like a baby store threw up all over it, in the best possible way.

1 comment:

Kyle said...

Not sure how to contact you other than through this form.
Thought you'd like to see this site... http://www.megamillionssimulator.com
It lets you simulate playing the lottery for YEARS, and the TRUE chances you have. Perhaps you could write an article outlining the difference between playing this for a year ($365) or investing a dollar a day into a 1% savings account (typical going rate).
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Kyle