Irregular Payments

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Despite our best efforts, we ended up blowing our Christmas budget…

We finally finished picking up a litte something for everyone on our respective lists over the weekend. Totalling all the receipts up last night, I see we overspent our budget this year. By 14¢. Oh, the horrors… I promise we’ll do better next year!

I used to love giving big gifts. It was my way of proving to those I loved how successful I thought I was — or at least, how successful I wanted to appear to them. I remembers years of not having more than a wild guess at what was spent on Christmas gifts (or, honestly, my month to month spending, for that matter), pretty well entirely based on how much the credit card balance went up those last few months of the year. And I remember because those years weren’t more than a couple holiday seasons ago.

These days, the gifts are much simpler. (Though since I’m an American, their total is still ridiculous, considering that the amount we spent on Xmas is probably more than what the majority of families in the rest of the world earned for the year.) And guess what? Everyone appreciates the gifts just as much, and enjoys themselves just the same. I would go so far as to hazard probably moreso, since there seems to be some toning down all around as far as the level of consumerism on display. Perhaps we’ve all independently come to the conclusion that we were going overboard on the whole gift giving thing and it was time to stop the insanity. Or maybe everyone else looked at their credit card statements and came to the realization that, hey, this is no way to live our financial lives!

Either way, I’m looking forward to getting together with the entire family this year. Hanging out with my sister and brother (who I see maybe twice a year), showing off my increasing chatty two-year-old (hey, I can still show off a little, can’t I? :mrgreen:), and just kicking back and relaxing with everyone is gift enough for me.

It should be enough for anyone, I’d think… :Xmas:

Tagged:
 » Christmas, Xmas, holidays, shopping, consumerism, family, budget

The folks at the Motley Fool are reporting on a new addition to the tax laws: the ability to tack on your Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) payments to your itemized deduction in 2007 like you do your mortgage interest payments.

I really like this little snippet:

Unlike your mortgage, which you’ll probably pay for decades, private mortgage insurance can come to a relatively quick end.

And of course, that is true, depending on how you define relatively. On a, for instance, age of the universe scale, 11 years is relatively quickly. To me, 11 years of PMI for a one year deduction just doesn’t seem like that wonderful of a deal. Wait, what was that? You didn’t notice that the law, as currently written, allows this deduction for a single year? Hmmm, yeah, I can see how you might have missed that, as it they certainly didn’t spend much time on that particular fact.

Even for 2007 — when this provision will actually be in effect — I just don’t see how paying $4 to the mortgage company to save an additional $1 on my taxes is anything but, well, stupidity. (I’ve seen a couple posts by people who seems excited by the proposition, but I can’t seem to find the posts in my history or I’d trackback ‘em just to see if I could get a decent justification on how this is a particularly good idea.)

While it may be a slight help to the potential homeowner, the private mortgage insurers are the true winners with this. It will just make it more likely that those with a weak grasp of the big picture - “Hey, we get to write off that PMI thing! Let’s go get that house we can’t afford!” - are that much more likely to justify to themselves taking out that zero-down-payment loan.

Oh, and to top it all off, I get to answer excited question about this for the next 4 months…

Yeah, me!

Tagged:
 » PMI, private mortgage insurance, mortgage, taxes, itemized deductions

Another month sneaks past, and another report comes due. Not a whole lot of time has been spent focusing on finances this month, as our little family has been spending an insane amount of time finally doing our part to complete our renovations. Let’s just say, my life would be well lived if I never saw another paintbrush - or discovered the holding power of primer on skin - ever again!

But after all is done, we will finally be able to kick back and relax. (OK, you old house owners out there can stop laughing at that statement already - yes, I’m quite aware we’ll have tons of things that will need our attention, but renovation on the scale that we’ve undertaken is a stress I’m not sure I would do again had I known what we were getting into! 8O)

Nevertheless, of course money moved around a bit even without a whole lot of attention being focused on it. So without further ado, let me present The Report - November 2006 Edition:

A little commentary:

• 4.4% return on our investments? Give me that every month and I’ll paint a room or two…
• Many people got many things taken care of as far as the renovations. Most of them haven’t bothered to send out a bill yet. My guess is, over the next few months, as everything rolls in, that used line of credit total may approach our mortgage! Am I thrilled about this? Well, no, not in the slightest. But it still brings the cost of our home to substantially less than I feel it’s actually worth. While I may be coming from an optimistic viewpoint, I’m not being that optimistic - we got an absolutely astounding deal on our home.
• Chase keeps sending out these “4.99% for the life of the balance” transfer checks. I’m considering using one to transfer a bit of the used line of credit, as we have a ridiculous $15k+ of room left on it. I’m not quite sure that it’d be worth the $45 per month we’d save in interest to be playing with a credit card, but just saying, I’m considering it…
• All I want for Xmas is the ability to move in… and it looks like it may just get my wish.

Tagged:
 » debt, report card, credit cards, mortgage, investments, assets, liabilities