Irregular Payments

New here and like what you read? Subscribe to my RSS feed for more. And thanks for visiting!

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government. - Benjamin Franklin

I’m not sure what’s up this year, but I believe I’ve heard the query, “But can’t I just write that off as a business expense?” more times this season than I ever have before.

In other words, no, you cannot write off part of your remodeling bill because of your home office when you, well, don’t even have a home office…

As you may have noticed - and I’m sure you’ve been waiting with bated breath - I’ve neglected to post our net worth update so far this month. And I even have a few legitimate-sounding excuses.Namely,

1. a dead home PC which was only replaced a couple days ago
2. a tax season that is as consistently busy as it always is
3. the effort required to clean up the minutiae from that big ol’ table when I export it as HTML from Excel (Whatever committee decided on the specs on that bit of code for Microsoft - and it had to be a committee because an individual would never end up with such obfuscated garbage - must have arrived at some reason for spitting out those results, but for the life of me I haven’t figured it out yet.)
4. a three-year-old in the house (ok, this one might not be a good excuse, but many days it should be! )

But the real reason I haven’t prepared one (at least for presentation on the site. I have one, it’s just not easily put up here… see #3 above) is that most of the info on the statement isn’t all that relevant IMO. At least for now, our assets just aren’t going to fluctuate all that much, outside of small additions to my SIMPLE balance and any market changes in the value of our retirement accounts. The real action is going on on the liability side of the equation, and hopefully in a rapid downward direction.

The last few weeks shows a substantial increase in what we owe since most of our renovation bills have finally arrived. There’s still a handful of bills floating out there, but not like this months batch!

So for awhile, I plan to simplify a bit, just report on what we owe and focus on the progress on that front. Because, quite honestly, that’s where I think I should be focusing…

Where we stand today:

	Jan31′07	Mar13′06	Change
EVERYTHING We Owe
Credit Card Debts
Chase	$20,250.00	$19,900.00	($350.00)
Other Debts
Home Mortgage	39,426.69	39,323.59	(103.10)
Low Energy Loan	16,584.94	16,353.31	(231.63)
Line of Credit	1,690.29	33,493.51	31,803.22
TOTAL Liabilities	$77,951.92	$109,070.41	$31,118.49

And my thoughts?

Yes, our home is certainly worth that. But still… Ouch!

Almost as soon as we get out to our new home in the countryside, and we get our first real taste of winter. Followed by about 3 more weeks of the same. Needless to say, that ‘taste’ has become more of an ‘engorgement’.

To add the proverbial cherry to the top, I spent half of the last week essentially trapped at home by the biggest blizzard in the area in almost 10 years. I could theoretically get out, but there was no guarantee that I’d reach any particular destination. And if I did leave, no guarantee that the wind wouldn’t throw a four foot drift in my return route. Let’s just say I didn’t bother wandering.

Needless to say — but I’ll say it anyway — I am now officially sick of winter. At least this week is looking to heat us up a bit and not snow.

Bring on the mud!