Irregular Payments

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A fellow debtor using the nom de plume of Loonies and Sense tagged me to take part in the latest meme making it’s way through the personal finance community: MOMA (aka My One Money Advice). I must say, at first glance I thought I had yet another spammer sneaking by my filters — after all, what does the Museum of Modern Art (you know, that other MoMA…) have to do with personal finance? Anywho…

MOMA asks this one question: If you can give one advice, tip, or story related to money, what would you share?

My bit of advice:

More isn’t a goal; Enough is…

Wanting more is a natural impulse. More money. More stuff. More food. More drink. More sex. More drugs. More rock ‘n roll.

More can be a wonderful thing (as well as a terrible one when taken to excess). But as a goal, more sucks. No matter how much X you have, unless you’ve somehow cornered the market on X, with some additional effort you can always get more. With more as your goal, contentment is going to be elusive, because once you think you’ve finally caught up, the target has moved.

Enough, though — now there’s a goal. I’ve been thinking about enough quite a bit recently. Like anybody, with proper motivation I can likely boost my income to just about any reasonable (perhaps even unreasonable) level. That is, if I were willing to take extraordinary action and make extraordinary sacrifices. But money in and of itself isn’t my goal anymore; enough is.

So what is enough? Well, that you’re going to have to figure out on your own. It can take quite a bit of effort and refining to come up with your enough. But trust me on this, it is well worth the effort!

To keep the meme chugging along, I’d like to know what brip blap, Debt Kid, Finance is Personal, and I’ve Paid For This Twice Already have to offer. And thanks to the meme starter, Moolanomy for kicking off some interesting reads!

…it’s National Relaxation Day, so, well, relax! Go out and do a bit of de-stressing today. Go on a swim. Hit the sauna. Take a nature walk. Sucker punch a sleazeball mortgage broker.

It goes without saying (but I will anyway) that into every life a little rain must fall. Likewise every market must have the occasional correction. I’ve been paying attention to the financial news, so I knew there was going to be a pretty hefty ding to the bottom line. But as long as our investment allocation doesn’t go too far out of whack, I’m the tortoise — just keep plodding forward; darting all over the place just wastes energy money.

So I hadn’t checked the actual numbers for some time. And all I can say is, wow, am I glad I’m not hung up on the day to day performance of it all!

Perhaps a mojito or two may be in order?

Another month, another peek at the ol’ SotD.

July continued June’s slow but steady progress. A bit more progress would have been realized, but a short vacation to attend a family reunion was in order, which cause us to really blow the ‘Crap Food‘ budget category, and end up a bit over on the ‘Gas‘ as well. Excuses excuses…

At this pace, everything will be paid off somewhere around mid-January, 2016. Absolutely ridiculous. 8+ years to get rid of this balance is untenable. Mind you, before then our other property will be long since sold, which will knock off a hefty chunk of that total. But there hasn’t been a heck of a lot of true interest in it so far this summer, so who really knows when that will be! Still, we’re looking at a more than a couple years before it’s gone. Too long for my tastes!

So, to paraphrase Dave, a bigger shovel is in order. A few things are in the fire, but substantial returns are still eluding me. For now. More on that later…