Wet the Bed?

Ok, get this one. Most mortgages are set up so that you make a monthly payment to the mortgage every month and it slowly gets whittled away until you have paid off the loan. So, to throw out some hypothetical numbers, it would look something like this:

Loan Amount: $200,000
Total Payments: $479,018
Total Interest: $279,018
Tax Savings: $83,705
Out of Pocket: $395,312
Years until paid: 30 Years

Well, most of us have our dumb little checking accounts that we use to buy groceries with, use the ATM machine, etc. What if we could open a Home Equity line against our homes that is large enough to pay off the entire mortgage on the homes; and then convince the bank to open a checking account that would automatically sweep against the line? Sweep, meaning that if we wrote a check it would add to the loan balance and if we made a deposit it would lower the loan balance. Then, you could close that dumb little checking account and deposit the money in the sweep account. Assuming that you have an average checking account balance of $5,000, the new numbers would look like this:

Loan Amount: $200,000
Total Payments: $441,761
Total Interest: $246,559
Tax Savings: $73,968
Out of Pocket: $367,793
Years until paid: 27.6

So nothing would really change in your daily spending habits, but you would save $27,519 and pay your mortgage off in over 2 years less time. Now, we all have that dumb rainy day fund as well (or we should). Why not apply that to the sweep account also? You could draw on the line if that rainy day ever did show up, so why not? So let’s say we apply that $5,000 checking account and another $10,000 from our rainy day fund. Then the new numbers would look like this:

Loan Amount: $200,000
Total Payments: $381,884
Total Interest: $196,173
Tax Savings: $58,852
Out of Pocket: $323,032
Years until paid: 23.92

So, you would save $72,281 and pay off the loan six years faster. And you wouldn’t have to change any spending habits or anything. Those dumb little accounts we hold are just getting chewed up by inflation anyway. Why not put them to work?

"Borrowing money is like wetting your bed in the middle of the night. At first all you feel is warmth and release. But very, very quickly comes the awful, cold discomfort of reality." – Elizabeth Gilbert

Mr. Gullible

I get a lot of forwards every day, emails filled with non-productive content, such as jokes about lazy husbands, or videos of kids doing stupid things, or slide shows with poems and flowery fields that are meant to make you cry, or news articles about unstoppable gas prices, etc, etc. Sometimes these emails are filled with outrageous content that is entirely false. Other times it is genuine stuff. And sometimes it seams real, but isn’t. I’ve been known to get tricked into believing that emails are real when they really weren’t. Yesterday was my most gullible of email moments to date. A video showed up in my inbox that showed people using cell phones to pop popcorn. I’m so paranoid about what cell phones are doing to my brain that I believed it really worked. In fact, I went to the store and purchased popcorn to give it a try. And I didn’t just try it out at home, but I took it to work and convinced a couple of my coworkers to use their cell phones to give it a try with me. I even had a few more people from my department as an audience. It didn’t work of course, and I was left to bemoan my failure in front of everyone. I tried to use the excuse that maybe it had to be microwave popcorn to work. One member of the peanut gallery decided he’d make things worse by asking me if I’d checked out this experiment on Snopes. Well, I did after he suggested it, and sure enough it turned out to be a complete fabrication. Everyone spent the rest of the afternoon making jokes at my expense about how I should try other household chores with my cell phone, like ironing my shirt or whitening my teeth. I should stamp gullible on my forehead before going out in public.

Tis the Season

Yesterday was the Mountain West Conference media day, which is kind of like the day after Thanksgiving when it is officially the Christmas season, but this is even better because it is Football season. This morning I marked every Ute game on my Outlook calendar, the Mountain West Conference 10th Anniversary team was released (5 Utes on the roster), and a lady from my work had a helmet signed by Sione Pouha and the entire Jet’s team. Tis officially the season. Now, I just need to get a couple of days off of work, because the Utes have two Thursday night games and decide which of the road games to go to this year; definitely Utah State, hopefully San Diego State, and maybe a third one in Colorado Springs. I’m so excited! All I want for Christmas is a Ute victory in Ann Arbor! Go Utes!

After I wrote the above, I began to wonder whether my fascination with Ute football is bordering on obsession. So, I decided to add up the time I spend watching Ute football. If I go to the game, I probably spend about eight hours with the tailgating and everything, and if I watch the game at home, it probably only takes about four hours out of my life. If I go to eight games a year and watch four on the television, then that is a total of 76 hours per season. Now, if I spend 16 hours a day awake that is 5,840 hours a year and the 76 hours I spend watching Ute football is only 1.3% of my waking life. One would probably have to spend upwards of 50 hours a month doing something to consider that something an obsession, so I think I’m in the clear. Of course, that doesn’t count all the other things I do related to Ute football, such as reading newspaper articles, listening to talk radio, and debating around the water cooler, but I think I can chalk those activities up to multitasking. I may be a superfanatical Ute supporter, but I’m still a productive member of society. Feeling justified, I’ll shout it again; Go Utes!

Quel es? ... Ahhh ... la belle femme skunk fatale!! Tch-tch.

I went rock climbing for the first time on Friday, something I have been avoiding for years, because I was deathly afraid of it. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights; it’s that I’m afraid of my ability to hang onto the wall. First of all, I don’t exactly have a lot of upper body strength. To be honest, some of my shirts button right over left instead of left over right. But mostly, I don’t have a lot of hand strength to hold onto the wall. I’ve always pictured rock climbers as having vice grips on the ends of their wrists. But on Friday, I was finally talked into it, mostly because I didn’t want to be the only one not to go. I learned a lot about climbing that day. The first thing I learned was that the shoes really hurt. In fact, after I laced them up I no longer had any fear; I just wanted to get it over as fast as I could to get that special kind of torture off my feet. I scurried to the top as fast as I dared, repelled to the bottom, and ripped those things off of my poor little patos. Once the pain diminished to an aching throb, I realized that I had made it and started to feel pretty good about myself. I was amazed to learn that rock climbing is done mostly with the legs and that you don’t have to do the equivalent of a thousand pull ups by hanging onto a crack. Another thing I learned was how different climbs are rated, and that the one I had just struggled with was aptly named “bunny slopes”. I no longer felt very good about myself. Later that afternoon we went to a more “moderate” climb. To me, it seemed like we were trying to shimmy our way up the side of a rock that had a face as smooth as a mirror. I did my best to hold back the tears as I laced on those foot sized iron maidens and then began to climb. Do you remember the old Warner Brothers cartoon about Pepe Le Pew chasing around Penelope Pussycat? And do you remember the part when the cat would eventually get cornered and would try to climb up a sheer wall while the skunk stood at the bottom reading poetry and declaring his love? Well, I was like that cat. I tried to scratch and scrape and claw my way up the wall, while the girl at the other end of the rope voiced her approval. But in reality, I just kept slipping, swinging into the wall at the end of the rope, and bumping my knuckles, arms, legs, head, buttocks, you name it. Each time I slipped, the girl at the other end of the rope must have given a heave so that I was a bit higher on the wall when I regained my grip (lather, rinse, repeat). By the time I got about half way up, I started to feel like the belayer was just hoisting a piano up to the fourth floor, so I decided to tap out. I give props to rock climbers with sufficient technique to rest their entire weight on a bump of rock the size of a pea.