Today we’re bringing you another round of He Said/She Said. These posts are really your chance as readers to hear how discussions (and sometimes disagreements) play out when managing our lives with each other. For a look at some of the past He Said/She Said discussions – check ‘em out here.
Sitting on a pile of cash this big and knowing that Mr. PoP’s parents would be A-ok with us keeping the $50K we owe them for a couple more years (they like those interest payments!) instead of paying them back on August 1, has been making us even more aware than usual of possible investment opportunities.
We’re considering these investment opportunities carefully, but wanted to share some of the investments we’ve passed on recently and why.
We Won’t Buy this House
Regular readers probably remember that we bought an empty residential lot in 2011. As a quick recap, it’s on a saltwater canal in a growing area. Our goal is to flip it in 10 years (so by ~2021) for at least $200K, hopefully more, and hopefully sooner… but that’s the goal.
Well, recently a dumpy little foreclosed house in the same neighborhood came on the market at an asking price of ~$130K, so we just had to take a look at it.
Would it be possible for a renter to “buy” us another lot in this neighborhood where we think there will be decent mid-term growth opportunities?
There seems to be a false premise that many people in the United States operate under. It’s a dangerous one that when you construct your world view around it can lead to a very difficult and stressful lifestyle. What is this premise?
That most people care about the details of your life.
This isn’t a pessimistic statement. This isn’t an “oh my god i’m so alone in the world” idea. It’s good news. I swear!
This is what Mr. PoP thinks of anytime someone says, “Good News!”
Though the professor from Futurama is hilarious, there’s someone who communicated this point even better many many years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, one of my favorite quotables of all.
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt
Think About The Last Time You Reflected Negatively Upon Others
On last month’s income statement, I alluded to a couple of big checks that we were expecting to come in April, but didn’t quite make the cut. One of them dropped on May 1st. It’s a check for almost $7,000 from a car accident settlement that finally resolves a car accident that I was in about 2.5 years ago.
Recap On Accident And Injuries
Not the car that hit me, but I always thought these jaguars seemed about to pounce!
The accident was pretty straightforward. I stopped at a red light. The car behind me didn’t. It didn’t end particularly well. I had whiplash on the day of the accident, but have two lingering lower back issues that are going to stay with me for a very long time (perhaps indefinitely – which plays a roll in why I’m a bit afraid of the idea of pregnancy).
FWIW, we ended up using a personal injury lawyer to help settle the claim, despite our apprehensions about consulting a lawyer for real estate matters, and feel like we came out ahead for doing so.
We’re by no means home decorating pros, nor would you find our work on HGTV. But every once in a while, we complete a project in the house that despite its low budget, ends up having an outsized impact. We shared our cheap fix for ugly fluorescent lighting a few months ago, and today we want to share our most recent home improvement – our take on vertical gardening.
Gardenias are so gorgeous, but impossible to grow in our front yard!
Landscaping in our front yard has been a thorn in our side since buying our house nearly 4 years ago. “Normal” landscaping in our area looks nice, but isn’t designed to be low cost, or low maintenance. A typical household in our neighborhood pays about $150+ in water for landscaping every month, and pays a yard service another $100+ to mow the lawn and keep the bushes trimmed lest they grow out of control.
We’ve avoided spending that $250/month. And that’s great. But we also don’t want to spend a ton of time or energy on maintaining the landscaping ourselves, either. We’ve gone through a couple of designs with out landscaping, seeking out a combination of:
low water needs (our dry season lasts about 6 months and is quite dry and city water is NOT cheap!)
low sunlight needs (the front yard of our house is bathed in shade from our 50ft live oak, which we lovingly call The Tree)
colorful and floral scented (or at least 1 of these)
So the last few weeks have been rough in the PoP household. We were having problems with our internet connection, and went back and forth with our ISP multiple times because we kept losing our connection. (Tragedy! Absolute Tragedy!)
At one point, we had a nice repairman out to our house an he suggested trying out a new modem. Here’s how the interaction went:
Repairman: (trying to figure out if the replacement DSL modem in his truck would suit us) How many devices do you guys connect to your router with?
Me: Regularly? 8? 9 if you count the printer that’s connected to enable wireless printing.
Repairman: (eyes bogging out of head) What?
Me: We each have a work laptop, a personal laptop, a tablet, and a wifi enabled smartphone. This is normal right?
Repairman: (says with slight disgust while shaking his head) Young people. Jeez.
Someone tell me we’re totally normal for having that many devices. Right? Totally normal?
Anyhow, we’ve now had 48+ hours of solid connection, and are knocking on every piece of wood we pass to keep the connection lasting indefinitely.
My newfound love for bike riding is starting to compete with my love for adorable kittens. Luckily the internet has come through with just the solution.
Our HELOC (home equity line of credit) is a line of credit that was extended against the value of our investment duplex (which didn’t have any other mortgage liens against it). Having dumped about almost $60K in cash into the duplex over 6 months between buying it and fixing it up, we were looking to have access to some of that capital should the right real estate deal present itself. And the HELOC was the right balance of cost and benefit to provide us with access to that capital when we needed it.
So Here’s The Deal
After extending the full $38K HELOC to help us buy our residential canal lot in November 2011, we paid the entire balance off a few months ago. (We were quite excited that the HELOC was dead!) In a couple of months, we’ll hit the 2nd year anniversary of opening the HELOC, and we’re evaluating if it’s worth it to close the HELOC early and pay the early termination fee or to keep it open and continue to pay the ongoing costs associated with it that we pay on the anniversary of opening it each year.
Today we’re bringing you another round of He Said/She Said. These posts are really your chance as readers to hear how discussions (and sometimes disagreements) play out when managing our lives with each other. For a look at some of the past He Said/She Said discussions – check ‘em out here.
It was one of the first times I had heard about some of the details of the planned mission around our favorite red planet that has a goal start date of January 2018. Here are some of the facts:
16 month trip from earth, slingshotting around mars and back to earth
1 man and 1 woman (preferably married) in a small capsule
Recently a couple of different events coincided that changed the way that I look at my 9 mile (18 miles round trip) commute to work.
A recent 10K (6.2 mile) charity race had its start/finish lines right near my office on a Sunday morning. Since I usually run between 15-20 miles on Sunday mornings, I had Mr. PoP drop me off at the race start and told him I’d just run home after the race for a total of a little over 15 miles.
Mr. Money Mustache wrote his Anti-Automobile April post spurring readers to keep track of biking/driving mileage for the month of April.
Considering that I had just run the distance between my office and home, and now knew the sidewalks, I figured I could give the challenge a try!
I Hadn’t Biked In Forever
Since moving to FL, my bike hadn’t gotten a whole lot of use. Okay, even less than “not a whole lot”. “Hardly any” is more like it. We had even semi-permanently loaned it to Mr. PoP’s parents to get it out of our one-car garage that sometimes feels tight on space and into their spacious 2 car garage that stores just a car and a golf cart. But in the name of the challenge, we brought the bike back to the house so I could ride to work.
Today we’re bringing you another round of He Said/She Said. These posts are really your chance as readers to hear how discussions (and sometimes disagreements) play out when managing our lives with each other. For a look at some of the past He Said/She Said discussions – check ‘em out 
