This is a guest post from Joe at SmartMoneyFocus.com. Joe is on his way to be an asset millionaire by age 41. I remember the day that we paid off the mortgage like it was yesterday. My wife and I sat down and wrote the check to the mortgage company. It was the biggest check that either of us had ever written by far. It was for $167K. We had been saving and investing for this day for about 7 years and it was sweet. This was the end of our debt free journey. We had saved and worked hard to pay off, not only the mortgage, but also student loans, cars and credit card debt. We got there faster than I thought we would, but I did not know where our journey would take us. After our little triumph, I knew we needed another focus to keep us headed in the right direction. We decided to focus on our three boys and their college education. They are young and we had 10 years before the oldest would hit college [...]

We’re looking at doing some home improvements to our house: some new windows, a new stove, and just some general painting and repair.  This year we need to work on the exterior of the house since we’ve focused on remodeling the interior of the house over the past four years.  We decided that the best way to go about making all these repairs was to do one thing at a time.  That’s totally not how I like to roll, but it definitely makes more sense for my sanity.  It seems like anytime I get an idea about a new project there I am, full force into the demolition of the project and then I realize I’m way in over my head. Some things are better left to the professionals.  I was curious to find out how much replacement windows would cost, so I requested a few companies to come out and give us a free quote on replacement windows.  Our house is unique in the fact that the front part of the house was built probably in the 1940s and [...]

As I mentioned before, we need to replace our stove. The stove we currently have is ancient, and works half the time. The burners are going out and sometimes I’ll put a pot of water on for tea and realize half an hour later that the kettle hasn’t started whistling. It’s annoying. Mr. Money is a chef, and wants to replace it with a gas range with a convection oven. There are a couple problems with this: one, convection ovens are expensive!; and two, we currently have an electric stove so we’d have to run a gas line to the stove and add a hood vent. I asked a heating and cooling specialist today about how much it would cost to do both of those things. He said that it would probably be $600 maximum. However, he would have to look at it to give me a more accurate quote. I told Mr. Money that, and he didn’t seem like it was a big deal. He was expecting it to cost more money than that. I told him he’d have [...]