Thanks for visiting Ultimate Money Blog! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Last year I shared how I can’t bring myself to pay extra on the mortgage. Fortunately, since then I’ve been able to bring myself to make a few additional principal payments on our mortgage, and I love seeing them applied directly to principal.  It’s a great feeling.  However, we have many more years to go and many more mortgage payments to make.  So far we’ve eliminated at least one mortgage payment off the life of our loan, and it feels awesome. When we refinanced our mortgage a couple years ago, instead of going with a 28 year mortgage (the amount of time that we had left on our original mortgage), we stretched it out to a 30 year mortgage to get a lower payment.  One of our goals is for me to be a stay at home mom whenever we do have kids, so that was a huge factor to us.  We figured we can always pay extra on the mortgage [...]

This afternoon I had a genius idea.  I decided that I want to sell our house and buy another that will fit our lifestyle a little bit better.  The house we are in now is a perfect size (it’s about 1500 square feet and we don’t use two of the bedrooms plus the dining room) but is on a little less than an acre.  I really want to get chickens, and we actually can because there are no ordinances against it here but it would be nice to have more property to be able to put them farther away from the house.  Also, if we could get a house with more property, I could bring my horse down here, be able to have one milking goat, and any other animals I’d like.  Plus, our dogs would love having more property to run on, and I could have a bigger garden to help with our dream of self-sufficiency.  I’ve always wanted to live in a house with woods on the property and room to run. However, I think it’s kind of [...]

Last June we refinanced our first and second mortgage (I didn’t follow my own tips for a first time home buyer) and secured a lower mortgage rate.  We signed for a 30 year mortgage in order to keep the payments low.  We wanted to know we can afford the payments so I have flexibility in my career.  You never know, I may want to be a housewife one day and I want to know I have that option!  When we refinanced our mortgage, we went with a loan that didn’t provide an escrow service for us, so we had to do that ourselves.  Not a problem; we actually enjoy saving money ourselves for homeowners insurance and property taxes. Thankfully, the closing costs of refinancing only were $150.  The only drawback?  There is a prepayment penalty on the loan, and the only way I can avoid a prepayment penalty is if we make a large payment on the loan and then wait a day and pay the rest.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t have over $100,000 just sitting [...]