January Mortgage Update: And the amazingness of making more money than you ever have before

Last month (December):
Balance: $67,886.81
Years left: 5.333333333
P =$929.45, I = $284.95, Escrow = 613.58

This month (January):
Balance: $65,769.13
Years left: 5.16666667
P =$945.68, I = $268.72, Escrow = 613.58

One month’s prepayment savings: $4.64

Man, look how low that mortgage is getting.  Still 5 years out if we just pay the required amount, but if we keep up the prepayments, it’ll be half that time or less.  But we’ll see what happens.  (Especially if we keep spaying/neutering/testing/vaccinating cats at $300/pop.)

Anyhow… it is SO nice having more money than you need.  The lack of needing to think about money is just amazing.  A huge stress is gone now that DH is working again and the mental load is also gone.

There’s still a lot of stuff that we don’t do, but just knowing that we could do it is relaxing.  One of these days we’ll hire someone to mow the lawn.  We could totally hire someone to clean if we wanted to.  If things don’t work out in one way or another, we can throw money at the problems again.  Even if those problems never actually happen, the possibility of them happening is stressful when money is tight.  You can just forget about a potential problem until it happens when you have enough money to solve it.

This is not to say that you should spend your entire paycheck each month.  Our baseline expenses are still set from my paycheck alone.  We still have pretty frugal habits, even at the grocery store.  DH still has his allowance for his fun stuff.  We’re still limited by time.  We’re automatically saving as much, if not more, than ever.

And at some point with additional spending, it isn’t the additional lattes that get you (DH is thinking of re-upping his TONX subscription rather than continuing to roast his own from Sweet Maria’s).  It’s the big stuff.  The housing.  Replacing fancy cars.  My colleagues have traded up their “starter house” for enormous mansions or estates, sometimes building it themselves.  Then they complain about money being tight and have to take on more consulting.  It takes more lattes than a person can drink to make up for an additional 200K or 300K in debt on a house.

We have no intention of buying a fancier bigger house, and hopefully our cars still have a lot of wear in them.  And when we do replace them it’ll be with something at the level of a Civic Hybrid at the fanciest.  No BMW in this family.  So another $300 to neuter, vaccinate, and deworm yet another kitty isn’t worth thinking about.  We can spay/neuter several kitties a month and still be ok now that DH is working again, even if it means slower mortgage payoff or less money to a different charity.

Don’t worry, by next month we’ll probably be used to earning this amount, even though we never did get used to living on only half this amount, and we’ll stop talking about it.  It’s a lot easier to get used to having too much money than it is to get used to having just enough.  And, of course, one never gets used to having not enough.