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Personal Finance Update: August 2007
This month, the bills have presented a depressing mess. All of our various insurance policies came due, forcing me to imagine an endless series of potential tragedies waiting to befall me and my beloved soon-to-be-wife.
For example, soon Florida will be in the prime Hurricane season, so I had best renew the home-owners insurance (scam!) before a storm takes my roof off. Of course, nestled between the Banana River and Atlantic Ocean, it is just as likely that a flood will wash my single-story-with-no-basement into oblivion; good thing we also have flood insurance (bigger scam!). However, statistically speaking, it is far more likely that I end up in a multiple-car pile-up thanks to the many semi-blind octogenarians who share our local roads; thank goodness we have the opportunity to pay for the next six months of car insurance (the biggest scam of them all!). The key point is this: no matter which terrible way I will die, first, I must first spend my hard earned money on endless premiums in hopes of never collecting a dime in pay-outs. I would wager that whoever invented insurance had friends at the Federal Reserve.
Enough blather; how do the numbers look?
The Good:
We saved our target $380. I also added an additional $333 to savings this month, as I explained here. The IRS is demanding my money, along with 8% interest, per year, having already waited three years to mention this to me. Luckily, August is a historically quiet month in the web-dev game, so I should have some free time to really dig into this issue and see what I can do.
The Bad:
We exceeded our target debt payment of $1,525, and reduced our bad debt by 8.58%.
AMEX: paid $1,500, owe $13,078.77
VISA: paid $1,000, owe $7,701.92
Car: paid $215, owe $5,524.56
Total Bad Debt: $26,305, down $2,469 from last month.
The Ugly:
Student Loans: paid minimums, owe $27,429
The Mortgage: paid $510 towards principal, owe $272,014
According to Zillow, my house’s value is back down to $274k this month. LTV (loan-to-value) sits at a Serin-esque 99.28% (up from 98.15% last month).
We are still “right side up”, but for how long? My next-door neighbor lost his house to foreclosure a few months ago, and it has just been purchased for $250k. It is literally twice as big as mine, with a pool also twice as big as mine. If that place went for $250k, there is NO WAY this dump is worth $270k; I expect we could plunge as low as $200k, once the smoke clears. Either way, homeowners of the world unite- the worst is yet to come.
Hungry for more?
