2million Personal Finance Blog, My Journey to Financial Freedom

Free Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

Here is an offer for a free compact fluorescent light bulb from The Million Lights Project. They are giving away 1 million CFLs as a project to raise awareness of how tranditoinal incandescent light bulbs contribute to global warming.

Regardless of the cause, getting a free energy efficent light bulb is a no-brainer.

Thanks to slickdeals for the find.

Rationalizing The House That Got Away

My wife and I just went through one of those roller coaster weeks in our house hunting search. We had a house on our radar screen that was out of our price range, but got drastically reduced. It was just what we had dreamed about living in although even at its drastically reduced price I hesitated about the price tag. We still don't "need" a home for another 6 months (till we get back from our assignment).

After an in-depth discussion about how it was everything we ever wanted and how we could stretch to pay for it we agreed to make an offer. Mentally we were ready to reach an agreement at the asking price - after all it was dramatically reduced. By the time we called our realtor to make the offer, the sellers accepted another offer. What a downer! It was a rare opportunity for us to grab a beautiful property on the top edge of our price range and it had everything we were looking for - by far the best value we have seen.

Looking past the frustration of missing out on something we had already mentally made the leap to living in - I recall:

As a rule a thumb I have to believe its better to minimize our living expenses (ie read smaller house) rather than maximize them (read big house that just got away).

Where there is one opportunity found lies more opportunities yet uncovered.

I like to believe that we will end up in a house less expensive than this one that slipped through our fingers. While this house may have been a great value and decent investment, I believe that we will be ultimately better off if the delta we save will be invested in something that that works for us like an equity investment or a rental property.

My wife now thinks we have to hurry and find another house. Her concern over rising interest rates is a valid one. However I am less concerned over interest rates and more concerned over the price we pay. We can always refinance if rates drop, and paying a higher interest rate means that the option to prepay our mortgage may have a higher return when compared to other risk free investment options. I am just hope housing prices will drop -- at least in our area, Raleigh, NC, there is little sign of a dramatic slowdown. My fear is we end up with a lesser house at a higher price tag than the one that just got away.

A Reminder About How "Stuff" Costs Us

I have always described myself as a non-material guy - after all I pride myself on living on less back home and avoid buying "stuff" as much as possible. It allows me to save and invest more of my income.

However, I re-realized just how much "stuff" I actually have when I went on our current assignment. I am having to pay for a storage unit to hold my "stuff" while we are away on assignment since I rented out my house and did not merge my "stuff" with my wife's "stuff" before we came over.

This "stuff" is really costing me more than I ever accounted for - not only did I have to pay for these depreciating assets, I now am having to pay for space to store them. When we get back to the US we are going to have to buy a house big enough to hold all this stuff.

I need to get rid of more stuff. This was going to happen regardless since we got married and still need to sort through our household items to figure out what we can get ride of. Ofcourse you know my "stuff" is not as nice as her "stuff". The less stuff we have the smaller the home we could settled down in and the more spacious the home will feel.

House Hunting Picking Up Steam For Us

Well, my wife and I have started to spending more time looking for our new home. This has kind of been on hold since we were overseas, but our housing circumstancs are changing so that we need to find a new place to live as close to our return date timeframe (December) as possible.

My wife and I have been purusing the MLS listings on and off over the past 6 months trying to get a feel for what houses are going for in our area (Raleigh, NC) and what we are really looking for. We have previously talked about what we were looking for in our home, but by studying the listing out there we can get a pretty good idea of what it might cost us and where we would have to go to find it.

We have settled on an area to focus our search. It's a bit further away from my work location, but that helps us get the lot size we are looking for in our price range. We are currently focused on the $250,000-$300,000 price range, and don't yet feel comfortable paying more than $300,000 for our house. $250,000 would be my preferred price, but we won't be able to get what we are looking for at that price.

Starting a House Tracking Spreadsheet
Once we fine tuned our requirements we started tracking all the houses that fit that criteria - 2200-3000sq ft, .3-2acres lot size, 3bedrooms+bonus, at least 2.5 baths, wooded lot, 2 car garage. Any properties that we come across that match our criteria we log in our spreadsheet so we can track price reduction, final sales price, and compare to other properties we find.

June 2008 Net Worth Update (-$20,122)

What a swing - we went from the best net worth gain ever last month to knocking the socks off the worst month ever for us back in January 2005 where my net worth declined -$1,903. Its hard for me to fathom even losing so much off our balance sheet in one month. The loss is more than we even grossed in total income, but I guess it's the volatility we need to get use to as we continue to expand our equity positions going forward.

Assets	May-08	Jun-08	Change	%
Cash & Savings	$ 91,767.13	$ 92,302.47	$ 535.34	0.58%
Taxable Brokerage Accts	$ 77,669.02	$ 75,937.16	$ (1,731.86)	-2.23%
Roth IRAs	$ 44,244.80	$ 40,918.14	$ (3,326.66)	-7.52%
Pre-tax Retirement Accts	$ 173,517.84	$ 162,950.51	$ (10,567.33)	-6.09%
Stock Options	$ 28,863.99	$ 20,144.00	$ (8,719.99)	-30.21%
ESPP	$ 45,472.49	$ 41,687.51	$ (3,784.98)	-8.32%
House #1 - Rental	$ 160,000.00	$ 160,000.00	$ -
House #2 - Rental	$ 128,225.00	$ 128,225.00	$ -
House #3 - Primary	$ 116,500.00	$ 116,500.00	$ -
Receivable (Payable)	$ -	$ 9,726.00	$ 9,726.00
Other Assets	$ -	$ -	$ -
Total Assets	$ 866,260.27	$ 848,390.79	$ (17,869.48)	-2.06%
Liabilities
Credit Card Balances	$ (20,054.38)	$ (27,938.02)	$ (7,883.64)	39.31%
House #1 Mortgages	$ (113,831.55)	$ (113,634.55)	$ 197.00	-0.17%
House #2 Mortgages	$ (101,578.55)	$ (101,460.55)	$ 118.00	-0.12%
House #3 Mortgages	$ (93,415.56)	$ (92,238.69)	$ 1,176.87	-1.26%
Rental Deposits	$ (10,190.57)	$ (9,190.57)	$ 1,000.00	-9.81%
Additional Tax Liability	$ (10,391.04)	$ (7,251.84)	$ 3,139.20	-30.21%
Other Liabilities			$ -
Total Liabilities	$ (349,461.65)	$ (351,714.22)	$ (2,252.57)	0.64%
$2million Goal Progress*	$ 493,714.18	$ 472,415.26	$ (21,298.92)	-4.31%
Net Worth	$ 516,798.62	$ 496,676.57	$ (20,122.05)	-3.89%

Highlights for June

All credit card debt (except current month's purchases) is in the form of 0% APR balance transfers earning interest in my savings accounts.
June was a brutual month and even knocked us off out of our half-millionaire status temporarily
We decided to extend our overseas assignment till the end of this year.
I opened a Chinese Bank Account to take advantage of the decline of the dollar.
I finally cancelled my participation in my employer's ESPP
Overall our investments performed poorly, but were inline with the market. See our June 2008 Investment Report.

You can see my previous monthly net worth updates here.