Pocketmint

Tag: mortgages

1. What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars

   21 March 2012

   With the decision to stop paying our mortgage, our immediate expenses dropped by nearly $3000 per month. That saved us over $32k in 2011 alone. So what did we do with all that ‘extra’ money? Well, first of all, about $6000 went to pay additional income tax, now that we no longer qualified for the […]

2. Mortgages: knowing when to walk away

   12 March 2012

   In January 2011 Jak and I made a bold and controversial financial decision that would send our lives down a sharply different path. We decided to default on our mortgages. For background, you should read my earlier post about buying our current house in 2006, around a year before the Seattle housing market peaked and […]

3. Retrospective rubbernecking at the subprime mortgage disaster

   17 November 2011

   As I mentioned once before, I have a block on ‘formal’ book reviews, so consider this just a friendly little chat, okay? I trust Stacy’s opinions implicitly, particularly on matters of journalism, so when in passing she praised Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, the very next thing I did was hit the library web site […]

4. To buy or to rent: failing to predict the future of housing

   26 June 2009

   In the last month I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that purchasing this house when we did was a huge financial error. It’s been hard, and I’ve engaged in a lot of self-flagellation over the subject. We closed on this house December 1, 2006. Two and a half years later, we’ve paid […]

5. Put that money where it belongs, dammit

   8 June 2009

   Here’s yet another reason why checking online account information regularly is a good idea: My regular monthly electronic payment on our second mortgage went out to Bank of America on June 3. On June 4 I manually sent an extra $2000 against the principal. On June 7 I checked our mortgage accounts online. Turns out […]

6. The giant sucking sound at the bottom of the global pool

   22 August 2008

   If you’re not a regular listener of This American Life, you may have missed the May episode entitled “The Giant Pool of Money”. It explains why what we have now isn’t just a ‘sub-prime mortgage lending crisis’ but a ‘worldwide credit crisis.’ It’s masterfully written, taking all the jargon and translating it into plain, often […]