Our move back down to San Diego. A Year Later, during CO-VID and the pressure is mounting
It’s been a little over a year since, my family and I moved back down to SD. At the beginning of the 2019, my wife and I had a net worth of about $600,000. At least that’s what I recorded on my budget sheet in Numbers (Apple’s version of Excel. Personally, I think it looks nicer but totally not nearly as powerful with the equations. I have to do minor hacks sometimes to get them right. Since I look at it everyday and don’t mess with the equations that often, I like the nicer look over functionality in this case LOL). This is my first blog post, so I wanted to tell people about where we are currently at. 2020 was lucky for us. Between the 2019 and so far in 2020, my wife and I are worth about $850,000. That’s a gain of about 250,000 over two years. Thats crazy!!!!!
You would think I would be amazingly happy, however, I realized the other day that I'm not. I’m so pressure to save and work that I think I’ve gone overboard with the obsession of retiring early, which stems from me not liking engineering, but I need the job to make sure that my family can survive. It just doesn’t make sense to me that if we are 85% of the way towards being millionaires that we would still feel pinched to save towards financial independence. I think most of it is my fault for putting so much pressure on myself, but I personally am just tired of working a high stress job LOL.
With CO-VID and the pressures of possibly being let go from my job with a single income family, everything just feels magnified. Let me explain my situation a little bit and what’s weighing on my mind. I recently agreed with my mother that my family should move out of her house (we thought it would be a good idea since the house could fit all of us and my step father recently past away, trust me NEVER DO THIS). The break down of my net worth is that we have assets of about $1.4 million with about $550,000 in liabilities (namely two mortgages). We could make it work while living with my mom, but with us moving out, we couldn’t possibly handle keeping both properties. We’ve decided to move into one of our condos in SD and sell the other to pay it off. In doing so, I had to give an amazing renter a 30-days notice to move. I felt so bad about doing this. She’s been an amazing renter and I did everything I could to try to avoid this situation, but I needed to do what’s best for my family.
There are two financial gurus that I enjoy listening too. One is the old school man himself, Dave Ramsey. The other is someone closer to my generation in age, Graham Stephan. Those that know Dave Ramsey knows that he very much a man that HATES debt of any kind. He does give an exceptions to mortgages, however, I always felt like it was an exception he didn’t like to say yes to. Graham is a little different, he likes to use leverage to make money with real estate and credit card churn for that little extra when spending. Both have their points, so I like to listen to the contrasting views.
The reason why I’m saying all of this is because my wife and I talked about it and decided that we would try out the Dave Ramsey ideals and live debt free, even with our condo. So after we sell one condo and pay off the other, we will have 0 liabilities. This has me VERY excited and like the old man says “You can always go back into debt, if you want.”. I will let you guys know what it feels like to be debt free when we finally pay off our mortgage. This is all I'll write for now, I think I'll try to write a couple blogs a week once during the week and once during the weekend. If there is any topic you want me to cover. Just let me know :). I’ll try to be as open as possible, till next time.
- M