How time flies.
Five years ago, I had just moved into a little apartment (1BR, 450 square feet total). It had originally been one of the rooms of a 1930s-1940s motor court, so while there was a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living space…it wasn’t huge. It was also built for transient folks, not long-term residents, so the insulation was nonexistent (though there was a heater…after a fashion.) The neighborhood was okay, not fantastic; but I had been renting a room for me and my two cats and keeping most of my stuff in storage for over a year. I finally was making enough money to live on my own, and had finally found a place that I could afford that wasn’t some narrow barracks of a mother-in-law unit in someone’s backyard, nor a despicable rat-infested hovel.
Five years ago, I was working for just over minimum wage creating PDF forms for a small company. I drove to work, worked in this nasty environment where the boss railed about his regular employees - even ranted at one of them to the guy’s face, but the guy wouldn’t leave because he needed the insurance. (Since this was the network guru for this itty bitty “company”, if this guy had left, said itty bitty company would have collapsed.) The boss looked like Kris Kringle, but perpetually griped about his diet, his wife, his lazy craptacular employees, the other workers (which kind of made me wonder what he said about me on those rare occasions I wasn’t there - I got there most mornings before the boss did), anything and everything. He was verbally abusive. He was scared of women, which meant that he had special loathing for myself and one other person, a female regular employee. Privately, I called this boss “Santa Claus with distemper.”
Now I am a homeowner - fairly recent, too, as I celebrated my one-year anniversary this past US Thanksgiving. I have two jobs, and am looking for a third - but I have two jobs. In the next year I will need to replace my hot water heater. In the next two years I’ll probably need to try and replace my car. I’m trying to find as many ways possible to get my home paid off earlier rather than later - as things stand, I’ll have to work until I’m 70 to finish paying this mortgage. And while I really like it here (though my brother thinks that I’ll be “upgrading” - though why I can’t fathom), I would feel a hell of a lot more comfortable if I didn’t have this much outstanding debt. I would not be at all unhappy to pay off my mortgage two, three, even five years faster. But things being the way they are currently, I haven’t even been able to throw money at the principal - which would have been quite nice, in my opinion.
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