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$65 Richer

March 13th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

Dh had a focus group yesterday. $65 for a little over an hour. Yippee. It was the first one this year.

He also had a hearing test (and it went well - his hearing has improved). The charge was $55 - so it will mostly go to that. A wash. But I am optimistic that I won't have to pull any money from the medical fund for all these doctor appointments. Knock on wood anyway, we'll see what the rest of the month brings.

BTW, still no bill on BM's emergency trip. Figures.

Oh yeah, and he has to go in for a blood test and such Friday, for school. I think we pay $10 for blood tests. But I don't know what all they have for him - if he has to see the doc or what. Could be another $75...

Last night BM's eyes got really red. We were worried if we could take him to daycare yesterday with dh's hour-long hearing test and my tax appointments. Ugh. Of course these things happen the rare times we both have plans.

But he woke up good as new. I figured he probably had the same thing LM did, but wasn't quite sure at first. But relieved when he woke up since in the 2 hours between the development of red eye and when I went to pickup LM from daycare, he also looked good as new. I remember looking at him like, huh? I never would have noticed anything.

It's just a weird thing.

Even if it was viral I was not sure the preschool would want him. So was relieved when he woke up good as new.

It's some weird bug though. Earache (or sinus pain anyway), sore throat, red eyes for a couple of hours, and some eye discharge, and that's about all we could figure. No fever or anything. LM just did not vocalize the sinus pain or sore throat, though thinking back it seemed like he didn't eat much the days around his red eye incident.

Anyway, dh has been volunteering much at the TV station, and it seems like the shifts have been getting rather long. So when he went out last night and said it should only take an hour, I must say I was rather confused. I was thinking TV station for whatever reason.

Then he came home with a wad of cash. Aha! I had totally forgotten. So what a nice surprise for me. Big Grin

Oh, I keep forgetting to mention... I read an article last week or so that people walking away from their houses is just a huge problem in California. Like, why make the payments if the house has gone down so much in value? They rather just walk away and start fresh.

Anyway, I read that thinking, gosh, this would never happen if people actually had to put money down on their house. This is just another side effect of this whole mess.

Just, wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Likewise, it really struck me when a fellow blogger said she told her dentist she had a 3-year plan to save up for a down payment on a home, and her dentist thought this was quite an impressive long-term plan. IT's like, what, people don't save for down payments anymore????? Has it historically taken a very short time period to save up for one? With housing prices these days, is it that unfathomable that it could take TIME to save up for a house?????? Coming from the land of expensive I know we were quite rare to save up our 20% so quickly. But, I mean, we knew housing was insanely expensive and it was our priority. IT really wasn't difficult in the least. (From my perspective anyway). But I could easily see being in a position where it would have taken us many years. Though we had a desire to get in the market quick, we wouldn't have bothered if we couldn't do it "right." That is why we moved somewhere where we could afford to do it right.

Anyway, so these days I keep reading these articles about people who couldn't possibly have saved a down payment (not even 1%) but took on $2k-$3k monthly mortgages. My jaw just drops when I read those. If you can't save a DIME, then how in the hell do you think you can afford those mortgage payments? IT just doesn't make any sense.

It is very frustrating to me because when we bought it was more expensive to rent our condo than to buy it. Which was where a lot of our urgency came from. We didn't want to spend too much time spinning our wheels, or worse, falling behind.

But rents have fallen while prices have skyrocketed. There is actually a considerable opportunity to rent and save, and has been for man years. Yet the attitude is just so weird. "I can't save up $50k down by tomorrow so why bother trying. The $36k in annual mortgage payments? Well I think we can do that..."

All the while I think what a dream it would have been to have the luxury to rent AND save up more money first.

What are these people thinking????

I'd be curious to hear from the older crowd how long they saved for a down payment?

It only really took us a year to do it, BUT we had put so much in place to get there. Technically, I could say 5 years. We saved a chunk that final year, but dh was saving steadily through college, and that was where a good chunk of our down payment came from. Then we just saved the difference when we both went from $10k salaries to $30k salaries out of college. We only had to do that one year, and then we were homeowners. So we kind of hyper-saved to get there, but frankly found it the easiest way to do it. We were used to living on pennies and so we found it quite easy to do it that way. I mean it wasn't a big deal to delay gratification for one more flipping year. (Plus if I took another $50 to splurge out of every paycheck it felt like quite the windfall!!! It didn't take much to improve on our college standard of living. Another $1k/year was a 10% raise, etc. AND I no longer had college expenses so, yeah, it was easy). We had to come up with $50k down on our condo. So yup, a good 5 years or so for us...

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