What’s the Point?
I’ve been thinking a lot these days about money. And it’s just depressing, though it shouldn’t be. Honestly, in the grand scheme of things, I’m quite well off. I have a good job with good benefits and I own my house. Well, the bank owns it, but they’re letting me live there as long as I give them 21% of my take home pay for the next 18 years. Aside from my mortgage, I have no other debt, so that’s good. I guess what is depressing me is that I don’t live that extravagantly, but that I feel like I’m always stretched for cash. For most of my working life, I’ve been saving as much as I can for retirement. It just doesn’t look like there’s ever going to be enough there for me to retire.
There’s a (very) small part of me that would like to be able to just get on a plane and go away for the weekend. But, me being me, I’m always calculating about how much it would cost and then decide that it would be better to just stay home. A bigger part of me would like to just hire someone to finish fixing up my house, but there’s no way I could do it. And my family continuing to tell me that I’m strange for trying to do it myself, is starting to bother me. I get that many people wouldn’t want to live without a shower for a year. But it’s not like I didn’t take a shower in a year. I just went to other people’s houses or mainly, to the gym. Yes, it was a hassle, but I’d like to think it was worth it. The result was that the bathroom got completely remodeled, I learned a lot and I didn’t have to take out a loan to pay for it.
Being in debt really bothers me. I don’t know why this is. Millions of people all over the world are in debt and they seem to be getting along just fine. If I didn’t mind, I could get a new home loan to pay for repairs and another to buy a new car. It would be easy, but my stomach just churns at the thought of getting these other loans. I guess my biggest issue is that I shouldn’t have bought this house. I do like my house. And I thought that I had calculated how much I was paying on my condo with the assessment and taxes and figured that I wouldn’t be paying much more when I bought the house. But I completely missed how much repairs would cost. So, lesson learned there.
What’s the point of this post? I have no idea. I thought that I hadn’t been updating the blog as much as I should have been so I wanted to get something down. Unfortunately, I’m feeling a bit depressed and that seems to be reflected in this post. Here’s to hoping my next post is less of a downer.