On January 16th, I Was Relaxed. Why?

Tuesday, January 16th, 2024

In 2009, my husband and I made the decision to refinance our home from a 30 year mortgage to a 15 year mortgage. That was also the year we sat our sons down and told them, “We had to make a decision. We could pay for you to attend college, or we could pay off the house, which you will inherit. We chose the house, because we know that if you ever want to do something that requires a degree, you’ll find a way to pay for college.”

The impact of this decision was intentional and intense. Our mortgage (based upon changes in our property taxes) has been 55% of our income. This is not easy. One’s home should consume upwards of 25% of one’s income. When it goes above that, safety margins become thin and a single rough patch can quickly throw a family into foreclosure.

In fact, when the Covid Experience began, I lost my job. If I’d lost my job for any reason other than government mandates and a global emergency (planned or otherwise), we’d have had a rough time paying our mortgage that year. As it was, our bank offered us a deferment for up to 6 months with an option to extend for another 6 months — and we ended up needing to take the full year.

Question: Why did we refinance down to a 15 month mortgage?
Answer: $202,000

That’s how much interest we saved, by paying our mortgage off double time. Also, my husband was born in 1955. If we’d kept the 30 year mortgage, he’d be in his early 80’s before we’d get the house paid off. We needed to maximize our investment in our property during his remaining years of full time employment.

And an investment it is!

Our home isn’t a house in a suburb, a high rise apartment in the city, or a cabin on a lake. Those homes are just homes.

Our house is on five acres of arable land with tremendous sun exposure, a roof covered in solar panels, a burgeoning food forest, and plenty of grassy fields for our current flock of chickens and other livestock we may have in the future. Our land is an ark, surrounded by vast tracts of preserved nature spaces, a community that minimizes chemicals as much as possible, a diverse ecosystem of pollinating insects, and two structures with metal roofing — making rain water catchment a real possibility. Our home is supremely well suited for extended family living conditions, making it our greatest gift to our two sons, and the generations to come after them.

Consider this:
If our boys choose to make their childhood home their adult home, each of them will be spared the typical 30 years of paying a mortgage — that’s 60 years of time and energy recouped in just one generation. If they each have 2 kids, that generation will potentially be spared 120 years of time and energy.

When you think about it like that? Wow! The old fashioned way of families living on the same land, generation after generation, makes a lot of sense. You can find a lot of this in rural areas of old countries, like Portugal, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Thailand, and the list goes on and on and on.

The temporary downside, which we chose to endure — as the first generation that bore the weight of purchasing the family homestead — is that my husband and I have been very cash poor.

This, for us, has been relatively easy to endure. We both prefer to buy our clothes used. Neither of us have an expensive hobby. Mowing walking trails through our fields, tending to the garden, harvesting tomatoes and cucumbers from the greenhouse, processing wood for the coming winter, painting the house by hand (with a brush), building a chicken coop out of 100% scrap pile resources, reading books, cooking healthy food, watching Netflix (the only streaming channel we pay for), learning Korean, walking to the pond, and knitting scarves for Christmas presents — these are our forms of fun. We’re either working or doing things that cost little to nothing, most of the time!

The point is simply this:
Know what makes you happy, before you commit 55% of your income to the mortgage.

All of which brings us to yesterday, January 16th. Over the past fourteen years, our mortgage has been due on the 1st with a late fee penalty issued on the 16th. Usually, I’ve been fine. Sometimes, though, I’d lose track of time and Bam! I’d realize it was the 17th or after midnight EST on the 15th or the 14th fell on a 3 day holiday weekend or — you get the idea. This happened about six times over 14 years, and I would kick myself and feel really, really irritated with myself that I’d made such an easy-to-avoid mistake. I always had the money IN the bank, after all. Argh!

And, that $100 penalty fee would leave an ever-present, lingering sense of anxiousness looming over me, all the time. When you forget something important often enough, you trust yourself a bit less and that leads to all sorts of icky feelings. Blech!

This month, that all changed.

This month, on Friday the 12th, I spent two hours talking to two different customer service agents at the bank that managed our mortgage. Yes, two hours! Why? Because, I was on hold forever both times, and the call was dropped when person A tried to transfer me to person B in the loan department. But, I still managed to get the pay off amount scheduled for payment by 4:45pm, just before they closed! Of course, with a holiday weekend, it didn’t go through until Tuesday, but it was official as of Friday — and so, for the first time in 14 years and two months — I looked upon the 16th of the month as merely another day.

Not a scary deadline that would bite me in the pocketbook if I got distracted by life.

And so, here we are. Without a mortgage. Owners of our own home. Eleven months early!!

I am so grateful for our decision, back in 2009, to do the hard thing. To put off all sorts of things we might have done with an extra $1,200 cash each month. To save the $202,000 in interest. To buckle down and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve a goal that is immensely valuable, economically fabulous, and best for ourselves and our kids.

Home ownership isn’t best for everyone, and not every home is worth owning. That said, freedom and liberty and democracy increases as the percentage of citizens who own their homes outright increases. And, I’m not talking about folks who are practicing home ownership while making monthly mortgage payments to a bank that actually holds the deed.

The idea, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy,” is total bullshit. Make no mistake. The horrible people promoting this terrible concept don’t plan to rent anything themselves! In fact, they’re currently, actively in the process of buying up more and more and more of our world. The people who tell you, “You’ll be happier when you own nothing,” are the same people who plan to “rent what they own to you, temporarily, until you move on and another person pays them rent, then another generation and then another ten generations, and basically — they’ll never stop making money off of renting to other people that which they OWN.”

When many people living in a community own their homes outright, the stakes become different. You care differently about the community’s development and success. You have a different attitude about the health and sustainability of your local businesses. You care more about the health of the local environment, because your kids will likely raise your grandchildren here, and so on. When your home is seen as being your family’s home for generations to come, you treat it, view it, develop it, and maintain it very, very differently than when it’s just an investment you plan to cash out of and sell to strangers.

From Left to Right: Dobby, March, Román, José, Jordi (2021)

And so, I am somewhat startled and amazed to find myself here. At the goal we aimed for those many years ago. Because a lot of things went right and we stayed true to our mission, as parents seeking to provide for our children. For all of this, I am thankful.