Some of my favorite bloggers stopped blogging or are blogging rarely so, yesterday I started looking for new personal finance blogs to add to my blogroll.
As I was perusing, I have seen bloggers who are doing financially pretty good in terms of budgeting, setting aside retirement money meanwhile paying down mortgages and car loans. Some debts they had were in the neighborhood of a total of a few hundred thousand dollars. Yikes!
To me it is very scary but these folks were happy and content.
I hate debt. I try to avoid it like the plague. I do not have any debt of my own but, I have taken over a couple of payments from a family member because that person is unable to make those payments anymore and we would like to keep the properties in the family.
Every single month, I look at those payment schedules and look at the money sitting in my savings account and I start itching to pay them right away to get rid of them both.
The sad fact is, one of them is a loan you cannot pay in full. There are exactly 24 months to go on that one.
The other is a mortgage of 10 years and it goes well into 2025. Hate, hate, hate that! The only reason why I am not closing the mortgage is that I can still earn more interest in my savings accounts than the interest on the mortgage. It is 10,53% versus 12%. Not a big deal but still... Logic dictates me not to do it.
For some people debt is a way of life. For me, it is the Plague. If I say, it gives me physical pain, it is not an exaggeration.
I'd be having pains to have a 10.53% mortgage! Yikes. I can see why you'd want to get rid of it, but on the flip side we also do not have anywhere near those savings rates. Most folks in the US have mortgages, but no savings.....so an interest rate like that would put a lot of people out of being able to even buy a home.
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