Monday, October 1, 2007

Determining My Net Worth

Using this calculator, I determined our net worth (um, not counting one giant and daunting comic book collection owned by SuperDad) is:

$58,971

Not too shabby.

We're lucky enough that we owe less (or nothing) than things are worth, like our house and both cars. The reason this is so is because we have:

  1. Never leased a car, which means we never had to roll over existing debt or penalties into a new loan.
  2. Paid off our cars quickly. (Okay, so we should have bought them in cash.)
  3. Never considered taking out a home equity loan, because we have:
  4. Never had more than a couple thousand in credit card debt, and now have ZERO!
  5. Been blessed with a caring and competant home town bank that didn't encourage us to borrow more than we could afford in mortgage payments and never offered us an interest-only or adjustable rate mortgage.
  6. Tried really hard not to let our egos stomp out our financial common sense.

I know (ahem, am related to) people that live in homes on which they owe more than they are worth. Wouldn't your house suddenly feel like a jail cell? The same deal with cars. I personally don't want to drive around a shiny new coffin. Maybe that's just me.

1 comment:

zdoodlebub said...

But the shouts of our culture for bigger, better, more often drowns out the sounds that peace and common sense would make, if we could hear them. I totally agree with you, but also see how hard it is for others and even me. It's something I have to stay vigilant against (especially after that baby shower!)

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