Dance Dance Dance!

I'm sitting here watching the Obamas dance for about the millionth time. They somehow make it look endearing each time, but I'm sure they are completely exhausted and that Michelle's feet are KILLING her. I don't remember all this dancing at previous inaugural balls. They have to go to ten of them, make a little speech (a different speech at each one!) and then dance a little dance, then pack up and go to the next one. Who on earth thought of that tradition?

Also, I wanted to comment on how heartwarming it was when the Bushes left Washington and the Obamas escorted them to the plane. Despite their many differences, they seemed genuinely respectful of each other. I'm so glad that I live in a country where there is a peaceful transfer of power. No matter what your political views are, you have to be proud to be an American tonight.

I bet the Obamas and the Bushes will both sleep well tonight.

Side Note: "Obama" is not in the Blogger spellcheck program. I bet that will change in future versions.

Craigslist!

I sit here waiting for a guy to show up to buy our old couch. He's 15 or so minutes late. Yesterday, a lady was supposed to be here at 4 to buy a table. She never showed and left me a voicemail saying that someone broke into a house in her neighborhood aournd 7pm. Um... okay. She says that she still wants to buy the table, but this is the 3rd time that her coming to get it has fallen through. I'm not sure if I even want to fool with scheduling a fourth pickup. Someone else wrote me about the table last night and I responded this morning, but haven't heard back from her yet. Craigslist is such a waiting game... for buying and selling!

Update! The guy paid for the couch and he's going to come back later this week and pick it up! Yay!

Refinance?

I've been crunching the number on refinancing the house.  We're right at the spot where it's almost worth it.  We have 24 years left on our 30 year fixed, and with current interest rates, we could refi for 20 years and only add about 20 bucks to our monthly payment, taking 4 years off our loan, but we'd have to pay loan fees etc, that would pretty much make us break even, meaning that it we paid what we'd pay in refi fees on our existing mortgage and then added $20 to our monthy, we'd pay the house off in 20 years, so there's really no point in refinancing.  The other option is to refi for 25 years, adding a year to our loan, but reducing our monthly payment for a little over $100, but we'd rather have it paid off a year earlier than pay less a month, I think.  Ideally, we'd like to refi for like 22 or 23 years, keeping our payment the same, but taking off a couple of years thanks to a lower interest rate, but you can't get loans in those time frames.  Maybe interest rates will continue to go down and I can relook at it in the next couple of weeks.  I'm checking bankrate.com every day.

Bankrate.com is a great site for figuring out financial situations.  They have a variety of calculators for playing around for money nerds.  You can figure out how extra payments will affect your loan, figure out what your monthly payments should be on credit cards to pay them off in a particular amount of time and lots lots more.  I used the credit card payoff calculator when we were paying off our cards several years ago and it was dead on.  We were out of debt just when the calculator said we would be, and thank goodness we paid off our debt, because if we hadn't, we would not be able to survive in our current one income situation.  

I'm totally ready to go back to work.  Not only for financial reasons, but also because I need to feel like a productive member of society.  There are many things that I enjoy about staying at home, but I would also enjoy shopping and remodeling my kitchen, which we've put off until I find a job.  We worked really hard to get completely out of debt so that we could have more financial freedom and now my lack of income is preventing us for reaping the fruits of our efforts.