Overview
Bought my house over 16 years ago height of the housing market and ooooohh did I pay for it.
But I did a good job refinancing during the financial crisis and ended up getting what I think is a good mortgage modification.
I make over 100k a year gross although my health insurance is incredibly expensive.and high tax state. My net is 80-85k. My spouse doesn't work but has a guaranteed income of just over 45,000 a year that will go up by a few percent a year till she passes.
Every year for years felt like just getting through one either work related or medical emergency until this year. I honestly have some survivor's guilt about this. I got a foreberance with my mortgage company for initially 3 months than 6 and finally 7. We were already about 6 months ahead on payments so now we are just even again.
We have owned this house about 16 years
I did lose about half my income for 3 months but it did eventually come back. I am grateful that I was able to get the mortgage work around as we would never been able to pay it otherwise.
THE GOOD
By the end of January I will have about 20,000 between checking and short/medium term savings.
I will have about 70,000 in retirement between my current 401k my former 401k(that I don't want to roll over as I would lose my Class A stock I already rolled over everything else) and my IRA.
No auto debt and mortgage is reasonable at less than 1,500 a month all in including taxes and insurance.
Student loans miniscule and almost paid off. The interest is so low not worth paying off now.
Spouse's income is guaranteed no matter what so even if I were to lose my job suddenly we don't need as big as an emergency fund as you would think.
THE BAD.
Many of those emergencies were medical and my health insurance sucks. There is about 10,000 in outstanding medical debt that I have slowly been paying off.
Spouse's student loans approx 30,000 already negotiated everything I can to reduce the payments they won't go lower.
House needs some work some of which we did when we had a break from but there is still more to do
THE BAD.
Approx 50k in credit card debt that is down a few thousand from the beginning of last year.
I swapped around some high interest cards for low or zero percent. I also had to make a few necessary purchases, appliances that died mostly, earlier in the year but got them at zero percent for 12-18 months.
Obviously using all of the cash we have saved up in the past 9 months to pay off credit card debt doesn't make sense. But how much does or should I just continue to save th few hundred that we have been for the past?
Submitted December 21, 2020 at 06:12PM by MyfavuserIDwastaken https://ift.tt/38sCHbd
