The Money Marathon

I was listening to Dave Ramsey last night as I was driving. I'm a big talk radio junkie and so this is totally normal. For the most part I agree with what he says. He was telling a caller that for the most part rich people are rich because they have a marathon mentality and are willing to wait things out and just plug along.

This really related to my day because I had this FABULOUS (and can I repeat it was fabulous) idea to make my days easier. The Fed dropped rates significantly and I thought we can refinance our house add in the money for the basement, have someone quickly come do it, and not change our payments.

Basements are sanity. How great is it to be able to keep quarrelling kids on separate floors? How great is it to send noisy kids to the basement where they can have fun and be a little noisy and still have the upstairs somewhat quiet? How wonderful is it to have ALL the messy toys in one room in the basement so you never see them? In my mind it would be instant heaven. That's a lot to expect of a basement. I guess I have that sprinter mentality.

DH on the other hand is a marathoner and has the mindset for that. He LOVED the idea of refinancing. But he put together a bunch of spreadsheets to show this and that and showed how much we would save if we did a 15 year and then DIDN'T do the basement. Did I mention that it would be 200 dollars a month more out of potential spending money? Then he wants to do the basement little by little with cash. Is is smart? Sure. It saves more than I care to comment but it's a huge sum, especially if you invest what your payment would be over the course of what would have been the length of the loan. But it isn't a basement. Is he a wise money marathoner? Yep he sure is. Am I still disappointed? Yes. The worst part though is that I know I am wrong and he is right. I hate to be wrong.

I mentioned how much he is going to have to fork over to cover my shrink someday or maybe my hearing aides from so much noise and his response was, "Insurance covers it."

Positive Note- T's violin teacher is going to let him go into a different group lesson today. Yesterday we drove to a neighboring town for his lesson to find that he had forgotten to put his violin back in the case after practicing (another positive note). I'm glad she's giving him another chance.