It’s definitely worth taking a look to see where your bank or credit union falls.

What makes this more difficult is that we live in a part of the country where housing is relatively expensive.  The original purchase price of our house was $280,000.  While we’ve been paying on that for almost 7 years, we still have a long ways to go.  The good news is that if we were to magically find about $130K, we’d have the option of paying the house off.  You can bet if we do come in to any amount of money like that, we’ll definitely pay the house off right away.

The thought of living in a home that is paid for is very exciting to me.  While we’d still have taxes and insurance to worry about, the reduction in our monthly bills would give us a ton more options.  Even with the mortgage, we are currently living on about 50% of our after tax monthly income.  If we were to lose our mortgage as well, it would drop us down to living on about 32% of our after tax income.  At that point, we could definitely think about pursuing work that we are more passionate about with little regard to what the compensation was.

54% of workers said they have less than $25,000 saved for retirement

24% have delayed their retirement in the past year

27% of workers said they have less than $1000 saved

43% have less than $10,000 saved for retirement

Personally, I think there is a reason that defined benefit plans like pensions have been such a popular thing.  It would appear that the majority of people either don’t  know how to save, or have never been able to put themselves in a financial position to have the extra money to save at the end of the month.  Either way, it doesn’t speak well for our collective future.  While I’m glad not to be in any of the statistics above, I still wonder how it will impact me.

A few things help me keep the price down.  My house is on a level lot, it’s pretty much all wood and is newer construction that incorporates a lot of the more current earthquake reinforcements.

What brought this up for me again is CNNMoney has an article that talks about who should consider getting the coverage.  Since I live in the “RED” zone (Pacific Northwest), it just reinforces my decision to have earthquake insurance.  There is no question that we will have a large earthquake here.  The only question is when.  Paying $370 per year gives me the peace of mind that I can put my house back together if we have the “big one”.

Check out the map and see if you live in a hot zone.

Follow ELYM on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/elym

You can pre-order it on Amazon.com right now!

Here is the description of the book:

Keeping your financial house in order is more important than ever. But how do you deal with expenses, debt, taxes, and retirement without getting overwhelmed? This book points the way. It’s filled with the kind of practical guidance and sound insights that makes J.D. Roth’s GetRichSlowly.org a critically acclaimed source of personal-finance advice.

You won’t find any get-rich-quick schemes here, just sensible advice for getting the most from your money. Even if you have perfect credit and no debt, you’ll learn ways to make your rosy financial situation even better.

• Get the info you need to make sensible decisions on saving, spending, and investing
• Learn the best ways to set and achieve financial goals
• Set up a realistic budget framework and learn how to track expenses
• Discover proven methods to help you eliminate debt
• Understand how to use credit wisely
• Win big by making smart decisions on your home and other big-ticket items
• Learn how to get the most from your investments by avoiding rash decisions
• Decide how — and how much — to save for retirement

Anyway, based on what I know about JD, it’s definitely worth reading!

A combination of factors helped boost our income this month and helped us add a solid $5500 to our savings account in February.  The first factor was the blog.  There were a few renewals as well as some new business.  I book the entire prepaid amount for advertising in the month that I receive payment (as opposed to averaging it across the subscription period), so I saw a bit of a spike in the blog income in February.

The second contributor was my annual bonus at work.  It wasn’t as large as it has been in the past but it was better than zero and definitely helped increase our income for the month.

Along with the extra income, we also locked down our spending more than we have in quite awhile.  As I reviewed our Mint.com spending summary for February I was happy to see that we only exceeded our budgeted spending by a few hundred dollars.  That’s mostly my fault because I bought a new audio receiver from Newegg.com that was ridiculously priced (low).  No regrets.  The other area that we were over budget on was our food/dining.  Not a big surprise.  We usually overrun this, although we are trying to do better at it.

Needless to say, I’m happy with how the month turned out from a budget perspective.  I’m also fairly optimistic about the rest of the year as we don’t anticipate any major expenses this year.  Luckily most of the big expenses are out of the way for the foreseeable future.  We shouldn’t need a car for the next 5+ years, we have a new roof and new siding on the house, and the lake house construction is basically complete.  Sure, we could probably come up with a few ideas on how to blow a bunch of money, but the overall theme at our house this year is going to be SAVING!  If we are able to control our spending we should be able to double our savings through 2010.  With the potential instability with my employment next year, frankly, the more we save, the better.

I read an article today that talks about a recent Slate commentary from Charlie Munger titled “Basically, It’s Over”.  If you aren’t familiar with Charlie Munger, he’s been the sidekick of Warren Buffet for decades and I consider him to be pretty damn smart.  While you can always find gloom and doom articles out there about the end of America etc etc, I’ve always been impressed with both Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger.  They have always seemed incredibly honest and they have a great way of putting things.  So, when I read the article, I have to admit, it put a bit of fear in me.  I’ve often wondered how long we can sustain the massive debt levels that we’ve seen over the last decade (and beyond).  There is not a limitless supply of money or resources in this world and sooner or later all the excess spending at the government and personal level is going to come back to haunt us.  It appears that it might be sooner than later.  I found the comments about “blind optimism” to be very interesting.  While I haven’t studied history as much as I should have, I do know that we’ve seen many societies rise and fall.  It’s fairly likely that eventually the US will fall from world dominance and now seems like as good a time as any.  With trillion dollar deficit spending, the rise of a global economy and educated global workforce, rising unemployment and consumer debt levels that have never been seen before, it’s not a tough case to make for a rather gloomy future.

On the plus side, I just saved a ton of money on my car insurance……

Anyway, go check out the Yahoo article and the original Charlie Munger article as well.  Definitely worth reading.

Follow ELYM on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/elym

http://www.ihoppancakeday.com/pancake-day-details.html

Bob has turned down a number of buyout offers over the years and the business continues to grow steadily.  A company news release shows that they are growing over 20% annually.

In order to qualify for a stake in the ownership, an employee needs to be vested over a three year period.

I’ve been down to their retail store in Oregon and was very impressed with the operation.  I have purchased a number of their gluten free products and have never been disappointed.  It’s a great company!

Anyway, I just love reading stories like this.  It seems to blur out many of the other negative stories out there about “profit at all cost”.  I bet Bob sleeps pretty darned good at night!

As we thought about it a bit, we realized that we’d be foolish not to register our daughter as a UK citizen.  While she is automatically a “UK citizen by descent”, it makes sense for us to get her officially recognized so that she’ll be able to freely move in and out of the country and work there if she chooses.  It also gives her access to UK healthcare which might come in handy some day if we happen to be there visiting, or if we lose our insurance here in the US and she is in need of care we can’t afford.

We have also been contemplating moving to the UK when we retire.  My wife would love to live back in the UK.  She spent summers there when she was growing up and obviously feels a strong connection to the country.  When we first started talking about this we thought we’d discovered an incredible option for our retirement that would let us live comfortably and have free health care.  (I would have to wait three years to become a UK citizen to qualify for the healthcare but that’s not a big deal).  As we put more thought in to it, it became clear that our plan wasn’t as great as it first appeared.  While we would ultimately have universal health coverage over there, it definitely wouldn’t be free.  It hadn’t initially occurred to us that we’d really end up paying for this healthcare through much higher taxes to our pension, investments and social security income.  Our assumption is that it would probably end up being more expensive than just staying in the US and buying private health insurance.  Once we hit medicare age (assuming it still exists), we’d almost definitely be better off staying in the US.

The one situation that it still might be a good idea to move to the UK is if we end up having very little money because I invested all of our money in a fool proof pyramid scheme or finally fell victim to a “hard luck” story from Nigeria.  In that case, if we were low income and wouldn’t be showing much income, we might be better off moving to the UK.  We would face very little taxes and would have access to the social benefits that the UK offers.

Who knows what will happen in the next 20 years before we retire.  It’s likely that we’ll retire here and spend time in Arizona or somewhere else warm in the winters but just having the additional options makes us feel fortunate.