dnord

Based on the number of ads I hear where people scream “you can get a loan, and you don’t have to own your home, you don’t have to have good credit, you don’t have to wear shoes”, I thought there must be an epidemic of homeless, shoeless, credit-wreck people who needed money.

But those ads were pointing me in the right direction: I am a few years into payments on a $200K home, and have about $25K in credit card debt. Since the equity on our home has increased, they’re happy to lend me this money and don’t care what I do with it. So I’m closing today on a loan that will pay off my credit cards and finance those balances out over 15 years.

The paymest will be much lower than the minimum payments I was making. It will take me longer to pay off, but that’s because the rates are pretty similar. On the other hand, I think this is more responsible debt, and being able to save some money each month will be a huge help to my longer goals (which I should probably stash in 43things somewhere).

I thought about it, and decided snooze was my downfall. I bought a mechanical alarm clock with no snooze, and while it’s certainly less pleasant to wake up, I’ve been up on time for two weeks now. It’s opened up a whole hour of the morning to me, and I’m eating breakfast and messing around on the Internet before I go to work instead of snoozing. I’m more tired at night and therefore more likely to go to bed at the right time. Weekends are still a challenge: everyone recommends that you keep the same schedule but I just can’t. We’ll see.