Posted on 04/08/2012 6:38:10 PM PDT by Altariel
Dear Dave,
My husband works two hours away from home. He gets up at 3 a.m. and doesnt get home until 7 p.m. We have a fully funded emergency fund, and he makes $95,000 a year. My parents place is an hour from his job, and theyve offered to let us live with them. What do you think of this idea?
Jessica
Dear Jessica,
Why dont you just sell the house and move closer to where he works? If he makes that kind of money and youve got your emergency fund in place, you should be able to handle moving costs. Ive got to be honest, Id do the two hours to work and two hours home drive maybe once before Id begin seriously looking for a place much closer.
Right now, you guys dont have a life. And moving in with your parents wouldnt be much better. That poor guy practically lives on the road, and Im sure you both want more quality time together. He sounds like a great guy, though, to be willing to go through all that. Hes busting his tail and doing what it takes to provide for his family, but theres just no reason for either of you to go through this kind of pain and inconvenience.
Get your house on the market, and find a little rental near his job for now. You can rebuild part of your emergency fund if necessary, but if Im in your shoes, Im going to fix this logistical nightmare as fast as humanly possible!
Dave
Dear Dave,
My husband and I need to update our will, but were not sure how to divide the money. All of our children are grown, including my three stepsons. The problem is that two of my stepsons are irresponsible with money and are drug users. Do you have any advice?
Colleen
Dear Colleen,
Typically, if you give money to a drug user theyll use it for one thing: drugs. Your goal as a parent is to love them and teach them to the best of your ability. Buying their drugs upon your death doesnt fall into either of those categories. Theres absolutely nothing wrong with you deciding not to leave them any money as long as theyre involved in this kind of activity.
If it were me, Id have a reading of the will when the changes are made. Then, Id sit down with the family members and explain why youve updated the will in this manner. Let them know you love them and want whats best for them, but you and your husband have decided youre not going to take a chance on funding any misbehavior on their part.
Make sure you let them know, too, that things can change if they change. They might be mad and fuss about it, but thats okay. Let them be mad. Its perfectly all right for you to attach stipulations to any inheritance they might receive, especially when its for their own good!
Dave
* For more financial help, please visit daveramsey.com.
Mornings are an optimum time to work out, for mort people, because you dont have life getting in thé way. In thé evening, you have to right off social outings, TV shows, ans motivational issues.
Most people who are in the situation described to Dave wouldn’t have made the mistake of being underwater on their house.
And if you aren’t underwater, whatever loss you take on your house you’ll “get back” because the house you buy will also be dirt cheap. 2 hours isn’t really that far to be in a different cost market.
So the only problem is if you owe more than your house is worth, since you can’t borrow more than your new house is worth to buy an equivalent house.
Of course, if you are underwater, you are already in debt whether you have realized that debt or not.
I live 45 minutes from work and $200 monthly gasoline...
Bump
The MISTAKE of being underwater???? Really?? Did you predict the housing market would crash say in 1997?
No, and I even downplayed the doom-and-gloom here at FR, mostly because I thought banks were too smart to actually lend money they would never get back.
On the other hand, I owned a home throughout this period, and unlike some of my more adventerous neighbors and others here and elsewhere, I didn’t re-mortgage my house every time it went up in value, just to take out the money and buy stuff I couldn’t afford.
So when my house went from being “worth” $500,000, to being “worth” $200,000, I was still well above water, because I never owed more than $120,000 on the house.
There are some people who actually had to buy their first homes into the height of the market. They are the ones I actually feel sorry for. But anybody who already owned a home — they could sell their home and buy a new home and not incur more debt, and keep well below the outrageous price peaks in their mortgage, and not get burned.
On the other hand, many of those underwater did get to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cool stuff, while I did not.
The point is that people who follow Dave’s advice (I’m not one of those, although I largely live my life in the manner he suggests, just because that was how I was raised — I simply don’t share his aversion to credit, since I don’t find it a temptation and therefore can use it for my advantage) — those people won’t likely be underwater, because they will have limited their borrowing and will be able to follow this advice.
More broadly, I’ll say that having money makes it much easier to handle money issues. People with money can borrow money more cheaply, can buy things when they are on sale, can replace instead of fixing when it makes economic sense, and in general can make better and therefore more frugal choices in their lives. So I think Dave is correct in fact — save up money, and it will make your life better.
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