Wow! Cars ARE expensive…

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Well, we bought a new car about 2 years ago. Prior to purchasing the Mazda 323, we were unaware of the total expenses that owning a car would incur. The list is quite long:

  1. loan payments
  2. taxes
  3. repairs
  4. oil changes
  5. gasoline
  6. insurance
  7. parking fees

… to name just a few. More importantly, we were surprised by the amount of depreciation in the first year, alone. Now our car is only worth about 60% of its purchase price. This has to be the biggest single expense that we hadn’t factored into the equation. So I am wondering if purchasing a second hand car would be a viable alternative to purchasing new.

Of course, if you purchase secondhand, you will need a reliable way to find out that the secondhand car of your dreams! Otherwise, those hard earned savings may be thrown away. Opinions, thoughts?…

Great PlugIns I have used #2: Word Statistics Plugin

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I have been using this plug in for quite sometime. I quite like having the ability to know how many words there are in a post. It’s useful! So I’m now recommending this.

It also has readability scores, but I don’t know how useful they actually are for writing as I actually tend to just write. The readability statistics are quite practical once you know what they signify. I found a website that helps provide some ‘standards’.

This post rates: Fog: 9.6 which indicates that you need 9.6 years of education to read this, or a headcold to write it!

(edited: the two possible modes of writing with ‘tags’ and mini-word style buttons produce widely different numbers of words).

Refinancing Your Home: Keep your head on!

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I have a mortgage refinance story to share with you guys. One that involves a certain levelheadedness to show that refinancing CAN work, but you have to be cautious.

We lived in an area where we had purchased property about 7 years ago. Prices were in the toilet at the time, but soon they they went further down, down by 5% to 10%. We didn’t flinch we just kept paying our mortgage, and concentrated on other issues. Our house price dropped from NT$3.5 million to a little over NT$3 million.

Stupidly though we forgot to check interest rates, as they dropped. Our mortgage payments didn’t drop much at all. By then my wife and I thought it about time to buy a car. We had an opportunity to purchase a parking lot in our community as the investment company was getting rid of the stock, before being liquidated. Never occurred to me to ask why! We delayed purchasing the car for quite some time, though.

So we decided to jump: we renegotiated our house loan with the original financier. We increased the total amount to about NT$2.7 million from the total outstanding. That provided us with a check to purchase our parking lot (about NT$380K). In addition, we negotiated a new mortgage payment about 2/3 of what we had been paying before. It was a win-win deal.

Since then, we have noted that the property prices have increased here by about 50%-60% conservatively. So we benefited in a number of ways:
1. cheap property purchase
2. lower interest rate and lower monthly payments
3. increased property value
4. convenience of personal parking space

But, before you refinance, you need to make sure that you:
1. work to increase the potential return
2. take advantage of poor market
3. can handle the post refinance payments
4. your life is better as a result.

Season’s Greetings.

This posting is sponsored by Personalhomeloanmortgages.com