Day 42: Put Your Cat to Work!
by Edward Smith
16 Aug 2020
Your House Payment Keeps You Over Employed
If you read my last article entitled: 🤠How Financial Freedom Tastes Like a Yummy Burger Franchise. You would have learned how house payments can buy you ownership over your future self, and how you get to run things your way.
In this article, learn how paying off a house, brings in so much extra income, it's like your pet went out and got itself a full time job. It's time for work Muffy! Get gone!
Life Disclaimer: Houses Cost Money
My house payment currently sits at $2,413 per month. That means that people in my household have to work for other people and earn enough money to take home at least $28,956 bucks a year, not including taxes, government program fees, or whatever else that gets taken away before we see the money hit the bank.
According to the website
The average minimum wage for a person per state averages at around 8 to 12 dollars an hour.
You can argue for or against that number. Point here it isn't a fortune.
If I was at the low end I'd make eight bucks an hour. I'd probably work 40 hours a week (if not more). I'd take home about 85% of that and would end up at about $14,144 a year (8 X 40 = 320 X 52 = 16,640 X .85 = 14,144).
This means that if my wife and I were both working in minimum wage jobs and our house payment was what it is currently, it would take both of us working 40 hours a week to earn what it takes to pay off our house each year.
That means nothing goes wrong. No job losses. It also doesn't account for food or any other expenses. Might be time to find a second or third job.
By paying off our house, we get to keep about $1,814 of that every month (or $21,768 of that). It's like me and my cat both got jobs at the local burger place and that money flows into the house budget to pay down our other bills. Things become easier.
Looking at it another way, it's like we bought off $21,768 of the work my wife has to earn every year. She could downgrade jobs and we'd be living the same way as we do now. Or if we both lost our jobs, it would take a lower paying job to normalize things again.
A Decade Worth of Dreaming
My dream took ten years to get to where it is today, but things are really starting to pop and happen now. I can see it. It's starting to get really exciting.
Ten years ago I decided to pay down my house aggressively as a way to buy my household's financial freedom. I didn't want to pay house payments because they keep us in bondage to a creditor.
I knew that if we could stop having to pay for a house, we wouldn't need to make as much, and we could get back on track quicker with less. That doesn't include retirement. Retirement puts this into overdrive.
At some point, our retirement investments will make what we spend. We'll hit a day where everything cancels out. At that point, our jobs become optional. We get to choose what we do after that. We can work. We can both stay home.
Nobody else gets to decide what happens to us. We don't have to ask permission. We paid the price. The machine is self sufficient. We can walk away and let it do it's job.
Conclusion
I also think if you can become self sufficient with your money, it makes you a better person in the long run. Instead of doing things out of desperation and out of necessity, you get to follow your heart.
When my wife and I get to this point, we'll get to serve others selflessly without distraction. When you remove the paycheck from the formula, you get to just be yourself, exactly as you really are.
No more games, no more shackles. No more show.
Sounds clean. Sounds honest. I like the sound of it. That's my dream.
Is your dream better? Go make it happen. Prove it.
I'm doing it.
I want to see what you can do.
I bet your dream is incredible. I can't wait to see it.
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