🤠 How To Drive Your Visualized Dream Home

Day 37:   Free Car When I Pay Down My House! 

by Edward Smith

11 Aug 2020

Just Picture It!

Being an adult can be annoying sometimes.   When you were first signing up for this adult thing, people failed to disclose everything to you up front.   There are days where people expect you to be responsible.   

You end up having to do unpleasant, but necessary stuff.   You have to unclog a toilet, pay a bill or meet a deadline.   These things don't excite you.  They can be mind numbing.

So what do you do?       

If you look around.   You're not alone.   There are people around you doing the same stuff that you're facing every day, and they're perfectly happy.   What's up with that?   Maybe they've found a way to look at the whole thing differently.  Wish that were you?  Let's close our eyes and try to picture things in a different way.  

How Do you Make a House Payment Fun?

About ten years ago, I decided to get a house mortgage, and I began paying down my house.

Anyone that tells you that the process of paying down a house early is fun probably needs professional help.  It's moral.   It's responsible.   It's mature, and I highly recommend you do it, but it isn't what I would describe as fun per say.   

   

House Mortgages can actually put you at risk.   They are always hungry.   They don't care whether you keep your job or get fired.    The mortgage shows up every month and requires it's payment.  No payment, no house.  As simple and dangerous as that.  

So in this situation, you're not doing it because you enjoy it, you're doing it to keep things in balance and out of trouble.

So how do you turn something so scary like that into something fun?

I decided to picture it with cars.     

  

Paying Off Your House, One Car at a Time

Here is how my plan works.   When I was in high school I drove a Geo Metro.   This car cost about $7,000 back in 1996.   It was affordable.  It was small.   It got the job done, but it was not glamorous.   

Later on I traded up to a 2010 Hyundai Accent and that car cost me closer to $14,000.   Having worked in a town where BMW and Tesla cars were king, I knew that my car wasn't on the high end.  

Cars could keep jumping up in price as your car got more lavish and exclusive.    I decided to put a spin on that whole model and go from the opposite direction.

I knew I owed a certain amount on my house, so I would take the value that I had left, and I would match that value up with something in the real world that had a comparable value.   So for instance, if I owed $250,000 on my house I might compare that house to the value of a smaller home in my area.  Then as I dropped the thing down to $100,000 I might look at expensive limited edition Italian sports cars.

I would keep doing this as the value kept getting paid down.   I ended up with a small booklet of car pictures with dollar amounts next to them.   A 2019 Tesla Model S costs $77,200.  A 2016 Jaguar Xf costs $51,900.   A 2016 Lexus Gs cost $45,615.   

Every time I paid down my house I got to mark off an expensive car.   I pretended like my loan was now paying for the type of car next in line.  I started paying down a 2019 Tesla.   Eventually I'll have purchased my way down to a 1997 Geo Metro costing $3,295, and then I'll be back in high school almost free of debt completely.   

This worked out great, because as I would be driving around town in traffic, I could see the car type that I was at, and I could think to myself that my house was worth the same thing.  All I have left to do now is buy that car.   

The house wasn't even a scary house anymore.  It was just a car.  Something I could take care of quickly.   I also could see that paying down things meant my loan became less and less lavish and more and more down to earth.  When you do that, you start to feel progress and you begin to feel safer.    It becomes fun.   The pictures provide visuals.   They work like milestones.   You can see where you are at, and the world is full of visual cues.

Conclusion

In this article, I talked about how creating a visual set of pictures can work as a progress report when you're trying to pay down a large unfriendly thing.   I like to use cars as my example, but you could do it with anything that you care about.   

You might compare your large expense to a set of different designer watches, or you might think of it in terms of gold, or the value of a collectible comic book or card.   Just make it something personal to you.  Make it something you enjoy and that you interact with often.   This changes your adult messy thing into something more friendly.   When things are friendly you remain motivated to chase them.   

Just think.  After your big expense is paid off, you can actually start saving up your money for the other thing that you were fantasizing about all of this time.    Maybe you'll see me driving around in that new Tesla car one day.   Honk if that excites you.   That's pretty cool.