The Gamble Family (.Net)

Be on fire.
Be unstoppable.
Be a force of nature.
Be better than everybody else at what you do.

I shall take this opportunity to borrow from the bible and shout “Tetelestai!”

This past week, we paid off the mortgage on our home. My wife and I seem to be among the fortunate few that are actually able to live in a home for nearly 20 years and pay for it - completely. In a time when the mortgage industry is in shambles, this does indeed seem rare that a mortgage gets satisfied. Couples seem to get lured into the new “creative financing” arrangements available and find themselves in ballooning debt with no hope of financial survival other than to default on a loan and surrender their American Dream.

I find this situation tragic. I blame the mortgage industry for coming up with financial arrangements that allow people to purchase a home without the real financial ability of making the payments once those mortgages begin to balloon. I also blame the people that are being suckered into these arrangements. Why would anyone in their right mind take on a $1,000 monthly payment, knowing that in five years that their payments will balloon to over $1,700? I hear over and over of people having purchased a home that they could barely afford with the $1,000 monthly payment, much less the expected increase to $1,700. Have people become so financially ignorant that they can’t do the simple arithmetic and realize that they are destined for financial failure?

My wife and I have been fortunate in our 33+ years together that we have never accumulated debt that we could not handle. If we didn’t have the money to buy something (except for the house and automobiles), we simply did without that particular item. This is not to say that we did not purchase “nice things” along the way, but we were always careful to never over-extend our budget unecessarily.

Call us “Old School” if you must, but at the end of each day, we hold each other’s hands and gaze into each other’s eyes as we sit quietly in OUR house.