Tolerances

For the first time since the economy turned a bit sour, my non registered account has soared above even and is up about $550. It is solely due to 2 holdings -- one of them a new one I just bought a few months ago. The other 4 are still lagging fairly far behind so when they come back to life, I will be quite pleased with the overall result. My registered retirement account has a ways to go still.

This month D and my paydays are off sync. He gets paid bi-weekly, which works really well with the mortgage whereas I get paid bi-monthly. So for part of the year because of the 2 months where there are 3 mortgage payments, we mismatch for a little while. So there is a bit of extra thinking as I am responsible for extra mortgage payments as well as the prepayments.

Someone I know is single and carries about $350000 worth of debt, $230000 for the mortgage and $120000 in various other loans. They recently told me how great it feels to be working less and credited me as their inspiration.

I didn't feel very good about it nor did I realize they felt they were thinking of matching my work schedule at any time during our conversations. Though we probably make a similar range of income, I don't carry that amount of debt and I have a spouse that works too. This person does have a tenant and is working of selling things online and feels our situations are comparable. I'm not really seeing that.

I see my role as D's backup. I am able to match his income should anything happen. Because of our current aggressive debt payback, we are using all of his income and most of mine. So if anything should happen to me, he would not be able to sustain it and would have to resume to a "normal" level of living with regular payments but our lives as we see it now wouldn't be massively affected. I have very little tolerance for chance with respect to money and debt.