walked with mom for 35 min

Went to the post office before work this morning and spent $1.84 to ship the half.com book.

Total spent so far this month = $73.29

I saw I got the $20 bonus for the Virtual Bank account I opened. Added that money to my extra fund. Made $100 on bank bonuses so far this year.

I was reading about the new tax proposals. I guess one of the proposals would limit the amount you deduct for your mortgage payments. So far I haven't been prepaying my mortgage because I have a really low rate for 5 years. 4.5% I know I can do make more by investing in the stock market. But I'm rethinking that position for a variety of reasons.

1. if the deduction is not as good, there's less incentive to keep the debt and invest elsewhere.
2. Mortgage rates are going up as the fed keeps raising interest rates, who knows where it will be in 5 years where my mortgage converts to 1 year ARM.
3. The more pre-payments I make now in the early years of the loan while the interest cost is high the more money I save long term. Right now my mortgage is $704 a month and about $200 of that goes to principle. So if I make a $200 principle payment I save $500 in interest payments, plus all my future payments would pay more toward principle. And that's a tax free investment. If I invest $200 at 5% for 29 years I would have more than $800 before taxes and I could probably average more than 5% a year. So on paper it's still better to invest, but because I want my house paid off before I retire it might be better to put the money towards the house.

I always make myself nuts over this decision. I keep going back and forth. My emotions say pay off the house and my head says invest instead. I make my next year financial goals in December and I think instead of diverting so much of my investment money to stocks I'll put it towards pre-paying the mortgage. Maybe I'll split it, 1/2 toward pre-pay and 1/2 towards investing. Definitely need to think about it some more.

Finished reading my book Private Demon by Lynn Viehl. Vampire. Ok, kind of hard to stay interested. New author, probably won't get any more of her books.