Net Worth Snapshot

Here is the net worth snapshot for Mr. and Mrs. FSA.

Current
Assets	Value	Comments
Home	$220,000	appraisal
Car 1 - 2001	$9,000	trade-in value
Car 2 - 1995	$1,950	trade-in value
Checking	$3,900	best estimate
Savings	$1,138	best estimate
Emergency Fund	$1,500	emigrant direct
401 (k)	$0
Roth IRA	$0
Misc	$477	kids 529 plan
Total	$237,965
Liabilities	Value	Comments
Mortgage	$190,000	5/1 ARM
Car 1 Loan	$14,000	60 Month loan
Credit Card Debt	$5,893
Student Loans	$24,000	Husband and wife
Misc	$0
Total	$233,893
Total Net Worth	$4,072

Not too bad so far. The good news is that it's positive. The bad news is that financialbabysteps is catching up to us quickly. That is one financially savvy baby! A little friendly competition never hurt anyone :). Here's the rundown on our assets and liabilities:

We refinanced our home recently so the appraisal value is only a few months old. Funny story about our mortgages. I was just graduating from college and couldn't qualify for a conventional mortgage yet. We wanted to move in and get settled before I started working so we did an IO ARM which allowed us to buy the home when we wanted. After making one payment, I started working and we refinanced to our current mortgage which is a 5/1 ARM with a really low rate of less than 5%. The total P&I payment for the ARM is less than the IO payment of the first mortgage we had which is great. It was fortuitous timing for us since it was right around the time that interest rates bottomed out. We will certainly be moving in under 5 years, so I'm not worried about the ARM reseting at a higher rate. The only negative I have about the mortgage is that we're currently paying PMI. That sucks. I tried using homegain to see what some comps would be for our area, but they didn't have data for our little town. I'm planning on waiting another six months before trying to get rid of the PMI.

We own two used cars. We bought one with cash and the other we financed through our credit union with a 5 year loan. Ordinarily I would say that taking out a 5 year loan is a bad idea for a car, but considering the fact that the interest rate was exactly the same whether I got a 3, 4, or 5 year loan it made sense to me. The rate is below 5% on the car loan as well, and I can earn almost the same amount of interest from an online savings account so I'm not really in a hurry to prepay the loan.

The emergency fund really needs to be more, but we're going to be concentrating on the Credit Card debt first.

You might notice that we have started saving in our kids 529 plan, but hasn't funded my 401(k) or a Roth IRA. More than half of the kids 529 comes from family memebers for Christmas and Birthdays. We did the inial seeding to open the account, but we haven't added anything since we opened it last month.

In terms of the retirement accounts, my company doesn't match until I've worked for a full year. I'll also be getting my first raise at the same time that I qualify for the match, so that's when we'll start contributing.

A large portion of the credit card debt (> 75%) is currently in the form of a 0% balance transfer for 12 months. We're going to be aggresively paying that off in the coming year. The rest of it is from our home improvement project that we did at the beginning of the month and will be paid in full from savings. So far we have yet to pay any credit card interest and plan to keep it that way.

For our student loans I've signed up for the electronic payment option so I qualify for a lower interest rate. My wife is finishing school so we don't have a pay her loans for at least a year. I consolidated my loans and I'm currently paying less than 5% on the balance. My mortgage rate is actually lower than the rate on my student loans :).

So there you have it. Our financial picture for the current year. In another post I'll go over the goals that we have and how we plan to achieve them. Any comments or thoughts on our net worth picture would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Conversation with my son(s) #1: Why don't we go to church?

This series will be a weekly (hopefully) endeavor where I will imagine some hypothetical conversations with my boys when they grow older. Hopefully they will prove insightful. Not too sure on what the format is going to look like, but I'll tweak things as I go along

Son: Hey dad, can I ask you a quick question.

FSA: Sure son, what is it?

Son: Um, well I was just wondering, why don't we go to church?

FSA: Why were you wondering that, if you don't mind me asking?

Son: Well, some of my friends were asking me at school. They were talking about going to church and stuff, and they asked me what church I went to. I told them that we didn't go to church and that we just stayed at home, but I figured I'd ask you why.

FSA: Ok, fair enough. You see son, church is for people that belong to certain religious groups. It's for people who more or less believe the same thing and every Sunday they meet to talk about those set of beliefs and be part of a community of like-minded individuals.

Son: How come we don't go?

FSA: Simply because we don't share one major belief. I'm an atheist, and your mother is a...hmm, spiritual agnostic is the best way to put it.

Son: What does that mean?

FSA: (laughing), for me it means that I don't believe that god exists. For your mom, she's not really sure if god exists, but she tends to believe that there is a spiritual realm to the world...or something like that, you should talk to her and get her thoughts on the matter.

Son: What does that make me then?

FSA: Well son, most likely it'll make you either an atheist, or an agnostic. Most kids usually follow their parents when it comes to religion.

Son: I thought grandma and grandpa were Christian though? Why aren't you a Christian then dad?

FSA: That's a long complicated story, son. Suffice it to say that I took a look at the evidence and it lead me to atheism.

Son: What do you mean by that dad?

FSA: That's going to be a conversation for another time son. I promise we'll get to it though...we could go to a church if you wanted to see what it's like. Maybe we could go to different congregations and we'll talk about what we like and don't like.

Son: Do you think that would be a good idea?

FSA: It's just a thought. I'll talk to your mother about it and see what she says. We might go to a Unitarian Universalist church first and see what they're like.

Son: Ok...what's a Unitarian Universalist?

FSA: I wish I knew son, but we'll figure it out together. (wink)

Son: (laughing) Ok dad, if you say so.

FSA: I love you son.

Son: I love you too dad.

~Fin

So that end's the first of what should be a weekly series. In this short conversation, I wanted to touch on how my sons might feel like an outsider because of our familiy's lack of religion. I hope that I'll be able to do a better job explaining to them, while at the same time allowing them to explore and be their own person. I'll try to refine the format and improve upon the dialogue going forward.

Bruce Almighty

This weekend I saw portions of Bruce Almighty again. Funny movie, and Jim Carrey is his usual self. This was the second time that I've seen the movie, the first time I saw it I was a theist, this time I'm an atheist. I still enjoyed the movie, but this time I saw it for what it truly was, an exercise in Christian apologetics. There were many different aspects of faith dealt with in the movie, but the largest one seemed to stem around free-will. One memorable quote from the movie is when Bruce askeds God (Morgan Freeman):
Bruce: How do you make somebody love you without affecting free will?
God (Freeman): [scoffs] Welcome to my world, son.
This raises some serious questions of consistency in the movie. The movie makes it clear that God cannot alter our free-will, but at the same time, he is omnipotent. As such, he was able to grant everyone's prayer and several thousand people choose the same lottery numbers. How is that not changing their free-will? Wouldn't you have to alter their wills in order to get so many people to pick the same numbers? Then there is mention of people's stocks tripling in five days. The stock market is made up of people. These people engage in buying and selling based on a variety of factors. In order for a stock to go up, people have to want to buy it. If the demand for the stock exceeds the supply, then the stock goes up. So in other words, people's will would have to have been manipulated to some extent to get the stock moving. These are the two most obvious contradictions as I wasn't able to watch all of the movie again.
As some of you are already aware, I am already of the mindset that free-will and omnipotence are mutually exclusive and things like this cement that notion in my mind. I promise that I'll try to get a fully fleshed out free-will post later on. I have it somewhere in my head, I just need to get it down.