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Archive for September, 2015

Broken dishwasher - 15K?

September 18th, 2015 at 03:01 pm

Our dishwasher broke. It is close to 6 years old, so it is probably best to replace it. $500-$1,000.

Once you are replacing a dishwasher, you may as well replace the counter top - we have a cheaper non-stone one, I don't even know what that is. I'm thinking granite or some kind of stone. Don't know how much, probably 4K.

You can't replace the counter top and leave the old sink and old faucet. Than, once you have new counter top and sink, that cheap white tile back splash is just completely out of place.

And since cutting stone for the counter top, it would be cheaper to cut out a small slab to be cut at the same time for an additional 2 cabinets on the other side (we really need more storage room and counter space).

That means the shelf that is there and goes across the entire wall needs to be ripped out, wall spackled and painted (or put some architectural element like a stone accent wall.

A build-in nook there would be nice.
My kitchen is insanely tiny.

This is when you invest.

September 4th, 2015 at 10:28 pm

Counter-intuitive, I know. But logical.

We consistently invested (though very tiny, insignificant amounts) dollar-cost averaging through the financial crisis. That turned out to be a great strategy, even though we did not wait for the market to "bottom out" and invested equally on way down and the way up. Later on, we wished we invested more during the crisis.

Now, we are trying to do the same, even if difficult to do emotionally - put whatever money we can scrape up during the month into SP500 and another mutual fund.
$200, $300, $500, $100, etc whenever market has a bad day (running out of money to cover all the bad days).
We have no idea how long it markets be going down, and while it is painful to see the losses continue, I know from looking back on major dips, this is how you get ahead in the span of several years.
So we try to invest what we can now, and when the market is rallying (could be long time from now), we will ease up on investments and do minimum monthly amounts.

Timing is not great - we just got back from a 4 week luxury holiday in the UK and now have to pre-pay whole year of after school care this week, so cashflow is very limited. But we put in what we can.