Weekend Update

As of now, I am now only about $3000 away from being short-term consumer debt-free. "Freedom!"

Also, you cannot imagine how ecstatic I am about my hefty 2006 income tax refund-- and how old or outmoded I feel for being more excited spending Friday night deriving how my CPA (or, rather, her software) ended up fetching me such a handsome sum of >$10K! My mortgages' interest were the largest contributors. It took me 3 years to finally believe what M kept trying to tell me about his real estate investments...

(I'm eager to completely revise and recalculate my "rent vs. owning in Socal today" scenario, now that I finally have all relevant net costs and figures for ownership.)

Unfortunately, the flip side is I can just see the majority of it vanish into thin air. Although I'm patting myself on the back for being completely aggressive with paying down my consumer debt, somehow I have to figure out how and when to address catching up paying my 2007 S-corporation owed taxes. I figure there's roughly $10K I owe there.

Back to better news, we've been receiving solicitations for Winder Court with significant appreciation. M, my business partner, has decided he has sufficient trust in me that he's given me the authority to make the final decision in holding on or capitalizing our value appreciation.

Adam, my finance-guru ex-coworker, provided guidance by advising I should make the decision by comparing it to putting our down payment into a 5%/annum fixed-income asset or annuity.

Whether we sell it off and collect the gains, or hang onto it for a while, it's a win-win situation for us. In our first year of a 30-year fixed mortgage, the equity paid by our tenants added up to almost being equivalent to the hypothetical gains from our down payment sitting in the above fixed-income asset. This only increase in later years, provided we continue experiencing similar optimal rental levels.

M is convinced that we should 1031 any liquidated funds into a couple more SFR's in the Dallas area after my fact-finding mission was inspired by a seminar that we both attended in his neighbor's garage. Apparently, there are brokers out there who are willing to service the wealth of Californians into properties in Texas and eliminate the legwork we SoCalers would usually have to exert.

To wrap this entry up, of all things, I'm giving serious consideration to "legally move myself to Texas"-- meaning, buy an SFR there, execute address changes for all my accounts to this new SFR there, even change my driver license and car registration to be over there, yet have my employer subsidize my room/board/per diem expenses as I still spend the majority of my time physically located in SoCal.