Watch our factor

The Cigarette Factor or the do not be dumb with your money factor. The idea was identical. I we saved a few dollars a day, we could eventually buy our own home. We rented we would always be poor, making someone else rich. If we bought a home, we would eventually make ourselves rich.

Our parent taught us a trick that makes it easy to pay down your mortgage early. It is a trick they said the banks would hate but we would love and they were right. These days it is easier than ever. What you do is take your mortgage payment and instead of paying it is full once a month, you pay half every two weeks. You do that consistently and by the end of the year you have made a while extra payment without ever feeling the pinch. So instead of taking thirty years to pay done your mortgage, you will have the thing paid off in twenty three years. We figured that by following this plan we could buy a home in our mind twenties and own it free and clear but the time we were in our late forties. What actually happened was even better. We ended up making even more extra mortgage payments on a consistent basis. So by the time we were in our late thirties, the house was pretty well paid off.

Then we do not have any more mortgage payments to make and without them, we had all this extra money each month. We figured ether we could waste it or we could buy a nicer house and rent out our first one. So that is what we did, using the same trick with the payment schedule to pay off the mortgage faster.

I was perfectly happy to let someone else make the mistake of buying it new a full price and then letting me have it for a fraction of what he paid. We did the same thing with all our cars. We always bought used and never regretted it. You have the car checked out by a reliable mechanic, take good care of it and it will run just fine.

If we do not have enough cash to buy something, we did not buy it. The entire time we have been married, we have never carried credit card debt.