I'm a certified mortgage planner. You are right on but my 2 cents worth on 1 piece. By the way a CMPS there are very few of us nationwide therefore pretty prestigous!
1 piece of advice instead of paying extra principal mortgage payments throw that $100-$200 into an asset bearing blended account. When you pay down your mortgage your payment doesn't change unless you were to refinance. Your equity in your home no matter how large or small earns a 0% rate of return. It's like burying $10k in your backyard. AND it is not safe. What safe means is that you aren't going to take your life savings and pour it into a universal life ins. policy which is highly volatile and does have good rates of return, but you'd better have assets in all other allocations to balance the risk. So back to safety i'm not sure where you live but here in MN twin cities house prices are dropping. Now if you paid down your loan by $10,000 over the last 10 years, and your equity were to drop $20,000 below what you owe. Now let's say an unfortunate circumstance were to occur. You lose your job, child gets sick, divorce, ect. Of course we don't like to think in those terms but that is the point of life insurance, disability ins. car ins. ect!
If an unfortunate circumstance were to occur and you had to sell immediately you would lose every penny of that $10,000 you worked so hard to pay down on your mortgage.
Now if you'd been saving that money over in X investment you have $10,000 cash. If you ended up doing a short sale or foreclosure you forgo your credit/pride/home but not your cash. The only way this does NOT work is if you're going to the casino every month with that $200 you've been disciplined with paying off your home.
An extreme of this equity management, I've done $500,000 rollouts of equity on high net worth individuals. They are disciplined with their money, use it to buy investment properties, start businesses, buy foreign condos in mexico costa rica, and invest in safe investments such as muni bonds. Now again if this individual blew it on mercedes, disney cruises, and a riduclous life style this would be an absolute no no!
And I dont' sell any investment products. I just felt like throwing my 2 cents worth in. Afterall Ivanka Trump took out a $1mil mortgage for a condo in NY. Of course she has cash. WHy did she do it. well maximum you can write off in mortgage interest at this time is up to $1mil in a mortgage. $1mil of money invested at even 4% rate of return after taxes in 10 years she has enough cash to pay off the condo in full if she'd like.
Add Ric Edelman's Ordinary People Extrodinary Wealth. He's been on Oprah, and has credentials a mile long.
7 more days! I will be spending the weekend packing!
I was like "Uhm.. no." So I'll just be packing an extra suitcase with that stuff in it. I'll just have to piggyback my carryon for the walk through the airport.
I still feel completely disorganized since I've really only been throwing things into the suitcase as I think about them. Hopefully I'll be able to work on that some this weekend.
answered a few phone calls and helped out a customer.. AND... there was a sweet couple buying 60 Bears !!! 
They are donated them to the Elk's Club which hand them out to kids.. 
I said, of course, not a problem, I have no where to be anyway *cough* Grocery Store *cough* 
We leave Thursday.
