We finally got an update this afternoon on how our mortgage underwriting was going. Even though we have lowered the amount we are asking to borrow, our lender is balking at our debt ratio, which is still fairly low even though it includes our current house along with the amount we will be paying per month on the new mortgage. We are planning to rent this house out after we move, because the housing market is crap, and we don't want to give our house away. Renting it out for a few years will allow time for the market to recover. They had not figured in the amount we could get for rent for the house in doing the calculations, and we are not sure that they will accept that logic. We have a few more tricks up our sleeves, but the options are dwindling rapidly.

The other problem is, now that we have a lender that might be interested, our appraisal is too old, so they want it redone. I fear that it will come in even lower than before, and then we will be back to square one. The hits just keep on coming. Sometimes I really feel that we will never get this house built and that we will be stuck in our horrid neighborhood forever listening to our POS neighbors cackle into the wee hours of the morning and smelling the nasty cigar smoke that wafts over from their back porch. What a horrible thought.

It seems that lenders should change their names from "lenders" to "rejectors" because they are certainly not interested in lending to anyone right now. Our mortgage broker said that it is a very strange time- that he could turn in the paperwork for a "perfect mortgage," one that was well within the loan to value, borrowers with excellent credit, etc. and still they would sometimes not get past underwriting. The underwriters would just never get back to him; they are all running scared. That, to me is stupid and ridiculous. How do the mortgage companies expect to stay in business if they won't lend to ANYONE? No wonder the housing market sucks; no one can get the mortgage they need to buy anything. There is no end in sight unless things change, either.

The idiot mortgage companies and their stupid ass sub-prime loans got themselves into a huge mess, and now Andy and I, with near perfect credit, can't seem to get a mortgage to save our lives. I don't see what they are so worried about- they are going to be bailed out of their financial woes by the government. We, on the other hand, have no one to help us with funding, even though it was local government that put us in this predicament by costing us a small fortune and then delaying us so long that the market fell apart in the process.

I want to scream and strangle someone all at the same time. What has happened to this country and will things ever return to normal? I truly can't see how they could at this point.

This afternoon as I was sitting around 'putering I got some email notifications from eBay. Stuff about an anonymous account being registered using the same credit card as the one I have on file, which is actually my debit card. And then I got another identical message, that another account had been registered. Always the skeptic, I logged into my eBay account using a new window and checked the message section to make sure the messages actually came from eBay and not a phisher or spoofer. The messages were real. I chatted with an eBay rep online and she told me how to report it, but I have to wait 24- 48 hours for a response to find out what happened.

In the meantime I called the bank that issued the card and found that there were three fraudulent charges, one for Yahoo Wallet at less than $1.00, and then two charges from eBay for just over two dollars each. I think that whoever is using my card is trying to set up these accounts and the small amounts of money on the card are the way of verifiying that the person opening the Yahoo and eBay accounts has access to the bank account, like when you set up a PayPal account and they send a few cents to your account and have you check your account and type in what the amount was.

I put a stop on the debit card. No screwing around, just nix it. I do not want to sit idly by while someone empties my bank account. So, for the next five to seven days, I'll have to do without my precious debit card. Damn fraudsters. I could have had a new card by Tuesday for $16, but I'll be damned if I will pay extra money because some asshat tried to use my account. It is kind of cool that I was tipped off to the fraud so quickly by eBay, because the charges hadn't even posted yet- yeah it was only about $3, but it could have been worse- and the charges could have started piling up rapidly. Hopefully eBay wasn't where the con got my card number in the first place, but I suppose it is likely. Hmm. I'll find out more tomorrow when I hear back from eBay's fraud department.

Andy and I will spend a lot of money on certain things, but we are both notoriously cheap on others, namely clothing. And he is much more of a skinflint that I am- he says he feels like he is wasting money when he buys clothes for himself. I have pointed out many times that it is not wasting money as he cannot go around naked or in rags, but he challenges the rags thing sometimes and wears his old clothes until they disintegrate into dryer lint.

Now myself, I love a bargain. And I'll buy plenty of clothes as long as the deal is so good I feel like I have to race out of the store lest they change their minds on the prices, like I am nearly stealing them. This morning I had a printable coupon I got online for one of my favorite stores for bargains, Macy's, so I had to check it out. I got four designer brand shirts, a pair of pants and a pair of shorts for $40.37 after tax. One of the shirts was $2.90, and the pants were only $4.90! Macy's prints out on the receipt how much you saved off the retail price, and I saved over $176 on my $40 purchase. I cannot believe that I can buy a brand name shirt for less than one gallon of gas! And forget Ross or TJ Maxx; Macy's clearance prices cannot be beat. If they were any cheaper they'd be paying me to take the clothes.

I dragged Andy out to find some clothes for him in hopes of replacing someof the tattered stuff he sports, but all he found was one shirt for $2.99. He's a difficult one when it comes to clothes. He said that he didn't see much that fit his "style" which he describes as "dull." At least he's honest. I think I am just going to have to start buying stuff for him and bringing it home for him to yay or nay. Otherwise he'll still be wearing the same holey clothes for the next ten years.

Yesterday in the mail we got the first of our year end statements from one of our mortgage holders that we need to complete our income taxes. This is just the beginning. Taxes for us used to be so easy I could almost do them by hand with a calculator, though we have been using tax software for the past six years or so. Still, our taxes have always been straightforward and have never taken us more than an hour or two to complete. This year may be a bit different.

This year in addition to our house we have our North Carolina property, which we closed on in January of last year. It should be considered "investment property" because we are not ready to build on it yet. Then we have the new property here that we are trying to build on, and its associated mortgage. Then we have dividends from my stocks and all kinds of deductions from property taxes paid on the three properties and interest on the different mortgages. It is more complicated when you actually have stuff- this is a first for us and I think it means we are getting old or something. It starts to get a little bit confusing. I wasn't sure if we should take our stuff somewhere to get help this year or not.

I decided to call my dad, who used to be a practicing CPA for advice. Surprisingly, he said it wouldn't be worthwhile to take our taxes to someone to have them done. He advised that we continue to use the tax software and then if we had any questions we should just call him and he would help us out. So I think that is what we will do. My only concern is that we make the most of our deductions- we want to get back everything that is coming to us as we think we pay enough in taxes already. What do you do at tax time in order to file? Tax software? Take your stuff to an accountant? Paper and pencil? Do you wait until the last minute or file your return as soon as possible?

The whole new house/road project is moving right along. The road plans have been engineered and are submitted to the county for approval, and several other side items are going on as well, such as our water main extension project, the property wetland permitting is still in limbo, and so on, each item costing us lots of money to move forward, of course. It is just one thing after another, as you can imagine.

This evening, I went upstairs to Andy's office to get an envelope, and saw a stack of papers sitting in the fax machine. I started looking through them and got a nice surprise. The fax was from the engineers doing our road project and said that after looking over the plans they had determined that we needed to apply for ANOTHER permit from the St. Johns Water Management District and that they needed the stack of papers all signed and returned to them ASAP and oh, by the way the application fee for that is $1000. They almost just mentioned it in passing as if we are made of money or something. Can we just get a break here?

This afternoon at work, I was fortunate enough to receive an award for good performance on a specific project, and with it was a check for $200. Cool. Then I got home and discovered that Andy hadn't left for work, because his truck's battery cable had fallen apart and the terminal had fallen into the battery which was also leaking acid. Guess how much the new parts cost? It was $202 and change. Go figure. He'll be spending the rest of the evening routing the new battery cable in the blistering heat outside. Sounds like fun, huh?

Tonight Andy text messaged me that he got his raise at work and how much it was. It was a pretty good raise and I text messaged back "Wow! Now we can almost afford to buy gas!"

The lottery came to Florida when I was in high school. My dad used to say it was a "voluntary tax." I have never really been a big lottery player. I would play once in a while, here and there, but only a couple times a year. I actually sort of swore off the lottery in the summer of 2002, wherein I decided that I would not play the lottery anymore, but would establish an anti-lottery fund. I started having fifteen bucks a week deducted from my paycheck toward purchasing company stock (I work for a NASA contractor made up of a conglomerate of companies) instead of playing the lottery. It is still sort of gambling, but not as much so as I get Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Rockwell Automation stocks every week. They are now worth over four grand, so it hasn't been a bad plan after all.

But back to the lottery. The jackpot has gotten high this week, and at work a few people have gone in together in a pool. They asked me if I wanted in, and I couldn't say no for a selfish reason. Since I am part of the pool I know we won't win for I am not a lucky type. However if I hadn't joined after being asked, they would have most certainly won without me, and I would have kicked myself for the next ten years for it. So, to avoid the kicking, I had to give it a shot. So, to the rest of the lottery pool, I am sorry that I have ruined your chances of winning, but I couldn't let you win without me.

This weekend Andy and I went on our regular grocery shopping trip, only we went in the afternoon, which we never do. We like to go early in the morning before the crowds, but this weekend we went later because Andy had to stay late at work on Friday night and didn't get home until almost 4 AM. Consequently the lines in the checkout lanes were longer than usual and it brough back memories of a time about three years ago when we were stuck in a super long line at Wal-Mart. That day we stood there and came up with our entire financial and home improvement plan for the next few years right there in the check out lane. We discussed paying off all of our debt, except the house, putting a new roof on the house, remodeling the kitchen, replacing the central a/c, and eventually getting a pool. We decided how we would go about saving the money for the projects, we would set up a separate savings and linked checking account just for our home improvement projects to keep that money out of our regular budget. None of this is very exceptional, we simply daydreamed aloud what we wanted to do. I am sure lots of couples do this every day. The interesting part is that we actually kept to our plan and did every one of the things we planned. We kept to the plan we set up in that checkout aisle the whole time, although I didn't even realize it until the other day. I guess it is time for us to get caught in the checkout line again so we can set up a new plan for the next few years. Anyone know where we can find a slow cashier?

The remodeled kitchen we planned that day at Wal-Mart.

Do you ever think about retirement? I do. And I wonder if it will ever be posssible for people in my generation with all the skyrocketing healthcare costs. $4,372,392.00 is the number that the calculator on the Vanguard web site says my husband and I need to save to retire at 55. That is an awful lot of money. We save 20% of our income now, in our 401Ks, but four million still seems like an unreachable number. There is a man that I work with now who has worked at the space center since the Apollo era; he has been there since about 1962 or 63, and he can't retire. He was in the hospital yesterday for an angioplasty, but he will have to come back to work soon. He will have to keep working until he dies, because his family pisses all of his money away. It is really sad, and he is only one of many in the same situation.

Andy and I are currently looking for some other investments to get into, like real estate, to supplement our 401Ks, and maybe give us a better chance of being able to retire one day. Our biggest investment right now is our house. Back in 2001, when we were engaged, we had money for a wedding, but I saw that the interest rates were low, and talked Andy into looking for a house. We used the money intended for the wedding as our closing costs and such to purchase our house in May of 2001. The house was, at that time 9 years old, and had appreciated about $10,000 since it was built. Well, it just so happened that there was a boom in the local real estate market, and now, four years later, our house has tripled in value. So that turned out to be a smart decision. We would not be able to afford our own house at today's prices, so it is a good thing that we got in to the housing market when we did. We had a modest wedding in the backyard, and have no regrets whatsoever about it- it was all family and was great. But that brings us back to investments. The real estate market around here is untouchable any more so we are looking for the next big thing. I have been looking at properties in the Bahamas that are still reasonably priced, but that is going to need a lot more research. It is so hard to guess what investments are going to be the big winners before it happens. But like I have heard many times before, land is usually a good investment because they aren't making any more of it.