What Really Matters

I was talking to a friend of mine recently and he was talking about how happy he is to have just paid off his home. He is in his early thirties and has a wife and two kids. Then he started to complain about work. His drive to work is over an hour each way. He puts $30 in gas in his tank twice a week. So he is spending at least $240 a month in gas to get to work. I know this because I started asking him a lot of questions. My mind was swimming with ideas of the freedom of not having to pay for shelter. I’ll share our conversation with you and some of my thoughts.

Food and shelter are easily the top two costly things in life. For many rent and their monthly food bill run neck and neck. For my friend, Mike, he just eliminated the mortgage. He now has a paid for home and with that a sense of freedom that comes from not being in debt. Debt has been consuming my thoughts recently and I will be writing an article on it soon. Without this debt you are able to do so many more things.

The point I was trying to get across to Mike was why bother wasting ten hours of your life every week driving to work with the mortgage paid off. Not only would he not have the mortgage to pay but would be saving the gas, wear and tear on the car and would have more time with his young children. He argued that he could not find a job locally to make the $14 an hour he makes at his other job. I told him it didn’t matter, he would be saving money by not driving so far and seeing his family more. On top of that if he made less money he would drop down in the tax bracket and give the government less of his hard earned money.  Not that he has even looked if there is a $14 an hour job around, hes comfortable and change is scary.