A neighbour child after going for a ride around the neighbourhood in our wonderful friend Brian’s classic no-top no-sides no-seat-belts VW beetle dune buggy: “Wow! That was better than sticking your head out the window!”

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LittlePage3, upon hearing that we’re having hot dogs for lunch to use them up, after being part of our ‘No more nitrates’ conversation: “Yay! We’re having cancer logs for lunch! Whoohoo!”

Our mortgage is up on September first.

I’ve been avoiding doing anything about it because it means trying to guess what’s going to happen in the next five or ten years with regards to a topic that I know nothing about: big finance.

Mortgages seem to be hot topics in the blog world, and CNN is full of articles on the impending crash of the mortgage market, and articles with headlines like “Black Tuesday Rains Terror on Financial Markets. Dogs, cats living together. Chaos!”.

Today we went to see the banker to talk about renewing. We checked online, and our bank was offering rates two and a half percentage points (!!) above most of the competition. ING Direct was offering 5.75 percent on a 5 year fixed, a local credit union was offering 5.85. Our bank was (unbelievably) offering 7.24.

We went in ready to walk away. We decided that we would be gracious enough not to ask them to beat the online price, but the local credit union was reasonable to ask them to match. I wasn’t expecting them to.

The banker turned out to be a young (it’s scary how young other people are getting all of a sudden…) gentleman who was friendly and helpful, and actually used the phrase “Oh, I don’t like to meet other banks’ rates. I like to beat them.” Those are very nice words to hear from a banker. Very nice indeed.

My magic 8-ball came up with “rates are going up, lock in” so we got a 5 year, closed, fixed rate mortgage, and the wonderful banker looked at our research and offered us 5.84. We signed, and it’s all over for another 5 years.

Maybe we could have saved a dollar or two some other way. But then I’d have to think about my mortgage between now and 2012, and I’d like to avoid that if at all possible.

Debt is always a touchy subject in the Christian sphere.

I don’t think there’s anyone who is actually pro-debt, but as soon as you start talking money with Christians, someone raises a topic like “Rich Dad Poor Dad” and starts talking about how it’s our Christian responsibility to use the markets and flip houses and get loaded by using complicated schemes in order to provide for our families and spend quality time playing with our kids in piles of dollar bills like Scrooge McDuck.

I’m not out to get rich quick (or slowly, for that matter). I just don’t want to have money be a stress in our lives. No, wait, correct that to: I just don’t want to have debt be a stress in our lives.

There are always folks telling us to dump every spare penny we can into our mortgages and retirement funds, so that we can retire early and have lots of money. “Get rid of that debt!”, they say. They want us to scrimp and save now in order to be free later.

Well, our debt isn’t crippling, so getting rid of it isn’t really that high a priority for us. We don’t have any “consumer debt”, all we have is the mortgage and a line of credit that we used in lieu of a car loan. We bought a house that we could afford. We decided what our payments should be and found out how much of a mortgage that would get us. We didn’t let the bank tell us how deep to dig ourselves in. We pay our mortgage on time every month, and we don’t use credit cards at all. We’ve tried very hard to always stay inside the “if we sold everything, we could walk away and take the car and our clothes with us” line.

Our philosophy has always been to pay off our debts in a manner that we can afford and use any extra money to live now rather than making things tight now to live later. We have a house that still needs a tremendous amount of work. If I own if 4 years faster, but it’s still a wreck, who cares? I’d rather get it finished and pay for it a little longer. If I scrimp and save and I die next week, all I’ve achieved is living a deliberately hard life. If I incur debts responsibly and pay my debts responsibly, but take the time and resources to enjoy life now, then I’ve passed on some memories and ideals to my kids and will still own my house eventually.

“Stuff” can be a god. You can worship stuff so much that you dig yourself into a deep credit hole and destroy any chance of freedom. “Debt-free” can also be a god, though. Scrimping and saving and dumping every single spare penny onto the debt in order to close the mortgage a few years early is an intoxicating religion that can be just as dangerous to your life and your happiness as worshipping Mammon.

Remember, it’s not money that’s the root of all evil. It’s the love of money.

Sometimes we need to change our strategy. If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always gotten.

I am drowning. I have far too many things pending and I’m not doing any of them because I don’t even know where to begin. The cloud of undone things hovers over me like a big dark cloud.

My desk is piled in stuff that got put there “until I sort through it”. The desktop on my computer always has at least 200 files on it that are put there “temporarily” because I don’t have anywhere to put them but I don’t want to forget about them. Every month or so I purge back to 50 or so, and end up throwing out most of the stuff because it’s irrelevant or I don’t remember why I kept it or it’s usefulness is now long past. I have items at work that are old and getting more difficult because they are old, but I don’t want to touch them because they are difficult, regardless of the fact that my inaction makes then even more difficult in the future.

Jennifer is trying to get organized using a book called “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It involves making notes of EVERYTHING that even crosses your mind that you need or want to do. The main focus is that if you have something in your mind but no next action for it, then it is a stress-causing “open loop”. Everything has a place, from a file system for papers, to a calendar for date-sensitive to-do’s, to lists of items to do broken down by project and by context. If I’m at the computer and I have a minute, I pull up my “computer” context and see that I need to migrate some websites to a new host, fix some typos on a web page and do some backups. If I’m going out, I look at the “shopping” context. When it’s work day I pull up the “basement” project and see what the next action is.

Essentially, it’s getting rid of that cloud of possibilities and maybes and “Oh yeah, I have to remember that”s and “Oh! That needs to be done sometime”s and putting them on paper where you can sort them and priorize. Once a week you sit and purge the done stuff and categorize the new notes.

This is going to be HARD. Every time I’ve tried a new way to get out of my mire I’ve slipped back into old habits in short order. This is going to require a completely new take on life as a whole. I’m scared, but I’ve had enough of the stress and the hassle. It’s affecting my entire life: my marriage, my parenting, my work, my faith.

Yes, I’m scared, but I’m finally more fed up than I am scared. I don’t want some new toy or system that will change my life. I want to change my life.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. — Thoreau, “Walden”