alt Hacker NewsI suppose. I just did similarly priced renovations and chose to put off the whole thing until I could do the whole thing with cash. But everyone is in a different situation. While I’ve been at my job for nearly 20 years, the layoffs are frequent, and I’ve never felt any meaningful level of job security. This leads me to seek risk reduction, and part of that is eliminating as many financial obligations as possible. In theory I could probably make more investing (if we ignore the psychology aspects), but in practice it’s had the side effect of dramatically increasing how much in invest on a monthly basis after getting all the debt eliminated (which was really only the house). The peace of mind comes more from those low fixed expenses than from the savings. If I had to, I think I could make ends meet working retail, without dipping into savings/investments. I think about this more often than is probably healthy.
I empathize with that situation, it's something that weighs on my mind a lot as well. One of my goals is definitely to get the mortgage cleared out sooner rather than later. In some ways I'm rolling the dice, but I also feel like I'm safe from layoffs at least one quarter at a time (e.g. I don't think it will be so sudden, it'll align with quarterly earnings), and anything I can pay off in a quarter of work is worth rolling the dice on, even though there's always some risk there.
My plan of the moment is to get to a point where my expenses are minimized (e.g. house is paid off) and I can cover basic living necessities on investment income, and do some type of artisan home business. I keep thinking I'm going to really seriously get into carpentry, which has been a long-time hobby, or open a mechanic's shop (my other long-time hobby).