Month: January 2024

When you’re an adult, sometimes you gotta do adult things, which are often not very fun things. One of these things is paying your mortgage. Now, I do that every two weeks like my mortgage company wants me to but sometimes, when you’re lucky enough to have some extra money lying around, you can pay down your mortgage even more.

Now I consider myself quite lucky, because I’m still gainfully employed and given what’s happened to the games industry in the last year or so, I am indeed quite lucky to be where I am. I’m also fortunate to have some extra cash lying around. The interest rates are at the highest they’ve been since I had the privilege of having a mortgage. My current interest rate for my mortgage is 6.5% and that is high for me. It used to be that my savings accounts would accrue interest at a rate higher than what my mortgage would. It just made sense to just park my money in my bank account than pay down my mortgage. That hasn’t been the case for a while now.

I probably should have done this a while ago but I’m gonna put a decent chunk of change into paying down my mortgage in a lump sum payment. I think I’ve done this twice before. It’s been years since I made my last lump sum payment. Anyways, according to the mortgage calculator, once I make this payment, it’ll knock off two years from my payment schedule. I’ll be mortgage-free two years sooner, assuming nothing changes, but of course things will change.

If interest rates remain high like this, it makes more sense to me to make more lump sum payments more frequently. I’m quite close to getting my mortgage down to five-figures now and that’ll be quite the milestone.

Anyways, that money I’m gonna use for the payment could be used for so many other, more fun things but being an adult sometimes means you gotta put away the fun.

I had the last two weeks off since I took an extra week from my vacation days and added that onto the company supplied week off. My plan was to do a combination of productive and lazy days and that’s exactly what I did.

On some days, I did adult things like clean my apartment, put stuff in storage, and fight the ants. On other days, I slept in until noon, ate food, and played video games well into the early morning. I got lots of sleep and there were days I wanted to get up early but my body just told me to keep sleeping until noon.

I also saw my parents and my niece quite a bit over the last two weeks which is so precious and special to me. My niece is three years-old now and I think she is finally understanding the concept of what an uncle is. The last two times I saw my niece, I helped her play with Play-Doh, which is her current focus in terms of play and toys.

I also tried making chicken piccata again. This is my favourite thing to order from Cheesecake Factory. A few years ago, I tried making this at home and I did not come very close to replicating it. It was terrible to be honest. This time around, I used a new recipe and it led to a huge improvement. It’s still not close to how Cheesecake Factory makes it but I got a lot closer. It’s easy to make and compared to some meal kit dinners, it’s much less complicated and takes less time. I’ll continue to refine my technique.

Alas, the break is now over and tomorrow is the first day back at work for the new year. Part of me regrets not taking another week off after the break, as some of my co-workers have done. My hope is that the first week back will be fairly low-key and low-stress as people like me who are returning are trying to shake off the cobwebs and some won’t be back yet. I can’t say I’m expecting myself to be too productive this week and I’m glad it’s a short week anyways.