Financial Freedumb and Brownie

In my post about DVDs being a waste of money, I said I would write about my luxuries, so you can criticize away…so here it is, my list of luxuries. Be nice.

- My dog. Some would argue that an animal companion is a luxury and not a necessity, but I’ll man up and say it, I love my dog.

- My camera. I like photography. I have a Nikon D70 and bunch of lenses. Nothing pro-caliber yet, but I may be considering a Nikon VR 70-200 lens in the near future.

- I like to eat out. We’re not talking Morton’s Steak House now, more like Subway and McD. I eat out, on average, 3 times a week. I work from home, so being couped up all day by myself is not that fun. I love ice cream too.

- I drive a truck, but I put on about 500 miles a month plus with the dog, a truck is just much easier for both of us, and I use premium gas in my truck.

- I love computers and other techy stuff. I have a DVR (similar to Tivo) and I have a notebook as my primary workstation. I am planning to buy a new notebook when Microsoft Vista comes out. Of course I may wait a couple of months until all the press has died down. I also have a High-Def TV, but it’s not the super fancy DLP 62″ projection TV, it’s just a 34″ CRT. It has a great feature set for the price, and the picture quality is great! I did want to get a DLP projection TV though.

- I own a Sony PS2, and I am considering purchasing a Sony PS3. But for ~$600 just for the console, I’m having serious second thoughts. I usually find myself playing games on the computer if anything anyway. And even that has become an extremely rare occurence. I used to play online games which costed around $13/month, but I stopped that last year. It just takes too much time, and you get no return! A horrible investment.

- I subscribe to Blockbuster.com.

That’s all that I can think of right now…I’ll post more as I find them. Somethings I didn’t write, I consider necessities…like the cell phone and broadband. I would consider myself a fairly non-luxurious person…Although I am considering buying some high thread count sheets, I probably never will. So criticize away! Maybe I should figure out how much these luxuries are costing me in the future…And maybe I should write a list of crap I just don’t need.

Didn’t I say this whole idea of getting pre-qualified is going to get me in trouble? I don’t want to buy a house for a year, yet I’m already looking. Okay, well not really, but I got this “oh so tempting” listing for a great house in a great neighborhood at a VERY good price. So good I had to take a look. Well, like the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This house was on a big hill. BIG hill with lots of trees and rocks above it. Uhhh, no thanks. The last thing I need is a rock fall problem. So it got me thinking, with my current income, what kind of house do I really want?

I wrote a while back on my dream life. Some of it was dreamy and some more realistic….Realistic because it’s sort of within my means…You know? A dream life would be making millions of dollars through passive income and having two huge mansions one in Hawaii and one in Whistler. Okay, make that 3…one in Vegas too .

Right now it’s just me and my dog. But looking forward, waaaaaay forward, I would like something for a family as well. I would also like to be able to generate some passive income while living there. So here’s my dream realistic house:

~ 5000-10000 sqft lot size
~ 1200-1500 sqft living space
- A decent sized yard, with a portion fenced off for Brownie to run around.
- Early mail delivery. Yes, I like having my mail delivered early!
- Hands free faucet in the kitchen.
- Target price of around $500-650K
- Off major streets
- Level lot
- 2 car garage
- Fairly up to date electrical system, if not then the ability to upgrade easily.
- 10′ ceilings
- 4 Bedrooms (Maybe a split, two level house, so I can rent one and live in another)
- Wired for CAT 6E. I’m pretty sure this is something I’ll have to setup myself.
- I would like a location about 15 mins from town.
- Friendly neighbors…who wouldn’t want that!
- Decent amount of street parking
- Breezy and cool location
- Fairly close to freeway

Is that asking for too much? By the way, can you tell where I live?

I live on Oahu, in the state of Hawaii. I guess it’s kind of important to know that since I could probably get a lot more house somewhere else. Yeah, housing is expensive here. The cost of living in such a beautiful state I guess.