I wanted to say thanks to everyone who weighed in on our "should we take out a home equity loan" question. We still have a couple of loose ends to figure out, and we're still not sure whether we will do it or not, but progress has been made.

*Instead of spending $12,000 on two cars, we are limiting ourselves to $8000 or so, which is what we'll have in cash after selling the 06 Outback. So, we decided we should get two older Outbacks instead of one Outback and a minivan. Then we avoid having to dig into any sort of loan for the cars, and own both outright. And save the car payment each month, which helps our bottom line.

*We looked up Consumer Reports Best Buy for a riding lawn mower and will be getting that one. Regardless, tractor or not, we need a riding lawn mower to do the area around the house, dh says (because the tractor will tear up the soft ground). We can put this on our Home Depot CC which will give us six months to pay it with no interest, then we will schedule payments to that card to pay it off before that time is up. Without the car payment we should be able to do this as it's around the same amount.

*We then have our tax return refund. With this we will pay someone to do the grading and driveway work. We will spend the rest on a hot water heater and any left over will hang around as part of our emergency fund (for the washer/dryer when they go, or anything else).

So - we get our needs met and we don't get into much more debt (just the riding mower). Whew. Before we were thinking we "had" to do the refi/HEL just to get the needs met, yk?

There is still a debate at our house over whether it makes sense to finance the CC debt, a tractor, AND the shell of the addition to our house, now instead of later. For around the same price we're paying on the CC now we could have all those things taken care of.

However the cool thing is that our friend who lives nearby, really IS getting a brand-new tractor (they own their land and live way off grid with a long and awful road to their house - they definitely need a tractor more than we do, to maintain access to their house year-round). He's a really generous type of person who would not hesitate to haul his tractor over here and help us with land maintenance. So that could get us by this year, as far as all the summer work we wanted to do like brush hogging and clearing.

If we get the driveway work done, we are more likely to get the person up the road to be willing to plow our driveway. We heard that the reason he won't take us on as customers is that our driveway is a PITA. :vent: If we fix what's wrong with it, we can just pay him to plow it next winter. We can also save up money over the summer and buy an ATV with a plow on it for next winter (for that pesky snow removal, Val ;) ).

I'd like to see if we can make a dent in the CC debt ourselves, this year. I think we really can. If we can't, or if next year the need for a tractor and that addition becomes painfully obvious, we can always refi next year and get those things done - and yes then we'll be putting *mostly* home improvement type things on the house (the tractor would be $10-15,000 and would definitely add that to the value of the house, plus you can always sell them for what you paid for them!, the addition would cost $30k and easily add $70k to the value of the house, we are DIYing it), but we would also be rolling the CC debt into it. I think I'd feel better if we paid off as much of the CC as we can, first, yk? I'd rather roll as little of that into the house as possible.

Okay so that's my new plan. ;) Much thriftier. ;) Dh doesn't get his big tractor this year...but I think he is okay with that now. :D We might still do the HEL or refi this year, but if we do, it's from a place where our eyes are completely open, and from a place where we know we can get the basic needs met *without* doing it - so it's not from "oh crap we have to get this stuff and NEED to take out a loan." It would be "okay, we are choosing to finance a tractor and an addition to improve our house, and it fits into our budget this way." But still, as I said, I think we are NOT going to do it!

Your new plan seems much thriftier. Good job!

I imagine the details will fall into place now.

Thanks. Gosh, working this stuff out within a marriage is freaking hard work. :P It took a lot of hours of listening, talking, and plugging in numbers...we're still plugging in numbers and may get an architectural consult on the cost of the addition and basement-drying work (the grading/driveway would be one thing, but if that doesn't dry the basement we need to dig a trench around the house and put in pipe and gravel for drainage - aka French drains). But realistically next spring is a better time to plan for the tractor and addition. I am aiming that by then my income will be steady enough for us to feel confident in adding to our monthly mortgage/house payment.

Matt and I discussed a lot of deep things about our relationship to money, especially how we both grew up in middle class families aspiring to be upper middle class...well in my case, my parents' grandparents landed in Brooklyn from Italy, Poland and Germany around the turn of the century, and it was a huge deal for my parents to go to college despite how smart they were. Then the goal was for me to go to college *and* get an upper middle class professional job, like doctor or lawyer. That was the implied promise when they paid for my college, yk?

For Matt it's a bit different - his mother's family is old Baltimore money, for the most part, but didn't have much left of the family fortune. He grew up in projects in California for a while and then suburban Maryland, and his mother had upper class tastes and values but never made much money. But he got a good education thanks to his great-grandmother's inheritance.

In both cases our parents are very materialistic and imparted to us a sense of entitlement - we should be able to buy whatever we want, when we want it. I know we have consciously struggled to overcome this, but it still sneaks in, in very odd ways and in different guises so it can be hard to really see it.

But we are getting better...discussing and opening up about these issues and even just realizing what is coming into play behind it all, helps so much.