Last week I experienced some crazy ass car trouble, all from a tire rotation. You see, I finally decided to rotate the tires on the beater Hyundai. Now this is my cheap to purchase, cheap to maintain, look dead sexy while driving car. Unfortunately, rather than rotating the tires every 5,000 miles or so, like the manual recommends, I let it go almost 15,000 miles. Yeah, I know. Let the flaming begin!

This past weekend I finally decided to get off my butt, go out into the sweltering summer heat of my garage, and do the dang rotation. Yes…because I’m too cheap to pay the $20 a local shop will charge. Well, that and I wanted to time myself and see if I could knock it out in under 30 minutes – mission accomplished by the way.  BOOYAAA!

Anyways, after 30 minutes of summer sweating glory, I completed the rotation and patted myself on the back, thinking “You just saved $20 Shaun… good damn job”. Meanwhile, the Mrs. decided to take the Hyundai to pick up my son. Upon returning she made a passing comment to me that the car didn’t feel or sound right while driving. I decided to take it for a spin.

Holy hell! She wasn’t kidding, something definitely wasn’t right. Every bump felt like a sledgehammer right in the culo. There was absolutely no give in the suspension. I’m pretty sure my spine compressed and I’m probably an inch shorter after that drive.

Hello all !! Before I start this blog post I want to point out that I’ve added a loan repayment tool in the Free Tools section of the site. This tool is different than many in that it’ll let you define a constant extra payment every month, or you can go to the amortization table and enter a single extra payment on any given month. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people that revolved around, “how would a single $1,000 extra principal payment (tax refund) affect my loan in the long run?” This tool will tell you. For example, in the case of a $200,000 loan at 4%, an extra $1,000 in the first month would shorten the loan by 3 months and reduce total interest by almost $2,300. Feel free to check it out.

Now on to today’s topic. It’s been an extremely busy summer so far. With multiple travels for work, kids sporting schedules, and somehow fitting a family vacation into all of that, It's been very hard to maintain track of financial goals, make progress on investing studies, read (I try to read a book a month), or even write blog posts. Fortunately, I spent this last week in Lake Tahoe, getting a little rest from the working / responsibility world. This was our first trip to Tahoe and to say it was beautiful was an understatement.

The crisp cool air, blue water, and smells of pine made for the ultimate relaxing getaway. Spending this kind of quality time with the family is more than worth the expense, and it reminded me why I'm striving so hard, and am so motivated to reach financial independence.

We hiked to Eagle Lake, which was probably my favorite part of the trip. Although my knees felt like they were going to explode by the time we got back. Yes, apparently I've got the knees of an 80 year old. Look at that picture!