If you just want a bigger deduction, you can borrow against the existing equity in your home. Just make sure that you expect an after tax return on the money you take out that is greater than the after tax cost of the loan. As for the optimum house cost, there is no easy answer. It depends on a lot of things. If you are someone that spends a lot of time at home, it's probably worth more. If you and your family are rarely there, you should spend less. Once you are getting the core financial things taken care of - adequate retirement savings, college savings, emergency reserves, and savings for expected major future expenses, I think you should do whatever you want with the rest of your money. If having a more expensive house is worth more to you than having better cars, better vacations, better stuff, more money saved, or whatever else you'd do with the money, then get a more expensive house. Personally, I find that people that underspend on houses, cars, and stuff, tend to be happier because they are less stressed about money.

Morning ladies : ) As I reread my post from last night, I see so many shorthand phrasings and mistakes...please forgive my exhausted, birthday-cake-addled typing/speech : ) Then I had a migraine last night and I'm still recovering, so I may not be entirely polished and coherent yet, but there's so much to respond to...because MAN, this is an incredible thread. There are still things from before my last reply that I wanted to address, including first off a bit about why sub teaching is out of the question...our school district has gone through a huge layoff/budget reduction process this past summer, extremely traumatic and publicized. We've now got class sizes about twice the size of those that the Chicago teachers were posting as being unworkably high. Things are really bad here. In fact the largest part of my summer, which I had planned to devote to learning Spanish and finishing the house, suddenly went to helping to develop a parent/teacher alliance dedicated to dealing with the budget situation in a more intelligent, less damaging manner. Literally hundreds of teachers were laid off (and they didn't have to be--long story). So there are lots of teachers wandering around trying to find anything they can... judith, I agree with you -- the organization of this thing is extremely weird. What's happening is that the for-profit online institution (not a U. of Phoenix kind of thing--an outgrowth of a well-established 'real' university) that the 'observer' is attending is in another state, so they have had to arrange observations for the practica of students who don't have teaching posts at the moment. She doesn't have a teaching post, so the school called our organization and asked if she could 'use' our classes, with no coordination of pedagogy, no recognition of onsite supervision necessary, no nothing... My background as it relates to observations/internships: I've not only created pre-service training for adult literacy teachers, and supervised *well-thought-through* internships with plenty of communication going both ways, I've also been trained and have trained current literacy professionals in educational ethnographic observation, which this person is *not* doing. (my supervisor now doesn't even know what ethnography is) IOW, I know enough to know that everything is wrong with this lazily-constructed excuse for an observation class. running, that must have been a really striking course of events for you all. Very frustrating to order more food than turns out to be needed, I imagine! I do think it would (have been) totally fair for my supervisor to share some of the payment with me in recognition for *any possible* extra bother it might be, and that that's what I definitely would have done in her place. On a different level, wrt starting a program of my own, I'm sure that other teachers will recognize this phenomenon: the *students* have been much more generous in their recognition of my work than my millionaire supervisor has. I'm talking *amazingly delicious* labor-intensive food made and given to me for our family, large and frequent offerings of frozen home-raised, grass-fed beef, a Visa gift card, handmade craft gifts, even clothing that people have bought in styles of their country of origin...I am embarrassed to accept them because it's more than some of the families can comfortably afford--but I try to be gracious and recognize the emotions and appreciation behind them. These are folks who sometimes can't come to class because they ran out of gas and they can't afford either busfare, or to refill the tank, until the next payday. So if I do start my own literacy program, I would never be able to charge a cash fee to the learners, because I don't think that they value something less if it's free -- folks who have to scrape by, overworking in order just to have enough money to survive, recognize that we all need to help each other as much as possible, and just because something isn't tied to money doesn't mean it's worthless. And in ref. to your basic point, that I should just tell the supervisor that the 'observation' needs to stop: that's *exactly* what I decided to do this morning, rather than offer to help facilitate it, etc...I just woke up with the thought that 'this is not my issue and I don't want to expend any more energy on it -- it just has to stop because it's negatively affecting the class." I didn't say all of that in my e-mail, but rather pretty much exactly what you said, nothing more, and not with any personal or negative tone at all. We'll see what happens, but it's definitely proceeding from a solid, love-based foundation of what's best for the class, so I stand by it. And stinky, you know you never need to worry about hijacking! Like golddust, I think that threads really begin to live when they veer off into new directions and take on new energy, so feel free! It's so interesting to see how different people price their garage/estate sales -- some folks have an "I just want to get rid of it and avoid 10 trips to Goodwill" attitude, and others want to wring every last possible cent from their stuff, even if it means they sell much less. I'm a person who doesn't like to haggle too much, so if something is priced insanely highly, I'm not going to bother to counteroffer, because of the negative energy..not worth it to me, even if the sellers say "make me an offer". eh. It's all psychology, isn't it! *Now* for my day-after-birthday indulgence, since yesterday was so crazy: a trip to Benjamin Moore for some paint samples (Covington Blue is looking like an early leader) for my file cabinets, and a nice long swim session at our lovely neighborhood pool : ) Swim off all that stress...which reminds me, oakley, that was an incredibly powerful story you shared about the effects of job stress on you. I'm glad it didn't have any worse outcome. We have to remember what's most important, even if some forces would like us to forget... I've said it before, but you all are completely amazing.

That's a great web site. So much good information on it. I hadn't realized how low the lower end of the the price range was. That's likely because, over the years, I've drooled over the higher end ones but couldn't justify new one to myself because I wasn't sewing enough. I've got a about 40 year old Singer and a 25 yo White that I got because it has free arm and stretch stitches (haven't used it much). As far as my MIL's old machine, both her grandson and son worked on it (read: took it all apart) after general checking for lint, stuck thread, lubrication, etc. and decided something inside was bent and it wasn't worth fixing. Don't ask me how they know that since neither has worked on sewing machines before but, hey, they are her grandson and son so she trusts their opinions. She seems fine with the idea of a new one. I didn't get a chance to talk to her about what she'd like in a new one but I will during holidays. Don't think any of my 3 SILs sew but maybe mom can seek opinions of her new neighbors (moved into a condo in another town in May when my FIL was diagnosed with terminal illness). Thanks for your help and I'll let you know what she decides on.

sweeby congrats on bonds issue resolved. how nice of EX! never heard of such tradition wiht T-shirts. my DD's school didn't have that, sounds fun. DD applied to 6 schools and got accepted to 5(6th one was the best choice but they wanted her to write some additional essay and she didn't bother, yeah typical). I cannot believe she finished her 2nd year already. KKNY not to hijack but do you know where DD will go? congrats on her graduation