u/Medical_Grapefruit94

I’ll try and be concise but there are a number of factors involved in this decision.

- 29 and married with 2 kids, another on the way.
- Cash & Investments: $280k. $50k retirement, $15k cash, the rest in brokerage
- No debt on the cars, student loans paid off.
- $290k left on the mortgage at a 6.4% 10/1 arm. Still 8.5 years in the fixed rate.
- Home is worth about $550k
- Wife doesn’t work and stays with the kids
- Salary Job: $80k + Bonus. Being fast tracked to C suite and I expect this to increase quickly.
- Side Hustle: $80k. This could continue to increase substantially, or I could lose clients, you never know…
- Our total living expenses is around $4,300 per month, total income after taxes and payroll deductions for insurance is about $10k.
- Inheritance: My folks are healthy and in their 60’s, but there will be many millions coming my way. I obviously am not banking on it, but I don’t really think my sunset years will be difficult financially.

I want to prepare for an early retirement, 50 at the latest. Should I pay down that mortgage aggressively or continue to put money in investments. Both? 6.4% on my money isn’t a bad gig, but I’m doing better than that in the market. I like the idea of not having a mortgage, but kind of feel like I’m throwing my money away when I make double mortgage payments (I know that’s silly)

I always think everything is going to go to shit, lose my job, lose my clients, market goes to 0. I know it’s not, but setting us up to weather a storm and be self sufficient ASAP seems really nice, just not sure if paying the mortgage down accomplishes that.

Can someone please explain why the Amazon connection STILL is horrible?

I have ongoing issues with my dual laptop setup. One is a MacBook Pro that works with every setup I’ve tried, the other is a MSI Creator Studio A16.

I bounce between my home office and work office, so both laptops are moving with me pretty often. At work, I just have a usbc monitor and since I’m not there much, I just switch usbc cables and it’s fine.

At home, I’m a little more between both laptops all day. I don’t want a ton of connectors since I’m always moving. The MSI is giving me MAJOR problems. It seems like the single usbc port I have is picky what power it takes. It’s also picky on video feed. So far every kvm I have tried doesn’t supply the power it needs, and has video issues / video completely doesn’t work. Any ideas?

Edit: the MSI works flawlessly with the dell usbc monitor…. It seems like it’s KVM that’s messing me up

I am a salaried employee and have a marketing business. I like the categories and how easy it is for my to categorize and exclude my reimbursable W2 expenses.

For the marketing business, I categorize normal expense stuff like internet, phone, etc. but I pay out a couple thousand to independent contractors each month. These are fixed costs and it’s currently baked into my budget. I don’t love seeing my total budget way higher than it would otherwise be. Is there a better way to do this like setting it to an excluded spending category?

Also, what since I’ve got income coming from all over the place, do you guys categorize income? Or just count it as income.