Having lived in a succession of apartments and condos for the last ten years it’s been almost exactly a decade since I’ve been a homeowner. Apparently, it was just long enough to forget about some of the irritations and pitfalls associated with owning a single-family dwelling.

We moved into our new home around mid-November. As soon as the mercury dipped close to zero degree we noticed the temperature in our lower level of the house was getting all the way down into the high 40’s at night. We had an HVAC technician out to diagnose the problem and discovered the furnace was on its last leg. Heat is kind of important in Minnesota.

Since then we’ve replaced -- the furnace, the air conditioner unit, we’ve had a plumbing leak (that the previous owners appear to have tried to hide) that required us to open up the ceiling in the lower level bathroom, and the hot water heater is nearly ready to give up the ghost. Also, the clothes washer the previous owner left us was harboring a mold super-colony (it was a 2009 Samsung). We didn’t discover this until we washed our first load of clothes.

The home inspector we hired missed all of those aforementioned problems.

Now there are two ways to look at it. One would be to get extremely pissed about it and declare life to be utterly unfair. The other is to consider it an investment (albeit an unusually large and unplanned one). Since victimhood-mentality isn’t my jam I chose the latter. At least we know all of the mechanicals of the home are solid now and will be for years to come. I intend to step into 2025 on a positive note.

So far the peace and quiet of our new home have worked wonders for my writing. My muse has been on overdrive this last month, I haven't written this much and this well since I was in my thirties. To me this makes it all worthwhile.

Satisfying My Inner Nerd

Speaking of positives, my brother is in the HVAC field and bought us the Ecobee Premium smart thermostat for a house-warming gift (pun very much intended) and Christmas.

This thing is a marvel. It delights my inner nerd. The Ecobee connects to Apple’s HomeKit and uses AI to learn your routines/preferences and adjusts settings accordingly to maximize energy savings. The thing that really sets the Ecobee Premium apart from its competition is the secondary wireless sensor that you can place anywhere in the house to help balance out the hot/cold spots in your home.

I installed a second-gen Nest smart thermostat in my old home in 2012 and it saved us a boatload of money on energy costs, most months we saved 20%. I expect even more savings from the Ecobee because it’s packed with even more features. I’ll report back after a couple of months about the real savings we notice on our energy bills.

Letting the Credit Card Companies Enrich You

For years I’ve used credit cards with rewards programs like debit cards and paid off the balances at the end of each month. If you’re disciplined it’s a fairly easy way to earn significant rewards – cashback, travel points, and gift cards. A couple of days ago I decided I’m going to use my cash back at the end of each month to buy Bitcoin. I really believe that over the next ten years Bitcoin doing this consistently will be the best investment and a hedge against the Fed’s addiction to printing dollars.

Yes Bitcoin will have its ups and downs but, in the larger picture, it’ll statistically never be cheaper than it is now. I set up a dedicated wallet so I can keep track of my progress. This should be an interesting experiment and it’s a method of dollar cost averaging nearly anyone with a rewards card could do. As an added bonus it feels good to be profiting off of these huge credit card companies instead of the other way around.