I thought I knew what to expect finan­cially in own­ing a home. I was ready for mort­gage pay­ments, lawyers fees, gas bills, title insur­ance, land trans­fer tax (which is a sep­a­rate pay­ment from the name change fee), and any other ran­dom thing that may cost me money.

What I wasn’t ready for was the rapa­cious urge to pur­chase things. Things that cover win­dows, things that illu­mi­nate the cor­ners of rooms. Things that go in houses, things that look nice. Things to play, things that orga­nize other things.

So I spent some money. Got the living/dining room and two bed­rooms pro­fes­sion­ally painted. Bought a 53″ Widescreen HDTV Projection TV. Of course, I needed a pro­gres­sive scan DVD player to go with it (as well as com­pos­ite cables for that and the Gamecube, which cost more than the DVD player itself). I even bought four games — Paper Mario, Viewtiful Joe 2, Timesplitters: Future Perfect, and Pikmin 2 — so that I could take advan­tage of widescreen and pro­gres­sive scan sup­port. There were also a few costly trips to Ikea, Homesense, Home Depot for things like tables, bowls, king sized pil­lows, and Egyptian cot­ton pillowcases.

I’m in debt for the first (and hope­fully last) time in my life. I was up to seven grand at one point, but the smaller part of it (all on credit cards) was paid-off with the help of my last pay­cheque, and the larger half hap­pens to be interest-free. I have to men­tion, though, that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of what’s left has been reduced, to the gen­eros­ity of my par­ents. $2000 of it was towards a set of custom-sized mir­rored closet doors to be installed in my room and in the coat closet, and they decided to pay for them as a house­warm­ing gift. Pat also got me a bar­be­cue that fits per­fectly on my back patio, along with cover, cook­ing uten­sils, and wire-string brush.

My goal is to pay off the debt as soon as I can, and start putting 10% of my pay into a high-interest sav­ings account. I’d also like to save 2% of my annual salary for house repairs and upkeep, while look­ing into higher RRSP con­tri­bu­tions and pos­si­bly an extra mort­gage pay­ment by the end of the year.

This’ll be hard, how­ever, because I’m itch­ing for a new com­puter. I admit that I couldn’t help but take advan­tage of a great deal on Dell’s 19″ view­able flat panel mon­i­tors, so I bought two. Unfortunately, with a lap­top, I can only use one for the time being. I’ve been look­ing at the new P4 Extreme Edition proces­sors, which are dual core with hyper-threading on each that can sim­u­late four proces­sors. I’m try­ing to wait until the price drops a bit, see­ing as how one of these costs as much as an entire new sys­tem. Normally I wouldn’t even con­sider spend­ing so much on a CPU, but I can eas­ily jus­tify it with all the video encod­ing and photo manip­u­la­tion I’ve been doing lately. I’ll prob­a­bly be able to afford one by the time they become rea­son­ably priced.

So this is where I live now: an attached con­do­minium town­house. My unit is sec­ond from the right, and goes under­ground. The white win­dows fac­ing out on the main floor are part of the break­fast nook. There are still boxes every­where though, and it’ll take at least half a month to get every­thing cleared out.

It feels good to wake up in my own house, and as such, I now have to ful­fill all the promises I made to myself on the sat­is­fac­tion of such a condition.

• I promise to floss every day.
• I promise to vac­uum more often than I did before (how non-committal of me).
• I promise to smoke less weed.
• I promise to stop pour­ing cook­ing grease down the drain.
• I promise to film Dolly run­ning her fat ass up the stairs (she never expe­ri­enced stairs until I moved).
• I promise to walk more often than I ride the bus.
• I promise to get my finances in order, which involves enter­ing all my incomes and expenses into Quicken XG then set­ting up (vir­tual) sav­ings accounts for retirement/emergency/pleasure spending.
• I promise to keep my room spotless.
• I promise to read more than I watch movies.