So I set a goal for myself at the beginning of 2007 – that goal was to be debt free except the house by the end of the year.  (Yeah – I drank the Dave Ramsey kool-aid…well, mostly at least…)  After the first few months, I figured out how to trim my expenses even more and figured out that I could actually pay off my student loans by my birthday (end of September).  At the end of 2006, I paid off all credit cards and any other foolishness I had – so I only have 3 “debt” items laying around these days: student loans (~$15K total), 1st mortgage, and 2nd mortgage.

I’m on track to pay off my student loans by the end of September, but it’s really tempting to pay off the 2nd mortgage first.  Both are about the same amount (second mortgage is a few thousand higher, but that just means waiting a month or so to pay it off if I chose that route), but the interest rate on my student loan is 4.25% while the second mortgage is at 8.25%.  Because of that (and the terms around each loan), my student loan payment is $125 a month and my 2nd mortgage is $190…so paying it off first would free up $190 instead of only $125.

But here’s the catch (and the reason I’ll probably still pay off the student loans first) – in a worst case scenario, I could probably sell the house and at least break even (if not, I wouldn’t owe much).  In that case, both mortgages would be taken care of, but the student loan will still be there. No matter what happens (practically…there are a few legal things that I’m going to ignore), I’m stuck with the student loan for up to 14 more years (the remaining length of the loan).  It seems really risky to me to pay off the second mortgage before the student loans.

Realistically, my plan would be to pay off the student loans first (just to have them out of the way), buy some new camera equipment (as a celebration type thing…and because I “need” it…), fill up the 5K for Roth IRA 2008, then focus on knocking out my 2nd mortgage as quickly as possible.  If raises go as usual next year at work, I can probably expect I would have the income to do all of the above between now and Jan 1 2009.  It’s just a question of what else will happen between now and then.

Anyway – I’m 80% sure I’m going to go ahead and pay off the student loans as planned, but it’s still a hard choice because of the interest rates (and the fact that I could invest it and do decently as well).  But when it comes down to it, I’ve really liked not having credit card payments and it feels great not to be paying on my everyday items anymore.  I can only imagine what it will feel like to have the house paid off one day…  The really amazing thing is that it’s not that hard – oh, it’s hard, but not that hard.  At the very least, it’s been interesting having to make all these choices now that I have a “real world” income.

So I’ve had a copy of Windows XP Professional x64 for quite a while – I never bothered to install it because all of my machines, except one, are 32-bit only.  My main desktop has an older Athlon 64 (3500+) processor, but I recently bumped up the RAM to 3GB for some photography and development work – so I decided it was time to give the 64-bit world a try.  I’m not sure why exactly, but after about 2 weeks of running x64, my machine is still blazing fast.  With XP Pro 32-bit, my machine was really taking a while to startup and would get bogged down quite easily.  I’m sure I have less software installed on the machine now, but I have my main applications installed now and things are quite nice.

I was a bit worried that some of my hardware wouldn’t be supported under a 64-bit Windows OS (which is one reason I haven’t been in a hurry to jump on the Vista bandwagon…I know there is 32-bit Vista, but if I have a 64-bit machine, I’m running a 64-bit OS…).  Anyway – the experience of getting things up and running was really quite nice.  Some applications went and installed just fine without any modification at all.  Others did require that I download a 64-bit version of the installer (as the 32-bit installer refused to run at all), but this was pretty painless.  Even my Brother multi-function laser printer and my Garmin Legend C GPS device had 64-bit compatible drivers, which was pretty surprising.  Interestingly enough, the only application I’ve really had trouble with is Apple’s iTunes.  I have the latest version of the software and the install process went fine, but when it came time to sync my iPod, I got all sorts of errors.  I ended up “restoring” (i.e. reformatting basically) my iPod 3 times, disabling all syncing except music, and rebooting a few times…now things “work”.  I still get funky error messages every once in a while, but my music plays on the PC and my iPod appears to have my music again.  I noticed that Apple has a page saying 64-bit Windows (XP Pro and Vista) aren’t actually supported by iTunes at this time – which is kinda funny because now I’m seeing quite a few posts from iBroke iPhone owners that are upset that they can’t sync the iPhone since they run 64-bit OSes.

Anyway, I thought I would post my base application list in case anyone else is curious about what works in the 64-bit world:

• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v1.1
• Microsoft Office 2003
• Visual Studio 2005
• Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (* 64-bit installer required)
• Garmin City Navigator v7 (* after 64-bit driver download for GPS unit)
• Quicken 2006 Home and Business
• Microsoft ActiveSync
• Apple Safari (Beta 3)
• Alcohol 52%
• Mozilla Firefox