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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
The tightrope of whether you're Caleb and you're you're landing in your first house or
you're me and you're getting rid of your kind of the house you grew the kids in.
Um all of those things have a lot of dynamic emotions in them.
They have a lot of dynamic opportunities, but they're all stepping stones to the next
place in life.
Welcome to the Up Your Average Podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to
level up your life.
So buckle up.
And listen closely to up your av.
Good morning, Caleb.
Good morning.
It's a big day today at Gimbal World Headquarters.
Yeah.
We've got Carmel on Canvas going on and the headquarters building here is the target of
some plain air painters.
I love it.
I don't even know if I've ever heard of that before today.
So that's gonna be fun.
We'll Yeah.
We will have a picture of Gimbal this time next week.
I don't know where where we're gonna put it, but it'll be fun.
That will be.
Maybe right there.
Oh between the windows.
Nice.
Nice.
Well, if you uh are in the Carmel area and you've got time this weekend, it's Artemobilia.
It'll be a fun time to walk around and check out all the hot rods and fancy cars from all
over the world.
I love it.
Have you been here before for that?
I have not.
I was thinking uh maybe coming coming by tomorrow.
I've seen pictures and it looks really, really sweet.
I think it's gonna be spectacular.
Yeah, I think it'll be a fun time.
Hopefully I can get over it for a bit.
I may not be able to make it because we put our house on the market and we are sellers of
a house now versus buyers of a house.
And I thought that's what we would talk about.
You are recently buyers of a house.
Yeah.
And we've got like a tug-of-war going on.
And I titled today's um conversation.
Then, now and home.
And that was my thought was when I was kind of in your situation back then, and we were
looking for a house.
What was it I was interested in?
And then we moved up to more of a dream house a few years later.
And now we are in the process of uh letting that house become somebody else's.
And so that
process of the evolution of a house, the process of evolution of your mindset, and even
specifically what is a home.
And w you and I had talked about this diagram before, um kind of the starter home.
Tell tell me what it was like for you and Judah as you guys were thinking about a starter
home, the the variables you were looking at, the possibilities, the longevity, all those
things.
Well I I think the
Uh first thing we looked into was the loc location.
I mean in real estate, I think the saying is location, location, location.
so that was a big determinant of at least where we wanted to look for a home.
And we looked at a couple of different homes, in Noblesville and Arcadia, Cicero, and
didn't love any of them for the price that they were asking for it.
Uh some of them were asking a decent amount, but had a bunch of work that needed done to
it, which I'm not opposed to doing work, but uh I'll need a little bit of a discount for
that.
and I think part of it is thinking back on it.
I've pretty much been moving from your house to a dorm back to your house.
Back to a dorm, back to your house, go into an apartment in Murray, and then uh moving in
with my in-laws for the last year and a half.
So I haven't really felt like I've had a place to settle down because all of those were
three months, six months.
I think the longest was a year and a half.
Uh so we were looking for somewhere that we could settle down for the next five, ten years
at least, and uh feel like we can.
make an area of it, make a home and just be well that that is the language that I used to
uh put this kind of presentation together is it um i i it was uh then now and a home and i
think when i was buying a starter house i would have called it a starter home and then the
evolution of
how much space and what do you need.
And I don't know that I got into when I was your age the real needs of what I needed at
that point.
Um I just had this concept of a building that maybe I would have that I would call a house
and probably even became began calling it a home.
And I think I think that word attaching it to the building is kind of marketing that's
happened by the home building
uh industry and so calling it a house has been really helpful for me to kind of be
objective about what are our needs.
And clearly the needs of thirty year old Keith and sixty five year old Keith are
completely different, right?
Yeah.
And so so that's why this diagram kind of came to be that you first you have your starter
house that's just kind of the one you drew when you're in grade school.
And then one day it just
pops up that, hey, I'd like something a little bit bigger.
And probably with that bigger comes more bells and whistles inside the building.
And then where mom and I are is we just are at the taking that big size house and and kind
of carving off a a good amount of it, maybe close to what we started at, uh square
footage.
But time will tell where we end up with that.
But it it's a process
I think was helped kind of hammered into my thought process by my parents and my uncle
having a house that they'd accumulated all those things in and not really ever deciding
what to do with Yeah.
What do you think about that process?
The process of going through other people's stuff.
Right.
Uh I don't love it.
I dunno
Luckily have to do a bunch of it with uh Uncle Bill.
I went a couple of times with you.
And then uh thanks to you and mom, it doesn't seem like we'll have to do it much with you
guys either.
You're going through that process right now and cleaning things up and uh going through
what you wanna keep, belongings, uh memorabilia, just safekeepings and stuff.
You're going through that now rather than
Maybe never.
Yeah, that's what when it was never and and I was um tasked with the opportunity to go
through that stuff.
I've I mean it was it was like a scavenger hunt, right?
Like to go through other people's stuff, but not particularly how you might choose a
weekend activity.
And we we spent a good number of days um doing that for both of them.
Bill Bryson is an author and I I've enjoyed
some of his writings and he wrote a book in 2010 called At Home A Short History of Private
Life.
And that book talks about the development of what a house looks like.
Like uh at one point it was basically called a hall, I believe.
Like it was just a building but a long hall in it.
And then then people started subdividing the building into things.
So like maybe
Native Americans would have a TP that was just a room and and that was pretty normal for a
house.
And the thing that really got me thinking about it was looking I I like to reflect on the
house that I grew up on because most of the time that we had we didn't spend in the house,
we spent outside the house.
So the size of the house wasn't as big a deal as the space that we had available.
And so like the first house that you lived in with us, we had a park right across the
street.
And so that expanded the space for our family.
Um and so w when I was looking at the evolution of places I've lived, I didn't put my dorm
room in it, but I th I would guess my dorm room I maybe had a hundred and fifty square
foot of my space, like if I split it in two.
So the
The evolution is the house I grew up in there was two hundred and twenty square foot per
person.
Then when we got to the house that you were born in, we had about five hundred and sixty
square foot per person and it evolved a little bigger to where we're at now.
But uh mom and I have twenty two hundred and fifty square foot per person now.
And so when you look at it at that kind of vantage point is how much space do you need to
do to do whatever you do, right?
Yeah.
No, it was I think I wrote down that r really only two things that I wanted in a house was
a little spot in the garage to be able to do projects or store my tools and then a spot in
the house where I can have my desk and uh do work or uh dig into the stock market at home.
Uh but those were really the two things that I wanted out of it.
Everything else
was just extra.
Uh but yeah.
It's been fascinating to me to watch houses develop over the years where they just in my
lifetime, so when an eleven hundred square foot house was pretty ordinary to just see how
big our first house was was unbelievable.
Like the the the kid, Keith, if I'd have walked up to the house, my first house, I was
like, Who are these rich people?
Right.
And just I think
the size of a house has grown probably fifty percent during my adult life.
And yeah and the the there's a phrase that say that kind of defines home as home is where
the heart is.
And what I think is the home is not the building, but it's the ra relationships that
involve eyes looking at you.
And so the home can happen any place.
It's it's where you are and
So often time what I think happens is the bigger the house is, the less time there is
actually to develop a home because people are out working to pay for the all the bells and
whistles and the mortgages and things like that for the house.
And so it's quite a tightrope to think through that whole decision grid.
For sure.
Yeah.
The marketing of it has been really
Thought provoking to me.
There's an old saying is to uh not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be
transformed by your thoughts.
And and the marketing has just helped people think they need more space and more space.
And with that more space, what also goes along with this more insurance, more utilities,
more stuff, more stuff.
And all of those things consume time, energy, and thoughts.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's uh I've definitely noticed that we haven't had our first utilities bill or
any of that yet.
But like we're at pretty much in an empty home, empty house.
We've got couple rooms with a couple pieces of furniture, but uh we have a big old bedroom
with just a bed and and bed frame, but
notice that we're gonna slowly start to uh accumulate stuff and get furniture and fill
that space, which takes time to find it, takes time to get the money to pay for it and uh
just effort fill in the space.
Well I'm I can tell you on the other end, when you're loading up your suburban to take it
to goodwill it doesn't take that much time.
I I dropped off.
I've been dropping off about a load a day at the Goodwill.
And I was just estimating yesterday how much was in the back like original cost was in the
back end of the suburban.
And I think there were fifty DVDs that we once bought.
Probably so those could be anywhere from twenty bucks.
Twenty bucks a piece, maybe down.
So maybe just in that might have been a thousand dollars just going to the goodwill and
And th what I was kind of thinking out loud is I'm like, I wonder how many weeks I worked
for everything that's in the back of this buggy.
'Cause it it was kind of mind boggling to to to see it.
And I'm not saying don't consume things.
I'm just saying that you'll be shocked at how quickly you consume things that their
livelihood goes behind you faster than you knew it.
Yeah.
the idea of the house and the home.
I was visiting my friend uh
Kathy, who's early nineties a few weeks ago, and she um was in assisted living and we we
were just chatting about her family and things and she's she said, It's nice here, but
it's not home, Keith.
And I said, Well, you know it really is, 'cause you've been telling me that your family
comes and visits you.
And if you can wrap your brain about around the idea that it's where your family visits
you or where you hang out with your family, is where your home is.
and not a building, it can help you be more objective and making decisions.
Maybe, maybe somebody that's watching will lose a job and they really love that house
they're in and they can't afford it anymore.
And and there's no reason to lock up your future based on where you once were living,
based on where your possibilities of tomorrow are.
And that's all I was trying to help my friend understand is that there's seasons in life
And those seasons don't have to be tied to a particular building.
Yeah.
And I think that mindset uh just builds contentment, just being content where you are.
And and historically, I don't talk about it a lot, but like economic history, there is the
opportunity that things shift and change very dramatically.
And so in the late nineteenth
People were making money hand over fist, and within five years later, they were losing
their houses, they were losing their farms, and they could have been just depressed and
just pessimistic about it, or they could have just said, okay, it's a new beginning.
And I read a book or two about the um the the planes with the dust basin and things like
that, and how people
Would get their minds locked in about thinking a certain way and they wouldn't be willing
to move.
And and that's just a dangerous mindset.
There's a uh a ten dollar word called mnemonic.
Are you familiar with that word?
Mnemonic is basically it's something that you tie a memory to to to help you remember
things.
Yeah.
So
probably you use mnemonics when you're studying for school to keep a list of things or or
such.
And and I think if you can tie mnemonics to a home versus a house that you can have fond
memories without a actually having to have the possession or the location.
And I I think of that during our early R V days where we loaded the whole family up in a
maybe a thirty five foot R V and left Indianapolis and made our way to Santa Monica and
back.
And we had these little pins.
I don't know if I've got one.
Yeah.
We we had these pins that said get your kicks or thanks for the kicks on Route Sixty Six
that we gave to people that helped us along the way.
And I recall being at the Malibu campsite, sitting up on top of the cliffs looking out
over the Pacific Ocean, and decided to walk up to the office and give the the lady run in
the office one reason.
Thank her for it.
And
And we were chatting about our time on the road and she said to me, she said, Keith, what
is in that box back in Indiana that you haven't had for the last three weeks that you need
in the box that's here in Malibu that you're missing?
And I really thought about it and the answer really was nothing.
Because everything that mattered to me was in the box that was in Malibu, right?
Yeah.
And and so
thinking about a house and and trying to prioritize really what matters, uh, probably is
worth a getaway weekend for like for you and Judah to get away and just chat.
What is it we really want in this house in the next decade or so?
And is there anything memory wise that we can't just leave behind?
Because if you get attached to the memories at a of a thing or a location, then you become
the prisoner of those things, I think.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
Let me see if I can find a note here.
Any thoughts come to mind for you with the house so far?
Um, I wrote down just a bunch of cost side of things that surprise me.
Uh just throughout the process.
Um
That I hadn't thought of before.
I think the utilities side of things versus when we were renting an apartment.
Uh we haven't paid our utilities bill, but I've heard other people talk about theirs for
their home and uh just know that that's gonna be drastic a lot more.
we touched about it earlier.
A bigger house means uh more things, more furniture to fill it.
Closing costs with the mortgage.
I had no clue what all went into a mortgage and all that.
And I still don't really know what all of those line items on the closing cost sheet are,
but uh they add up pretty quickly.
And um I wish I could tell you what they are, but I didn't even understand them.
Yeah.
Maybe somebody out there can help us understand them.
I think they're called profit margin.
em
I would just say maintenance.
We bought a new home, so there isn't much maintenance.
Um, but there are things you can be proactive with.
And we've already had a couple salesmen come up and one was a pest control um
Trying to sell us some pest control, and we live our backyard butts up to some cornfields,
which I'm learning now that when they start to harvest those fields, uh, all the rats and
rodents try to find the next closest safe area, and that is our backyard, our house and
garage.
Um so that's one.
The builders
Told us about sealing our driveways.
It's a lot uh healthier that it helps your driveway last longer.
And I think the last one was interest on the mortgage.
I this morning went and looked at our first payment and saw how much was going to.
Interest versus principal versus uh escrow for taxes in ch insurance.
And the number is seventy percent of our first payment goes to interest, eleven percent
goes to actual principal, and then nineteen percent goes to escrow for uh taxes and
insurance.
That reminds me of that old saying of the person that got that first paycheck and they
said, Who's this fiking and why are they taking all my money?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I I I knew that when you're borrowing, you're gonna pay most of the insurance or
interest up front and the principal comes later on, but I think the number is 20 years of
a 30 year mortgage b before your principal or your payment is half principal and half
interest.
So those first 20 years, the majority of your payments are going to uh the interest for
your loan.
There's an old saying that that really drove me as a young businessman that said, Just as
the ritual, the poor, so the borrower is servant to the lender.
And in ancient days, you literally would be a slave to the person that you owed money to.
Today you you're not directly a slave to the bank, but you have to come and sit over here
for us to give you the money to for you to take over to the bank for to pay for your
interest.
And and historically, I just don't think
Um, we're in a normalized time, probably last forty years.
I think our culture has not considered that to be a problem.
But historically, I think people always have considered debt a problem.
And so the the the sooner one can pay off some of that debt, the more quickly they
actually own the building that they're paying for.
Yeah.
And I I uh wrote some other things, like if you just pay an extra a hundred dollars a
month.
That fifty fifty break even goes from twenty years to fifteen or sixteen.
That's probably two or three visits to Starbucks a week.
Like if you didn't visit Starbucks and you just took that money pretty close.
Probably it would accelerate your mortgage.
And you'd pay it off in twenty six years.
Yeah.
And then these were with our mortgage, an extra mortgage payment per year.
I think the rule is doing half a payment every other week rather than once a month, you
get one extra payment each year.
Uh that brings the 50-50 break even to about 14 years, and then you pay off your mortgage
five years early for just one extra payment a year, which seems like very minimal.
I mean, obviously working and all that, but just one payment can reduce 30 extra payments
can reduce your mortgage by 60 payments.
I I think I might have told you.
I I printed out the amortization schedule, and I would just look at the next month's um
principal, and if I could pay the next month's principal on this month's payment, I did
that.
So I actually
was just playing a game with myself and then I was like, well if I can pay next month,
maybe I can pay the next three months this month.
And eventually it gets too big that you maybe won't have the cash flow to do that.
But there's a lot of ways to accelerate that thing so you have some freedom and liberty
sooner than you thought.
Yeah.
Ironically is that when you get some of that debt behind you, uh, is about the time that
you're gonna have some maintenance coming at you too.
So it's kind of a it's kind of a catch twenty two thing.
For sure.
Yeah.
I I've I found this uh proverb it said when you sit down to dine with a ruler, consider
carefully what is before you and put a knife to your throat if you're a man of great
appetite.
Do d do not desire his delicacies for its deceptive food.
Do not weary yourself to gain wealth, cease from consideration of it.
When you set your eyes on it it is gone, for wealth certainly makes itself wings like an
eagle and flies toward the heavens.
And I think of that when I consider
owning a house because what you said early on is that knowing contentment is the big deal.
Your grandma and grandpa white raised six kids in probably less than a thousand square
feet in and only one bathroom.
And it's one of the most enjoyable places to go on the planet to me.
But they have outdoor space.
So you they're always chasing the kids outdoors.
But to
desire a bigger and bigger house.
I would encourage people to read that Bryson book about the history of a house.
And and I think what you'll find out is the wealthy person probably isn't enjoying what's
going on inside the house as much as you perceive.
I I remember a very large house close to ours that had a tennis court and all the fancy
things that you would desire and walking around inside of it.
And it seemed like a ghost town to me at the time.
And and it
didn't have the vibrancy that I saw in the houses, you know, where people are alive and
active because a lot of energy had to go to pay for that place.
And and so the the actual physical place is a place and you may have memories tied to it,
but I would encourage you to tie the memories to something other than the building.
So if something would shift and you couldn't have that building anymore, you don't have
the negative energy of those memories.
that you might have if you tied it to the physical location.
So when I drive by the houses I grew up in today, I have fond memories of them, but I
don't have any I don't have any desire that I need to go back and do anything with those
houses.
And in the home, the home that we have, it can land any place.
The the um we're gonna celebrate Judah's birthday tomorrow and we're gonna do it a
restaurant.
And that's just gonna be as fond of a memory as any place to me.
Yeah.
And parks are y you know, I was thinking about our time together this morning and there's
a park down in Evansville, Wesselman Park, and we would do a lot of fun things there when
I was a kid and I just t reflect back on bike rides and things in that park and how
wonderful they are.
And so the more you can integrate outside space to your life, I think the less you're
attached to a physical location.
But you're also probably gonna be healthier the the more you integrate time outside the
house rather than inside.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's big deal.
Yeah.
So the the the tightrope of whether you're Caleb and you're you're landing in your first
house or you're me and you're getting rid of your kind of the house you grew the kids in.
Um, all of those things have a lot of dynamic emotions in them.
They have a lot of dynamic opportunities, but they're all stepping stones to the next
place in life.
And and they don't have to they don't have to have any kind of connotation, negative or
positive.
They can just be
We're gonna build in here the life that we want and we're gonna take that life wherever we
want to uh along the way.
Any final thoughts you have about the house?
I don't think so.
Man, I'm so excited for you and Judah and the let me find one other thing that I I found
was really encouraging to me about the house.
Um give me one second here.
Uh it's Proverbs twenty four here.
It says, um, and this would be my parting words for you.
By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established, and by knowledge the
rooms are filled with all present pleasant, precious and pleasant riches.
That's what I would say about it is whatever you fill those rooms with, those are the
riches.
And I'm not talking about furniture.
I'm talking about things that smile back at you and can call you mom or dad.
Well Caleb, thanks for hanging out.
Yeah, thank you.
All right, you all take this and share it with a friend, please.