Case study: Things I learned in 2009 with only passive income

Dec. 23, 2018

Introduction

It is time for me to review my expenses in 2009. I only had some passive income, I quickly borrowed from home equity loan. I like to do a case study on this finance decisions.

Case study: very low income

It is most tough time for me in my life. The home price went down, but my home equity line was still open with $58,000 dollars. I was so afraid that the line will be closed since home price goes down. I made a few transactions to write check to myself $10,000 a time after I settled down the appeal case in Oct. 2009. I like to make sure that those money can be available for me to use, I  had to withdraw some money in my checking account.

I had a Ford Explorer, the gas price was highest in the history, over $5.00 a gallon. I spent time to work on my appeal for leave case starting from February, 2019.

I own one condo with two bedroom one bathroom near campus. How do I learn to survive and also learn something new?

My analysis

First of all, I did not prepare the worst personal economy situation in my life in 2009. I had best education from 2002 to 2008. But somehow I was not so confident and did not learn quickly enough in my personal finance at all.

I had four year graduate study for my Ph.D. study, I had an intern and full time job almost one year with salary $46,000 US dollars from 2006 to 2007. I put $8000 us dollars into my 401 K, and did spend one vacation to cost me $1,000 us dollars to New York and visited Yale and MIT and Harvard and went out with my SJTU classmate from China.