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Exploring the recast, misfits, and the downgrade
Logan
May 22, 2025
In partnership with
Exploring the recast, misfits, and the downgrade
Happy Thursday! Thanks for reading Intentional Dollar — where we look at old money ideas through a new perspective.
What’s inside?
One idea to experiment with
Two quotes from others
Three questions to dig deeper
Four lines of poetry for the point
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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One idea to experiment with:
The Recast:
Wealth building is often confined to the realm of retirement preparation. Save enough money, as we discussed last week, and you can eventually afford the ability to walk away from required work. But I want to narrow the focus and look at the topic with a sharper lens.
Rather than the binary of “can retire” or “can’t retire,” I want to explore a more creative way to deploy assets—one that offers more freedom and enjoyment along the way. Specifically, let’s consider how we can use assets to recast our biggest liability: mortgage debt.
What Debt Does—and Why We Have It
First, any debt attached to our name is an obligation. At a minimum, we must make regular payments until the debt is gone. We’ve talked before about how debt payments are contracts against your future time. Owing someone money means you must go trade your time to earn enough to pay them, either through systematic payments or by paying the balance in full.
Second, while debt creates this obligation, it’s not inherently bad. When we’re young and broke, we borrow heavily for college. After graduation, we borrow for homes and cars. The scale of our borrowing increases the pressure of those contracts. A bigger house requires more income—perhaps a more stressful job. The same is true for cars and student loans. We borrow based on faith in our future prospects.
If you’re carrying hundreds of thousands in debt and making thousands in monthly payments, it’s nearly impossible to get ahead working a low-wage job. Your life adjusts to match your borrowing. And once those fixed costs are in place, we march on—maybe sending a little extra to the mortgage each month, saving what we can for retirement, emergencies, and other goals.
But the problem is this: borrowing decisions made five years ago might not fit your life today.
Fresh out of college, you may have been eager to work long hours and make good money. But five years later, with a family, the equation can change. Perhaps the income no longer justifies the time tradeoff. Perhaps working Saturdays no longer works. You begin looking for more optionality—and optionality is inversely related to how much income you need.
Recasting the Mortgage: A Tool for Flexibility
Because mortgages make up the largest portion of most budgets, recasting is a powerful and often overlooked tool. Recasting happens when you make a lump sum payment toward your mortgage principal, and your lender recalculates your monthly payment based on the new, lower balance.
The loan term stays the same. The interest rate stays the same. But the monthly payment decreases.
This is different from paying off your mortgage early. It won’t save you as much interest, but it creates instant margin.
Too often, we focus on trimming small expenses to improve cash flow. But we rarely think about deploying assets creatively to reduce fixed cash outflows. I’m not suggesting you drain your retirement accounts or stop saving altogether. But maybe you don’t need a huge balance sheet made up of illiquid assets that are tied down by their monthly debt service.
The Broader Question Today:
What creative ways can you use your assets to get closer to your ideal day?
recasting cuts the payment but keeps the time
Two quotes on misfits:
Keep waging war against the world’s attempt to smooth your eccentric edges.
“We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness.
The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.
The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.”
“Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo.”
Three questions on the downgrade:
What if I downgraded my life as I went on, subsequently increasing my margin and freedom?
How many lost vacations are trapped in sticky home equity and massive mortgage payments?
What if my immediate family were the only ones to see what I spent my money on, would I still upgrade?
Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.
Four lines of poetry for the point:
Margin expansion
From a loan recast
Don’t be held hostage
From decisions of past
Contact Me:
Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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