You could insulate the house with dollar bills.

We'll see. I've still got one more avenue to explore, calling HUD directly to see if they've got any programs we qualify for. When the guy at the bank who holds our mortgage realized my savings were too high to qualify for any of the programs he had access to, that's who he referred me to.

This whole exercise has highlighted the need for us to start working with a financial adviser. We've got saving and are doing nothing useful with it. We've now got the possibility of a college tuition to start thinking about, who knows what we'll be responsible for as our parents seem to insist on continuing to age, and then of course there's retirement, whatever that may or may not look like in 30 (40? 50?) years. It would be nice to get some help with planning.

With regards to college savings - a long time ago I signed up for UPromise. It gives you a cash back type award that can be rolled into a 529.

There are lots of ways to utilize it, but I just have my plastic linked to it. If I'm shopping online I'll check and see if they have a larger bonus for using the click-thru link on their site. Otherwise, I shop as normal. Anything I get is a bonus.

If you put $2,000 in an IRA plan now by the time Theo retires it will hold about $500,000.

I wonder if that will be a large sum in 2077

I want to know where you are going to get an 8.5% return for every year until he retires.

When it comes to retirement, it's not a particularly large sum in 2010.

8.5 is kind of high. Average DJIA return over the last 65 years is 6.52%. Doesn't seem that far different but $2000 invested on January 1, 1945 would have only returned $137,000 on January 1, 2010.

Still, put away $2000/month for retirement from birth and get 6.52% back and Theo'll have a nice $56 million nest egg. I'm guessing that even in 2075 that will be decent living.

All Theo has to do is buy out our mortgage company and that $2K/month (and then some) is all his!

I had planned to do something like that for our kids with a Roth IRA, unfortunately the money has to be earned income, so that kind of throws a wrench in the plan.