The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants (Premium)

As Mehedi noted earlier today, the Microsoft Store is selling Surface Laptop for $200 off today. And $200 off the base Core i5 version of the new Surface Pro. At these prices both are seriously worth considering.

But I am particularly taken with Surface Laptop, however. And this is interesting when you consider that I picked the new Surface Pro over Surface Laptop about six months back.

What this comes down to, I guess, is the mix of logic and emotion that accompanies any big purchase.

This isn't just true of tech, of course. As you may know, my family moved this year to Pennsylvania. But our original plan was to purchase a less expensive home in the northeastern Maryland/northwestern Delaware area, and do so without a mortgage, a major life goal. We had been living near Boston, one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country, for over 15 years, and given how housing prices have exploded there recently, we knew that we could buy a similarly-sized home in Maryland or Delaware and pay for it completely with the proceeds from our house sale. Even have money left over.

Incredible, right?

But in one of life's great coincidences---or, what some might see as one of those "everything happens for a reason" moments---we visited family in Pennsylvania back in April, just as we were hashing out our plans to move. We never intended to move here, but a family home, my step mother's, was going to be sold this year, we were told. We have two sisters and their families in the area, and their kids are friends with our kids. It seemed perfect ... but with one hitch. The home, inexpensive by Massachusetts standards, was a lot more expensive---like one-third more expensive---than what we were expecting to buy elsewhere. So we had a decision to make.

So we did some math.

Basically, we figured that we could just eke by with no mortgage on this home, but in doing so, we'd deplete all of our short-term savings plus the proceeds from the house. And the new house needed tons of work, and we felt like a lot of it had to happen right away. So we ended up getting a very small mortgage, and, later, a home equity line of credit, in order to get that work done. I've written about some of that in my Paul's Tech Makeover series.

But this is where the emotion bit comes.

We will save money by moving to Pennsylvania, overall, for sure. But we could have saved a lotmore money by moving to Maryland or Delaware. The advantages here are a known home, a family home, that we had been visiting for years, nearby family and, for my daughter, a friend, and a shorter trip to college for my son. Financially, this makes less sense that what we originally planned. But overall, it makes more sense. Because you have to factor in your well-being. It's not just about money.

(Side-note: My wife and I have long planned to downsize when the kids were gone. We still do. But this house is actually quite a bit bigger than the one we left, which we find vague...