Dear Quentin, After a terrible battle with dementia, my grandmother died a few weeks ago. She did not leave much, but I will — along with my siblings — receive about $40,000 in life insurance. I am trying to figure out how to best handle it.
I have some credit-card debt that was incurred during a period of unemployment during the pandemic. My spouse and I have student-loan debt. His debt will be paid off within the next year, while mine still has quite a few years left. We have two middle-school children. We have college accounts for them, but they are not nearly enough. We have pretty well-funded retirement accounts for both of us. We have a mortgage that probably has about 15 years left. We also have a very old house that really needs some work. We have not really looked into investments but are open to them. So we are trying to figure out what to do with this money. We are almost positive it is smart to pay off our credit-card debt in full. But we will still have almost $30,000 left to work with after we do so. We would like to work on the house, but is that the smartest financial move? Should we …