It’s been so long since I’ve written a blog post but a lot has happened this year.
In January we changed around our mortgage payment for our house we’re living in to monthly payments instead of weekly and were able to clearly see just how much the mortgage payments for two properties had become and realised that we could not afford to pay for a large mortgage on our house and the balance of the mortgage payment for our rental property (our old house) after rental income was received, so prepared ourselves to sell our old house.
We put the house up for sale in March and it was sold in April for a good price, and settlement completed in July. There was a lot of trouble with the entire process, with telling our great tenants that we were selling and them having to find a new place to live only a year after they moved in (they did find a good place to live though); and the purchaser was a nightmare.
But the house sold, and we put a very large payment down against the mortgage on our current house and have left some money aside to do some upgrades on our house to make it more comfortable to live in. The mortgage repayments are now much more affordable and we are living more in line with how we were before.
The mortgage is a 30 year loan so we repay extra each month so it will be repaid in 20 years when we are due to retire. Hopefully we can pay it off earlier than that but I have made it non-negotiable that it is paid off in 20 years at the absolute latest.
The interest rate rises are annoying but no longer extremely stressful as they were when we had two mortgages, and because we pay an extra $711 per month it doesn’t make any difference to our bottom line.
We are back to paying loans on one property not two which I guess is where we are supposed to be. Our main focus now is working out what is our maximum to spend on various things to be able to continue to live comfortably within our means. With the current inflation challenges this is proving to be very difficult!
As always I have been reading the blogs and look forward to being more active now that life has calmed down slightly!
November 19th, 2023 at 04:14 am 1700367269
November 19th, 2023 at 06:57 am 1700377032
November 19th, 2023 at 08:30 am 1700382653
November 20th, 2023 at 07:11 am 1700464275
November 21st, 2023 at 03:34 pm 1700580874
November 22nd, 2023 at 09:51 am 1700646693
December 1st, 2023 at 06:51 pm 1701456668
December 17th, 2023 at 12:21 am 1702772502
Huge apologies on my massively delayed response back to your question! I was down and out with a flu virus. Australia doesn’t have 30 year interest rates like America does, but I wish we did. Our fixed rates are available for between 1 year and 7 years but because variable rates are often much lower people tend to choose them. In paying off our last home we were fixed for around 75% of that period. In this home we are using a broker who does not recommend fixing because the rates are expected to drop. After this nightmare of interest rates skyrocketing on our main financial cost I think I would like to fix the mortgage by the end of next year for peace of mind.