How much are your Mortgage Repayments?? Mortgage Vs Rent...

[Astrolady]

Our mortgage is $430 a fortnight, and that includes an extra $90 a fortnight that we pay. But we did build 14 years ago and we got our house and land for $106,000. We have used equity twice adding an extra $30,000 onto that, hence the extra $90 a fortnight to pay the $30,000 off quicker LOL.

[mrsmac]

Our house is a little 3 bedroom on a busyish road but it is in a good(not super posh or anything) area of Sydney. DH earns about 75% of what i earn so his income is all we have after mortgage takes mine so definitely more than 30%.
We chose to spend more and stay in the area we work in and where I grew up, if we had moved we could have got a lot more house for our money or paid a lot less.

[MissM]

Our mortgage is $550 per week on aprox $330K loan. We only bought our first place 12 months ago so we missed the boat when it came to cheap property prices unfortunately We paid $380K for a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom duplex. It's brand new, but it has NO yard for the kiddies. Our mortgage takes up 1/3 of our total wage with both me and DH working fulltime and when I drop back to part-time after bub is born, it will take up nearly half of our weekly income. There is absolutely NO way I could ever be a SAHM unfortunately BTW, rent on a place similar to ours would prob be about $400 per week.

We borrowed $320k and we pay $600 - in saying that we pay more than we should, I think our minimum repayments are something around the $490 mark tho. We payed 305K for our 3 bed + study SLUG 2 bath 'duplex' (only 2 on the land) close to motorways and highways (5 mins to each) and close to loads of shopping centres. If we were to rent this we could be paying around $450

At the end of the day - we dont need to be stressed if the landlord needs or wants to sell and we can do what we like to our house

[Roryrory]

Ours is low - $268 pw (and damn well fixed until September - grrr!) Once it switches to variable it will be around $240-250. We bought our house years ago so our mortgage is very low - probably to rent similar we would be up for $600 pw in rent.

Also on capital gains tax - Bun is right in that primary residence (your home) is not subject to CGT but if at any stage it has been rented out you will have to pay some CGT based on that fact. For example, if your home is worth $300k and you rent it for a year while you move overseas, and during that time it increases in value to $450k, you will pay CGT on $150k when you come to sell it. It's been years since I practised in this area but I am pretty sure an individual gets a 50% discount, so if the home in above example was in a person's name (ie: not in the name of a company) you would only pay CGT on 75% (ie: 50% of the gain). Plus it is calculated at your base tax rate. So if hubby earns heaps the it is better to have the house in the wife's name, because her tax rate will be lower.