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

[Faithful Mumma]

Just curious.....


When we built our first home three years ago, and mortgage repayments of $506 a week seemed ENORMOUS and embarassing....that is on only $278,000. We fixed it for 3 years, and it unfixes soon and will be about $480 a week. I am just starting to realise though that our payments are pretty average?? Just curious what everyone else pays...
We live in the country, and I have moments every now and then when I think about how much easier it would be to rent.....but then one of my friends was looking for a new rental and was telling me about how you have to go on "group viewings" as there are always more tenants than houses, and that her rent is $375 a week....that is in the country....so only $100 difference really between that and our mortgage.
It made me realise how fortunate our own situation is as we live in a country where housing affordability is really becoming an issue.... and it is not just affecting the big Cities....

Soon the only debt we will have is our home anyway, as we we have been paying off our credit card debts etc, and are about 2/3 of the way to having them paid off in full..................2 years ago I thought there was no light at the end of the tunel, but now I can see we are nearly there!! It is a very liberating feeling, and I know we will NEVER take out a credit card again....EVER!!! We took out a debt agreement to pay them off. We have paid no interest since, have NEVER missed a payment on them, and we are paying every cent back and were still able to keep our house. Hard lessons to learn at a young age, and it will affect our credit listing for another few years, but to me that is a small price to pay for learning to live within our means.

[Arimeh]

Our mortgage repayments are $353 a week at the moment.

Rent in town for a place like this one would be about the same.

[skybie]

our mortgage is for 280k and its about $500 a week!!!!
To rent we can get a nice big 4 bedder for about $350 a week.

our house is a small 3 bed 2 bathroom single garage. i hate it and especially knowing what we could get if we did rent. i know its better to have ur own house and blah blah blah but i wish we had of waited a while to do it

[Arimeh]

i hate it and especially knowing what we could get if we did rent. i know its better to have ur own house and blah blah blah but i wish we had of waited a while to do it

Yeah we are considering moving back into town and renting again - so selling the place we just purchased in January. Its too far away from town, and costs us about $100 a week in petrol, so we're thinking very seriously of selling the joint. At least then we could save money and purchase a block of land closer to town and eventually build on it when I go back to work.

[skybie]

Yeah we are considering moving back into town and renting again - so selling the place we just purchased in January. Its too far away from town, and costs us about $100 a week in petrol, so we're thinking very seriously of selling the joint. At least then we could save money and purchase a block of land closer to town and eventually build on it when I go back to work.

We thought about selling and renting but we'd make about 40k profit on our house and then have to pay a mean amount of capital gains tax and DF's quarterly tax payments would go up to.
so we decided not to sadly

[Michelle71]

As far as I was aware, you don't pay capital gains tax if it is your primary residence

[Indadhanu]

Our RENT is $325 a week. To buy a similar house in thie area would cost around $350,000-400,000. We like the house we're in though, its huge (especially for us haha), we couldn't affod to buy a place like this right now. We are gong to wait until Jazz is in Prep and then we'll both work and be able to buy a house and afford the repayments and not have to settle for something we don't want. That way we also know what direction our lives might take. At the moment we're thinking of not having any more kids, but if we bought a 2 or 3 bedroom house now and changed our minds later about kids then that would really suck! We'd have to make do or sell and move... BAH nah we're just gonna wait!

[Sopdet]

I currently do both, rent and have a mortgage and quite frankly I'm getting rid of the mortgage, will continue to put money into the "mortgage" account but once I have hit my goal amount of savings, use that as a deposit for a new place and I will most probably end up with paying less in mortgage than I do now (even if the rates jump up over the next 2 years).

[*EJ*]

I am currently paying $500 a week (just added a little on to our homeloan to do our kitchen) but that $500 is more than we are meant to pay. I never take much notice of what our minimum payment is and have always paid at least $50 more than needed. Ours was fixed to begin with but has been variable for the last 4 years i think.

[Lulu]

mine is $320 on $200k, I'd probably be paying $40-50 more to rent something similar. I've always paid much more than needed on my mortgage until recently, I can't to start hacking back into the debt once it's rented out!

[briggsy's girl]

ours is a bit under 300 a week (four bed/two bath/two living) - which is cheap compared to rent in the towns nearby. we live way out in the country though, and do pay a bit in petrol for me to get to work. i sat down and worked out the figures though - to live in town, to get a house maybe 2/3 this size (and with no yard - we have a huge yard) - we'd be paying 70-100 more per week. so the petrol/travel balances it out - and we get to have a home we are happy with

[Astrid]

About $170 per week here, just about to go up to $210 as we have extended on the loan to buy some surrounding land. We live out of town, have to deal with our own garbage and need 2 cars. At the current petrol prices a round trip to town costs $6 without any running around in town. That adds up if I go in everyday, plus DH drives in for work, but he has a more fuel efficient car. Our mortgage is low, but we can't get ADSL out here, so no cheap phone or internet and that is really hurting us right now. We also lost $50 rent assistance per fortnight

We were renting in town, an 80's 3 bedroom, 2 living area, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage et for about $260 per week (that was 2 years ago, so it would be more now). We would just live with one car if I dropped DH off at work, he was only 5 minutes up the road.

[Pandora]

Ours is just shy of 2300/mtg for a 4br+study with not much yard. I'd prefer asmaller house and larger block tbh.

Our repayments are about 40% our income

[~me~]

Our's is only $300pw, we bought land and built when the time was right so our morgtage is under $200000. If we sold now we could buy outright in some rural areas. Renting in our area is around $350pw.
Lulu is very right...it's investment. we got in just at the right time, any later and it would not have been worth it.
If you do rent and your dishwasher, stove/oven or heating need repairing they have to get it fixed, if you own it and don't have the money, you wait

[aussienic]

Our mortgage is sitting at 96K and we pay 670 a month.. most people near us pay that a week.. and then some..

It is heaps cheaper to buy a cheap house then it is to rent here

[Bathsheba]

When we had our last mortgage it was nearly $500 a week. Both DH and I were working and we only had one child, she was school age. When we decided to have more children we knew we would have to sell and rent.

We've been very happy renters for 7 years now. DH is a banker and like Lulu mentioned sometimes renting can be a much cheaper and wiser decision. Please don't panic if you feel that your mortgage repayments are getting too much. There are other ways to secure a nest egg that are just as good as a house. When we sold our house we put the profits into shares and DH has self managed that. Unlike a house where you can't liquidate a portion of the asset ie sell the spare room, when we have a financial crisis we can sell some shares without threatening the whole nest egg. Our portfolio didn't suffer during the GFC either, it actually grew because we didn't sell during that time (DH held his nerve) we bought!

Anyhow I'm not saying that our way is better... It's just an alternative. Here in Australia there us huge pressure on young couples to get into the property market and it's not always the wisest thing to do. At the end of the day make sure your money is working for YOU... Don't become a slave to it. Remember also that while renters seem to be giving their money away to landlords people with very little deposit on their mortgage also end up giving away hundreds of thousands to the bank in interest. DH is hoping that if he continues to invest wisely we may escape having to pay the bank much/any interest at all when it comes time to buy a house... Maybe we will be able to buy one outright... No mortgage. In the meatime we have been fortunate enough to live in a big house on a big block of land (worth well over a million) in a quiet leafy suburb with quiet neighbours. Quality of life should always come first

ETA: I probably also need to add that our decisions have been influenced by several other factors. DH and I are old enough to remember the situation in the 80s when interests rates were up and above %17 and many people had mortgages higher than what their homes were actually worth... A horrible situation indeed. Also my parents were slaves for a mortgage and the pressure contributed to their divorce... Overnight the house and all assets were sold ... It was like everything they had worked for vanished. My mothers boyfriend then squandered the bit that was left and when she finally left him she found herself in her 40s with barely a penny to her name. Debt collectors were constantly hounding her for the boyfriends debt too.

Not meaning to scare... Just put my choices in context.

[*Beema*]

Our is definitely on the higher end of the scale, $1,725 a fortnight four our new house and we have an investment propery on top of that which is $1,100 a fortnight, but we get back in $680 a fornight, the rest is negatively geared. In proportion to our wages it depends on how many hours I work a month but on average it is about 50% of our wages, excluding the income we get in for the rental property. But we are selling that at the moment - when it sells to take the pressure off as such, it will clear the investment loan and take a good chunk out of our repayments on our current house as well, we don't have any penalties for paying our loans off earlier. I also put $300-500 extra on our current house a month depending on what I have brought in to reduce the length of the loan, the investment loan gets $100-$200 extra a month on it as well, as I have just set the Direct Debit to be that bit higher JIC and can always redraw the extra as it just sits there reducing the interest on the loan, and it makes it easy when rates etc come around ad I have the extra money sitting there.

The new house is sustainable as well, runs on full solar power, recycled and rain water, huge amounts of insulation etc, so we are seeing big savings in our everyday living costs, which is why the cost to build it was so much more than another house of the same size.

But for the value of both of our properties has gone up substantially, both times buying then building at the right time and right place.

[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.