I feel bad in saying but its done us great favours, all our savings went into our house 18months ago so now we have a mortgage and with interest rates dropping we are paying well above our minimum repayments.
Plus we are both in jobs that we don't need to worry about.
I feel selfish saying this when people are doing it really tough. We just been lucky it happened when it did in our stage of life.
We got our mortgage last june and fixed our interest for 3 years so are paying heaps more interest. DH and I both work in govt jobs so are secure but DH's pay is pretty low and he has been getting less overtime which is what makes his pay a lot less than we need.
Despite having a lot less to live on than other people who qualified we got none of the children bonus monies (the joys of a mortgage) but we will get the Rudd tax money as we earn under 80K each.
My friend's DH has a mowing business and they are being hit hard.
DP and I were saying only the other night how lucky we are. His job is secure - he's a train driver on passenger trains. It would be a bit of a different story if he drove freight trains - those jobs are being affected because they're carrying less stuff because of the financial crisis. My job is a semi-government one and is pretty safe too and the organisation is heavily unionised.
So for us it's meant that we can do our renovations and be paying the same in repayments as before interest rates started going down.
The only negative is that DP's XW is American. Will try not to write a novel at this point but her financially precarious position because of her own silliness with money and the situation economically in the US, may make it more likely that she will chase DP for money. He didn't represent himself at court for the divorce hearing (would have had to fly back to the US) and she was awarded a high sum in alimony for the rest of her life. We've been told by lawyers since that this was highly unusual and DP was basically penalised for not bothering to turn up to court. So she could chase that backpayment and we could end up fighting an international legal case which could leave us $50K down the tubes. Silly DP - this has caused a lot of tension between us as you can probably tell!
The financial crisis has not impacted our family at this stage.
Both of us are in industries where our jobs can be affected on the economy - I work for a major bank and dh is in the agricultural industry. At this stage we are both safe.
We will benefit from the government bonus as we both earn less than $80k p.a. and we fortunately sold our second house earlier this year, so we have no mortgage.
The downside is our savings are not earning very much interest due to the lower mortgage rates and our share portfolio was affected, but overall this makes very little difference to our overall financial position.
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