HOW TO SAVE YOUR HOME – A fight worth fighting.
by Neil Jenman
The word mortgage is French in origin. It means to make a pledge upon which your life depends – or, literally, an agreement until death.
In todays debt heavy world a mortgage really has one of two meanings. Either you destroy (kill) it or it destroys (kills) you.
Around one million Australians are now suffering the most talked-about material disease of today – mortgage stress. The symptom of mortgage stress is a mortgage payment which is more than thirty per cent of your net income. So, if you earn a thousand dollars a week and the repayments on your home are more than three hundred dollars a week, youre officially stressed.
But a repayment of three hundred dollars a week means youd have a loan of around $150,000 which means youd probably be living near Oodnadatta or Gulargambone.
If you bought a Sydney home for around $500,000 and you got a loan of $400,000 your payments would be around $3,400 per month. To avoid mortgage stress youd have to be earning around $200,000 a year. And, unless youre a cleaner at Macquarie Bank youre not likely to be earning anything near $200,000.
Today, for hundreds of thousands of borrowers, repayments have gone way past the stress level of 30 per cent. Its not uncommon to hear of people paying 50 per cent of their income towards their mortgages …..read more
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