So, after almost a year of having a mortgage, how’s it all going?

I expected an impact on my spending. Nothing terrible, and I wouldn’t have taken it on if I thought I couldn’t sustain it. But the monthly repayment is about double what I had been paying in rent, and I’m no millionaire, so it has meant a noticeable change in the amount of spare cash I have lying about.

I’m no longer swimming in it. Perhaps wading gently, at least in months when car repair bills or other occasional big expenses don’t come in. Or in the weeks following really busy periods at work (since I’m paid by the hour).

Big outlays such as overseas holidays are off the agenda for the forseeable future, particularly since they not only include paying a lot of money, but lost income.

In the first few months of the mortgage I did manage to make extra payments onto the mortgage, so now I’m about five months ahead. Obviously this means paying a bit less interest, but it also gives me a buffer so I could theoretically not pay it for a little while before there were any interruptions to work.

But as for my goal of paying off 20% of the loan by the end of this year… When I made that goal in January I’d paid off 3.84%. Now I’m sitting at 5.18%… so not exactly rocketing through it. St George will be raking it in from me for a good few years yet.

In investment terms, figures out today show median prices in Melbourne up 4.2%. (In Bentleigh it’s about 5% for houses.) I suppose, now that I’ve bought, it’s good for me that prices are going up. But I do wonder about how my kids will go when, sometime in the next decade, they look for their own homes to live in.