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How to Pay Off Your Mortgage
The most common mistake I see as a financial planner is the strategy that people employ to reduce the mortgage on their house. It is natural to want to live in a house that you own and be debt free. After all once you repay the debt you don’t have any more monthly loan repayments.
However, the most common way that people go about this is to try and pay back the debt as quickly as possible from their wages. This is unfortunately the hardest way to go about doing this given the nature of how our tax structure works.
Lets also take a look at your monthly budget. Your loan repayments, be they principal or interest are only a small part of your expenditure requirements. The rest is made up of food, clothing, ever increasing electricity bills, running cars and all of other our activities that we need or enjoy.
This being the case the notion of financial security depends on 2 things; being able to own your house debt free but also being able to have enough passive income to cover your living requirements. Therefore, if we are focusing purely on the paying off your house debt then we are only addressing part of the problem. This is why I see people who think they are ready to retire and they proclaim "we own our house” only to be bitterly disappointed when they realise they cannot afford to stop working as they still need to earn an income to fund their lifestyle.
What is required
You need to come up with a holistic strategy that will encompass all of your goals that you need to achieve. With the help of our expertise in taxation and finance we can then help you design a strategy that will achieve all of these goals in the quickest possible fashion. This is really a case of working smarter not harder, don’t struggle on the steps for 30 years when we can take an elevator and dramatically reduce the time but also improve the outcome.
However, the most common way that people go about this is to try and pay back the debt as quickly as possible from their wages. This is unfortunately the hardest way to go about doing this given the nature of how our tax structure works.
Lets also take a look at your monthly budget. Your loan repayments, be they principal or interest are only a small part of your expenditure requirements. The rest is made up of food, clothing, ever increasing electricity bills, running cars and all of other our activities that we need or enjoy.
This being the case the notion of financial security depends on 2 things; being able to own your house debt free but also being able to have enough passive income to cover your living requirements. Therefore, if we are focusing purely on the paying off your house debt then we are only addressing part of the problem. This is why I see people who think they are ready to retire and they proclaim "we own our house” only to be bitterly disappointed when they realise they cannot afford to stop working as they still need to earn an income to fund their lifestyle.
What is required
You need to come up with a holistic strategy that will encompass all of your goals that you need to achieve. With the help of our expertise in taxation and finance we can then help you design a strategy that will achieve all of these goals in the quickest possible fashion. This is really a case of working smarter not harder, don’t struggle on the steps for 30 years when we can take an elevator and dramatically reduce the time but also improve the outcome.
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