Mortgage payments - how much?

Our new mortgage is around $370k which is pretty average for Auckland I would have thought?

Apparently a good rule of thumb is that you should be paying around 25% or 30% of your income on mortgage/rent - I'd say for a lot of people that is pretty impossible though!

Definitely go and see a mortgage broker or even better financial advisor - they will be able to give you the best advice and a wake up call for your BF if needed!

Some awesome advice - thanks ladies. I need to sit down with my BF and get him to understand all these things too. And yes, do a budget which might scare him a little. He's one of the damn reasons I have anxiety issues about money! Anyway, we definitely need to do some more work to see if we can afford it and still have some buffer for rate rises or big unexpected costs.

Yeah, it was the reason I moved from Sydney in the first place and now I'm in bloody Auckland where the prices are almost the same. Oh well. Maybe I have some rich but unknown relative who will die and leave me all their money.

We owe 265k and pay $510 a week. We bought our house 3 years ago on a 90% mortgage over 17 years so we only have 14 years to go! When we eventually move up in the world and buy bigger and better I imagine we will go to a 25 year mortgage though but for now we are managing fine and are quite happy to be on our short(er) term mortgage.

Mortgage:
Origin:
late Middle English: from Old French, literally 'dead pledge', from mort (from Latin mortuus 'dead') + gage 'pledge'

It is amazing to hear what everyone is paying.

We are in a really similar boat to everyone else - $290k mortgage, paying $580 a week. This is over 14 years though. We could extend it and pay less.

I tell everyone who is looking to get a mortgage - figure out what you can afford to spend. 20-25% of your after tax income per week is a good guide (it is about what we spend) and then fit a loan around that.

And sometimes it is better to pay a larger amount on a smaller mortgage, than a smaller amount on a larger mortgage. Just think what the interest difference is between a 15 and 25 year mortgage!

I have friends who could have afforded to pay double what they were on their mortgage but they decided that they would rather have a crazy amount of disposable income. Now they have a family and cannot afford to pay more, they are in the poo because their house value has dropped and they have not been able to get as much equity in their recent sale.

When we started looking, we were childless but planning to TTC a year later. We were amazed at what the banks would lend - up to $660K

We ended up with a $285K mortgage which we're knocking back - I think it's now an 8 year term? We're lucky that my PT job allowed us to maintain the same payments, though much more than 30% of our income goes into our mortgage. ETA - we had been paying back personal loans/student loans hard out for 2 years prior so were used to living on that amount)

It is depressing that the next place we buy (which will be more expensive as we need to be more central for our works) will probably mean we end up with a mortgage that's double our current one. I sometimes feel like a hamster on a wheel.

At one point we tossed up moving back South and it was waaaaaay too depressing seeing what we could get in Chch for what we would get in Auckland. We decided to stop looking and comparing.

Edited by Flissty