Mortgage Motivation

Over the years, many people have told me that it’s more sensible to have a mortgage than to keep on paying rent. Rent is, supposedly “dead money” – you’re not getting anything for it (except another month living in your property of choice) and you’re just helping to pay off the landlord’s bills.

Finally, two years ago, I jumped off the bridge, and got a mortgage with Herself on this place. Since then we’ve been doing a lot of work on the place (as any vaguely regular reader of D4D™ will know) and that side of things is all going OK. Of course, the fact is that on that score rental is easier – if something needs doing, you call the landlord or letting agency, and it gets done.

For me though, while I’ll continue on with the mortgage, I’m discovering that it has a far more negative effect on me than I’d be happy with on the real long-term.

I find that the knowledge of the amount of the mortgage keeps coming back to me, that it’s kind of a mill-stone. I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to change it – but I’m constantly aware of it.

Maybe it’s that I’m a late-starter on the entire house-buying front, that if I’d been doing this since I was twenty-seven then I’d be used to the knowledge of the debt by now. (and I’d be nearly halfway through paying it off, which would help too!)  Maybe over time the awareness of the debt faades a bit. I don’t know – I’ve only been doing this for two years, after all.

I don’t want to have the mortgage for the full term of it – the plan has always been to overpay whereever possible, and by as much as possible within the terms of the mortgage, although over the first two years we haven’t been able to do that at all (mainly due to me being a slack-ass, and not doing the necessary extra work through the aforementioned lack of motivation) but the intention is still there for the next mortgage period.

And that’s the balance I need to find, too – between the awareness of this (to me) sodding huge millstone of debt and the desire to reduce it as much as possible.

After all, there’s no money more “dead” than the interest I’m/we’re paying to the fucking bank. Paying back 2½ times the amount borrowed? That’s “dead money” indeed.