Tag Archives: interest rates

Your mortgage or your life?

Following on from my realisation that the average income earner could retire at 52, I’ve started to analyse the relative importance of various categories of expenditure in preventing early retirement. Here, I look at housing.

Given that housing represents the single largest life time expenditure item for most people in the U.K., getting your housing strategy correct is vitally important for early retirement. As far as I’m concerned, it is simply irrational to rent in the long term, so, if you can afford it, buying really is the only option. However, the average-consumer goes about this in the wrong way – i.e. by spreading their mortgage repayments over a relatively long, 25 year term and dragging the mortgage out even longer because of trading up to a larger property.

According to this is money, a typical first-time buyer who buys a £151,000 home with a £121,000 repayment mortgage over 25 years will pay back £212, 000, calculated at 5% interest. In my calculations I’ve been a little more optimistic, to reflect some of the better interest rates out there at the moment, and assumed an average life-time interest rate of 4%, so borrowing the same amount  (£121 000) at 4% over 25 years means paying back a total of £191,600, at £638 a month or £7664 a year, which is equivalent to 9 years worth of earnings on the median-salary. Of these repayments, interest accounts for £191, 600 – £121, 000 = £70, 000, which in itself is equivalent to almost 3 years of work earning the median salary. (See endnotes 8-12)

In my frugal-consumer model (Spread sheet ) the same figure is paid back over 11 years, which means paying back a total of £149, 764, at £1135 a month or £13, 620 a year,  equivalent to 7 years worth of earnings on the median salary. Compared to the average individual, the frugal-consumer saves themselves over £40, 000 or the equivalent of nearly 2 years worth of work earning the median salary.

The above scenario is actually extremely generous in its comparison – In the sense that while my 11 year pay-back model is, I think, reasonably achievable for the average income earner, my ‘average’ consumer model is in fact not realistic – If a couple chooses to ‘trade up’ to a house then their costs of housing almost double.

The Average house price is currently £264K – And if we apply the same payback-ratios as above, then a  4% mortgage over 25 years gives a total payback amount of £385K (5% gives  £424K).

(NB – Many people will pay back more than this – 30 years is rapidly becoming the norm for mortgage repayment periods – In 2012, the number of mortgages with more than 30 years on the term had risen to 27.8%, up from less than 3% ten years earlier, and the longer the mortgage term, the greater the interest!

So let’s just pause…. assuming that you stay in a one or two bed flat for the rest of your life and stick to the standard mortgage term, then that will cost you £250K over the course of your lifetime, but if you want a family-home, you are looking at something in the region of £400K. Looked at in starker terms, if we take the median salary, these figures represent approximately 12 and 20 years of work respectively. If you compare the later of these to my frugal-consumer model, you lose 9 additional years working to pay for property.

To make an even starker comparison, there are several people in the UK who have built their own houses for 10 times less than these figures both in terms of money and time, it becomes clear that most of the above years are basically years spent making someone else rich – A combination of the land owner, property developer, previous owner and/ or mortgage-lender – And I think anyone who is either considering getting on the property ladder or who is currently on it needs to urgently consider some of the available, cheaper, alternatives to housing.

Or look at it this way – If you walked in to work tomorrow and your boss offered you a year, or two, or ten off on full pay, that’d be pretty nice, wouldn’t it? Or if you won £100K on the lottery, that’d be at least Facebookable. These are the types of figures radical housing alternatives can save you…..And these are the figures you throw away by being a mortgage slave.

NB – The point of this post isn’t necessarily to criticise the injustice of a system based on debt, the aim is simply to raise awareness of the extreme savings that can be made in terms of your money and your life if you just pay that damn mortgage down as quickly as possible.

References

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-1633400/Mortgage-calculator-Compare-true-cost-rates-fees.html

Related Posts

1. How the Average Income Earner could retire at 52