Our mortgage is no more. 🙂 Yep, gone! Both of them. 😀
When we moved up here to Ballan, neither Martin nor I were sure of how things would go. We were nervous as to how 2 city people would cope living in rural Victoria (Australia) and how the commute to the city would work out, how we would go moving away from friends and what we knew. We had initially intended to rent for 12 months but we were unable to find a rental property in Ballan to suit our needs (in fact there were precious few rental properties available at all) and so we decided to look to purchasing a house. Houses in Ballan are half as expensive as they are in the city, particularly inner suburbs like Spotswood, hence we were able to use equity from the city house to secure a second mortgage in Ballan.
Our old house has been leased out to tenants since January 2013, covering the mortgage repayments, which allowed us the option to move back to the city if things didn’t work out but after 18 months living in Ballan we have both realised how much we LOVE our life here. 😀 Moving back was not going to happen and so, after much discussion about our options we decided to sell our city house.
The discussion revolved around keeping an investment property with mortgage covered by rent versus being debt free. Both are without debt in a way, one based upon assets equalling more than our debt, the other being without any debt but less assets. In a society coming perilously close to economic collapse (growth cannot continue forever) we felt that perpetuating growth, even if only with a single investment property, wasn’t right for us. We liked the idea of owning 100% of our semi rural property and saying that enough is indeed enough. Our little slice of paradise is enough for us. :). In addition the rental property was forever requiring maintenance which reduced rental income and was a nuisance too.
The house went on the market for auction but an offer was made and accepted and the house was sold. 😀 After a few frustrating but unavoidable delays we settled on the sale on June 30th. 🙂
We’ve ended up with a little extra cash in the bank account which is a real blessing and we are using this money to invest further into our property with solar panels and water tanks as well as the deck and orchard. I feel extremely blessed. 🙂
Rabid Little Hippy 