The last few weeks I've been flat out working with not much energy left for much else, hence the lack of blog posts. But I have been going through our finances, doing lots of calculations and re-examining our goals as we get closer to the final year of our five year plan. And so we've made a few changes to our financial goals for 2021 - I guess thats the 'personal' part of personal finance.
So whats changing and why.
We're stopping the extra payments off our mortgage. Our mortgage is currently 19 years ahead and will be paid off in four years with no additional payments. Or, if we needed to, we could just pay $90/week for the remaining term of the mortgage. So we've got a great buffer there and an affordable mortgage if we were suddenly out of income. While mortgage interest rates are low and savings are getting good returns, it makes financial sense to put additional money into savings where it will grow & create additional income for the future. Emotionally, I really want to pay off the mortgage asap - but logically, this is the best financial decision.
We're increasing our savings. I'l be paying some of the extra money that would have gone to the mortgage into our retirement savings. The more we have in savings the more choices we will have and we can payout the mortgage on retirement if we wanted to.
We're paying extra on the investment property loans. I'll be directing some extra payments off the IP mortgages as I would like to have a 6-12 month buffer on mortgage payments before we retire. Its just another safety measure in case of tenant problems or financial problems.
Overall I'm feeling pretty good about where we're up to financially. I've updated our new goals in the sidebar.
I'm feeling tired from work, it's much busier, but in some ways less stressful than my previous job. I'm really hanging out for the student holidays in two weeks!!
