Good news!

We’ve just hit another mortgage milestone on our amoratisation table – we’re now paid up to Year 20!

Our new balance is $97,773

This is Year 5 of our mortgage so we’re 15 years ahead and another step closer this mortgage paid off. Only 10 more lines to cross out on that chart and we are done!

Because  the mortgage interest has gone down so much since I started this blog ($572 to $260), the balance is going down much faster now. I can’t wait to have it gone completely.

One thing working from home has shown me is how much I am ready for retirement.  I just want to be able to slow down and in the last week I’ve been able to do that. I’m not sure how long it will last but it does reinforce to me that I need to do my best to stick to my original retirement date for the sake of my health and happiness.

Paying off the mortgage before we retire is a key part of our plan. To have a mortgage in retirement we would need to have an extra $360,000 in savings using a 4% withdrawal rate. If we do need to access the aged pension it would be even more important that we didn’t have a mortgage.

We’ve been discussing and doing calculations on changing our plan to move into our rental unit for a few months now and we’ve now made the decision that we will be staying here. But I’ll write more about that another day.

The sun is shining here so we’ll go walking later. So far our town has had no more coronavirus cases for almost two weeks so that is encouraging.