A New ‘Normal’

Yesterday had the most beautiful sunrise…

I’m so glad I’m an early bird and get to see sunrises like this.

Today is the end of my third week working from home and DH’s fifth week. We seem to have passed that initial, anxious/fearful stage and are settling in to a new kind of of ‘normal’. It helps that in our town there have been no new cases for almost three weeks. We’ve all been told we will be working from home until the end of May.

This week we’ve settled into some better routines. We walk everyday at 6.30am, stop for morning tea at 10 and lunch at 12. After my work day ends I go out and work in the garden for about half an hour. Dinner is at 6.30.

I don’t want to use the big supermarkets in town as they are too busy. So we get a Hello Fresh delivery most weeks which gives us three main meals and several meals of leftovers for $120. Aside from that we eat out of the pantry & freezer.

About every 7-10 days  we collect the mail and pick up a few staples like milk, bread, eggs & meat at the corner store on the next block, its about 10 minutes inside the store and thats our only time out apart from our daily walk. The shop assistants all wear gloves which are changed between each customer and theres usually only a few people there when we go. When we get home we wipe over all our groceries before putting them away, change our clothes and wash our hands.

I’m coping well with not going out and I’m honestly not missing anything. I feel less stressed and am sleeping much better. I think DH & DD are missing the social interactions and just being able to go out and do things. But we’re all adapting OK to this new way of doing things.

Yesterday was payday and after paying the bills, and putting extra money in the offset accounts I paid our regular mortgage payment and everything extra off the mortgage. Our mortgage balance is now $96,977. 

Mortgage Milestone!

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.

Mortgage no longer six figures!

How good it was to log into the bank this morning and see the new mortgage balance:


                  $99,972


We are FINALLY under six figures, a few months later than planned but it feels so good to finally get here!  Now when I look at that number its only 10 lots of $10,000 – or 20 lots of $5,000 – thats what I need to focus on from here on in. I might make a payoff chart that I can colour in.
So we’ve have paid a total $78,581 ($67,298 + $11,255 interest) off the mortgage since I started blogging. Thats an average of $3022 per month. I have another month of a lot of bills and then I’ll be able to get back to throwing every extra cent  at the mortgage.