Do you dream of mortgage-free living? Owning your own property with no rent or mortgage to pay? I get it – living the dream right?
We’re making some big changes in the AoF household, however I’m not ready to talk about them yet, but I will update you at some point soon.
But it involves housing, jobs and basically the whole nine yards. As part of this I’ve been doing some serious house financing calculations. Whilst there are a ton of good mortgage calculators out there on the internet I’ve not quite find the right one to give me what I need. I also think that some of them are unnecessarily complicated.
So what do I want to do?
I want to calculate the time until I finish paying off my mortgage.
And I want to look at how that time changes under different property prices and different monthly repayment amounts.
Easy.
Progress to FIRE
It occurs to me that I can’t be the only one wanting to do this. I think there are probably two main groups of people wanting this kind of information.
Those pursuing financial independence (FI). If you are on your way to FIRE then it’s clearly ideal to have a paid off mortgage. One of the key methods to increase success of a FIRE strategy is to reduce your non-discretionary spend so that you can ratchet down your spend during periods of market stress.
So paying off your mortgage is a key component of that strategy. Note that I’m not saying you should repay your mortgage, that will depend on your personal circumstances, but if you are, then this tool will be useful to you.
For real estate investors looking to purchase new properties with leverage (i.e. a mortgage).
Understanding the length of time until you pay off a mortgage on a rental property can be an important component of your financial strategy to invest in further properties, or in assessing the viability of a new purchase.
So let’s take a look at some of the results.
Mortgage Tool
You can download a free copy of the tool here.
The data you need for the tool is simple. Just the down payment for the house if it’s a new purchase, or the current equity in the house if it’s a current mortgage. The current equity is simply the value of the house less any mortgage outstanding, and you can get outstanding amount from your latest mortgage statement.
If you pay tax and insurance through your monthly payments then you need to know that, and it will be on your statement. If you pay these separately then simply set it to zero.
Finally you need the mortgage interest rate. The data entry cells are show below. Simple huh?
Let’s look at a simple example.
Example House Purchase
Suppose you have a down payment of $20,000 and you anticipate annual tax and insurance costs of $3,000. We will look at a range of properties with prices $175k, $200k, $225k and $250k.
We will also look at a range of monthly repayment amounts of $1,339, $1,500 and $1,750 per month. You can see the results below, where the orange cells can receive user input.