Your Mortgage And How To Pay It Off In Five Years, By Someone Who Did It In Three:

Random House Australia (Published 1999)

Written By Anita Bell

Australia

Review 4 Stars – Excellent Book

How the blurb describes the book:

We first met Anita Bell in 1999 when her bestselling Your Mortgage and How to Pay It off in Five Years was published. Over the last half-decade, property prices have gone through the roof, interest rates have come down – then gone up again – and everybody went real estate mad. Through all this, Anita has continued to help people across Australia and New Zealand by showing them how she and husband, Jim, paid off their own mortgage, their investment property, and their block of land, and purchased shares. All on an average Australian income.

This Fifth Anniversary Commemorative Edition has been revised and updated and now includes information on stamp duty, median house prices, first home-owner assistance, non-bank lenders, interest rates and how to get the best out of your real estate agent and solicitor. In no-nonsense, easy to follow steps, Anita shows you how to save the deposit, secure the right loan, find the right house or flat and get it at the right price. Using this simple, down to earth plan that really worked for Anita, Your Mortgage and How to Pay It off in Five Years gives you all the practical help you need to own your own home outright, sooner than you ever believed possible.

Mr Home Budget’s Review:

The most important line in the book is this one, “Repayments on a home loan of every extra $10 can be worth up to $96 in savings!” As Anita says, “If that doesn’t motivate you to take a closer look at your budget and investments, nothing willl!” And I happen to agree.

This book holds your hand and assumes you have not purchased a house prior to reading. It takes you through saving for a deposit; how much you will need to save and what to look for in a contract when signing for a house. Which lender and which loan; the loan application itself and what sort of house you should you be thinking about.

While this is really important information, most people reading this review and her book, I would suggest have already got a mortgage. And in this review, this is the angle I would like to concentrate on.

Anita leaves no doubt in my mind, the goal is to crush, kill and destroy your home loan extremely quickly. Anita and her husband have done this through “sacrifice”; not by earning a massive wage or winning the lottery. By doing a home budget, cutting back on luxury items and generally being thrifty.  Every dollar they saved while doing this, they put straight into their home loan. This is where their success lies.

Believe me, nothing about this book is rocket science. There are no tax schemes saving you heaps of money. No get-rich-quick schemes or property investment ideas. No, Anita has simply done the black and white facts on maths to state the more money you save and put into your homeloan, the quicker it gets paid off. She has used the maths of compound interest to her advantage.

What Anita does extremely well is show you how to start a budget from the ground up. Plus she provides some of the thrifty tips she used to increase her home loan repayments. Some of these tips are so in your face you might think they are not worth mentioning. But you might find while you know them, you’re not putting them into practice. While the tips she uses, only cover a very small part of the book, she gets you heading in the correct direction.

Anita talks in a very black and white way about money. In fact, one of the better parts I would like to share with you is, “Some people seem to think of budgeting as a dirty word, but even the biggest companies handling millions of dollars have to work to budgets. Everyone has them – even if you never work it out or stick to it, you still have one. Your pay packet is only so big. If you have money left over each pay, then your budget is working well. If your pay is gone as fast as you get it, then you are living on the edge of a balanced budget. And if you seem to be getting deeper in debt all the time then, honey, you have blown your budget! So quit clowning around and get a pencil.”

If you want a book which really shows you why cutting back on your spending and adding this money to your home loan is important, then this is for you.

Pros: Written in an extremely easy way so anybody can understand.

Talks about the maths of paying money early to reduce your total interest bill and time.

Gets you thinking about all the money you are probably wasting.

Cons: The first half of the book assumes you have not purchased a house. However, most people reading this probably do own a house and this part may be boring or unnecessary to them.