Book Review: How to Pay Your Mortgage Off in 10 Years by Serina Bird
With 40% of Australians owning a home with a mortgage, this book should be interesting to each of them. More importantly, this book’s insights into how to effectively save waste without reducing their standard of living are far more important to all Australians.
Serina Bird, author of How to pay your mortgage off in 10 years (Even when interest rates are going up, is also the host of The Joyful Frugalista Podcast. This book has been well researched and will offer many gems of information about debt management but also money management in general.
To many, the thought of repaying a home mortgage in 10 years is simply unachievable. However, I personally have had several friends with average incomes pay off their home in this time frame and then move on to own a portfolio of investment properties. Their success is in their priorities. They were prepared to spend a few years, where the “wants” were secondary to their “needs”. They were all financially independent by the age of fifty.
This book gives the homeowner valuable tips on how to negotiate better interest rates and how to repay the loan quicker, saving them hundreds of thousands in interest costs. Once the home loan is paid, they can then reap the rewards of having more money to either enjoy luxuries such as better holidays, better cars or enable them to develop strategies to grow their wealth with either investment properties using debt efficiently or other investments such as shares, managed funds and superannuation.
For me, the hidden gem is Serina’s research on spending habits and how much money can be saved. For example, choosing where you do your weekly grocery shop could save you an average of $60 a week. Image what you could do with an extra $3,000 a year. Serina will give you a mind set of priorities and once you accept this mind set, the way forward to a financially secure future is much easier.
The money spent buying this book will be saved in less than a week if you adopt some of the strategies.
For those who are looking down on the barrel of another twenty or so years of mortgage payments, this book will show you how to quickly pay down the debt. We are all familiar with the concept of compound interest, but few truly understand the importance of how reducing the debt quickly in the early stages of the loan will reap rewards. Some readers may not want to do the “hard yards” for 10 years, but even if they reduce that debt by an extra $100,000 to $200,000 in the first five years, the time to repay the loan will be dramatically reduced together with savings in interest costs. This book contains enough information to achieve this goal without unduly restraining their lifestyle choices.
This book was published by Major Street Publishing, an Australian company specializing in high quality books in leadership, business, entrepreneurship, career development, personal finance, personal development, share market and property development, self-care, personal growth and motivational genres. This company is an excellent resource for Australians.
I enjoyed this book as it was a timely reminder of how easy it is to develop wasteful habits. I think it is essential reading for single income families and those on lower-than-average incomes. Adopting the strategies in this book will give the edge to maintain the same lifestyle as those with above average incomes.
How to Pay Your Mortgage Off in 10 Years is out now.