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When you are busy working away on your career or your business, or something that consumes much of your time, it is easy to overlook the nitty gritty details that bedevil your personal finances. I mean did you ever take the time to really read and understand your credit card agreement, your life insurance papers, your mortgage?

That was us! But we were caught out by falling interest rates, until it became such an obvious difference that we were forced to do something. Initially, we were successful in negotiating a re-mortgage and getting a full point of our interest rate, but we realised that it was just a ridiculously small amount when we saw rates still another point or more below what we were paying. So, we then went back to our lender and remortgaged the whole amount. While we didn’t play the “we’ll take our business elsewhere” card, the property market here was already in the doldrums, so it wasn’t difficult. In the end, instead of paying $675 per month in payments our remortgage ended up with us paying about $475. Not bad for a bit of inconvenience to our otherwise hectic lives.

However, we have to move with the times, and interest rates have now risen quite a lot from their low point, we are now considering switching to a fixed rate mortgage as a kind of insurance to protect us with interest rates that are still quite low historically speaking.

I recently came across this post that suggested we should pay off our mortgages within 15 years, not the typical 25- or 30-year deal! Now that would be aggressive. And locking in interest rates that are historically low may not be a bad idea! That would be much better than a 50-year mortgage! What do you think?