When my husband and I bought our first home we started off with a 5 year fixed rate mortgage with an amortization of 25 years. Within our first year when we looked at our mortgage statement we were floored when we discovered that we had spent more than $7000 in interest in our first year!!! We could hardly believe that on such a small mortgage the interest would be so high. And we had a pretty good interest rate at that time, too. Our interest rate was 4.99% when most people were stuck paying at least 6%.
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smart debt
As time goes on, loan defaulters are increasing in huge numbers. Students are taking out loans and are not able to repay them in time. Some are not able to pay them back due to financial turmoil and some avoid repayment purposely. Whatever the reason, the aftereffects of not paying back a loan are simply perilous. Defaulted loans can shatter one’s financial records and reduce privileges normally enjoyed by a student. Therefore, if you default on a loan, you need to understand your options. You don’t need to panic because fortunately there are several websites that can help you connect to financial experts who can bring you out of dire consequences.
Many folks work really hard in order to pay off their debt, including credit card debt, car loans, student loans, and their mortgage. This is an excellent idea, although, sometimes once our debt has been paid off, we get careless with our money. We suddenly have all this extra money at our disposal and it can be tempting to splurge.
Instead of blowing money that you no longer need to use to pay off debt, consider saving that money instead. For example, if you were making $350 payments towards your car loan and then you finally paid it off, why not allocate the $350 towards contributing to your retirement savings and other investment accounts to save for your short and long term goals?
Sometimes it may be hard to know if you are in over your head, but if you can relate to some or all of the statements below, it is likely that you have taken on too much debt.
1. You have no savings at all.
2. You only make the minimum payments on your credit cards.
3. Your bank account is always overdrawn and you often have nonsufficient fund (NSF) fees charged to your account.
Did you know that 6 out of 10 Canadians live from paycheck to paycheck? What’s worse is that almost 60% of Canadians would be in serious financial trouble if their pay were delayed by one week.
These are disturbing statistics, so what are we going to do about it? It is obvious that more and more of us are taking on more debt than we can manage. Is it due to greed or trying to keep up with the Joneses? What compels us to sink into so much debt?