mortgages

Imagine for a moment that you're a kid again. Where do you see yourself? What do you wanna do? What are your hopes for the future? Maybe you want to be an astronaut, or an adventurer, or the next drag super-star! We love to see it. What you probably didn't picture was a life spent in crippling debt.

Childhood hopes and dreams are innocent, more Winnie the Pooh than Eeyore the Donkey. In retrospect, I feel Eeyore was the elder statesman of A. A. Milne's book series. He was the one with the corporate job he's killing himself for, just to pay for the mortgage on the house where he stays with his wife and kids, the ones he can't spend nearly as much time with as he'd like to - because he has to work. 

Director of Something or Other at The Company You've Never Heard Of, Ltd. His friends and family don't really know what he does, but it looks good on LinkedIn. It even sounds good to say, even if he hates what he does. Or maybe he actually likes his job, but would prefer to be doing something else. Hand-rearing animals in a farm park would be lovely - if only it paid enough to support an inflating lifestyle! Either way, he's wound-up trapped, fallen down the cracks of life, stuck in the middle between what looks good and what feels right.

Not quite the narrative that Milne wrote about, eh? To my knowledge, no childhood dream of pastures new involves such a horrendous anchor. But it's the anchor many of us have already thrown to the sea floor, the narrative that we are already writing for ourselves each and every day. Someone needs to have a word with the screenwriter! If only it were that easy. 

So why does this become the dream of so many in adulthood? Maybe we follow the money, or the status, or both. Maybe for some, it's a form of social flexing. The house, the car, the suit, the Rolex, it portrays a prestigious lifestyle. It's the financial equivalent of tensing in the mirror for a selfie at the gym. Except with houses, rather than saying "my abs are better than yours," what we are saying is, "my pockets are deeper than yours."

Whilst you can't buy a chiseled, washboard physique, it does take hard work and dedication. The same hard work and dedication that can fool us into thinking that we deserve the fancy house with the multi-car garage and the drawer in your walk-in wardrobe dedicated to your exclusive watch collection. It doesn't matter that there's a huge payment to make each month, a standing order well into the thousands, what matters is that you can afford it and it's plain for the world to see.

The irony of course, is that all of this stuff which brings us closer to the feeling of freedom is actually that which is putting distance between us and true freedom. The harsh reality is that most working people are only three missed mortgage payments away from homelessness. To put it into phrases my dad would use, you loose your job and you're in shit street!

Paradoxically, despite being acutely aware of this slippery slope, its nevertheless tempting, even to me. Just this week, I had a moment of madness while browsing Zoopla. I've become increasingly restless during lockdown. Frustrated and driven mad with cabin fever, I've found myself more likely to throw myself into things without fully considering them. Plus I've been feeling a general unhappiness that's unusual for me, as I'm sure everyone has, which all-too-often manifests itself into "I can't fucking stand this place anymore, I want to move house." This week I saw a little place, ran some basic numbers on it, sent in a viewing request and went to bed.

I slept on it and woke the next day with a clear head and a changed mind. You don't make rash decisions just because you are backed into a corner. So when the estate agent phoned up, eager to get the ball rolling, I had to have that awkward 'letting them down gently' conversation about how I'd processed it over night, applying some much-needed logic and realising it was nonsensical. Right now, pandemic or not, it doesn't make sense for me to move just yet. For a start, I'm only two years into a five-year fixed rate mortgage. Sure, I could early-exit, or port it to a new place, but the reality is that I won't release much cash from the bricks and mortar I call my home. Not after two measly years anyway. I could have scraped together the bare minimum for a deposit, then further scraped the bottom of the barrel to make it affordable each month - but that goes against everything that I stand for.

Sure, I'm under no illusion that there will be people out there who have no choice but to operate at the very limit of their budget. But when you have the choice, why would you voluntarily put yourself in that position? It makes no sense to me.

Whether you're talking about an un-planned, frustration-fuelled move, or a meticulously planned and perfectly executed move into a beautiful mansion in the Hamptons, I believe there to be a common thread that drives us to desire more. Why else would we burden ourselves with six-figure loans just for a place to call home? As humans, we'll do anything to feel complete, including the acquiring of any material good that fits into our template of a perfect life. But as Joshua Fields Millburn puts it, "Everybody is attempting to buy what nobody can sell."

So what is the solution? Is there a solution? If this is an innate human instinct, our hunter-gatherer heritage shining through our 21st century lens, is it at all possible to fight our instinct to seek out more?

Perhaps not. It's probably one for a scholar far more fluent in the ways of the mind than I, but I don't think we can ditch it entirely. After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with buying stuff - so long as it is bought with intention.

When it comes to houses then, here's my hot take. If buying a home is on the cards for you (and please know, it's not automatically the best choice) then you should be aiming for a mortgage that you can comfortably afford over the shortest possible term. To me, that's the key formula, one which can be applied to anyone.

In my case, before I signed on the dotted line for my flat, I made sure that not only could I afford the basic rate monthly payment - but double it. It wouldn't have been pretty by any stretch of the imagination, far removed from any of the sexy, glamorous lifestyles we are used to seeing on Instagram, but the bottomline was that it could be done. In a worst-case scenario, if the mortgage payment or any other bill were to inflate to that degree, I could still have made ends meet. That gave me the confidence I needed to sign the biggest legal contract of my life so far, knowing I was stood on relatively solid ground. It was that which forced me to reconsider the notion of moving any time soon. Sure, in theory, I could have afforded to move, but in practice I'd have had no life. Plus were any of the bills to grow by just a couple hundred pounds a month, I'd have been seriously struggling to stay afloat.

Yet somehow, it's exactly that which has become fashionable.

It's now the expectation for homeowners to go big, or go (back to their mum's) home, to stretch themselves to the very top-end of their budgets - or worse, over-budget! Don't get me wrong, if you can afford double the mortgage payment on your dream home, then have at it! But for gen pop, it seems like we're all trying to keep up with an unrealistic expectation of what a perfect life is - and we're killing ourselves for it. Perhaps it is time that society let go of this idea that life always needs to be perfect for us to be complete.

But then again, perhaps I'm the weirdo here. I have plenty of friends with vastly different world views, with the attitude that you could die tomorrow so you may as well enjoy the time you got, the 'got it, flaunt it' types. And I get that. In fact, sometimes I wish I shared a bit of their laid-back approach to that big life thing we all have going on here. I'd be a much calmer person! But the thing is, chances are that you will wake up every morning for the foreseeable future, so it's worth giving some serious thought to how free you want to be each day.

~ Aedan.