Woo Hoo!!! Congrats! That's awesome. West Coast Cellar meetup!

I hope I get mine too. I had to send a different check and sign different papers on my offer since I gave my best and final offer of $400k. I hope we get it.

I'd be willing to bet with insurance and taxes his payment is close to $4,000 per month.

In that range.

Congrats!

$4k per month? What term would that loan be over? We don't pay anywhere near that much for our mortgage (which would be around the same amount) even if you do include insurance etc.

20% down, 30 year fixed at 5%

When you say insurance, do you mean building/contents insurance or mortgage insurance?

Over here, you only have to get mortgage insurance if you're borrowing more than 80% of the value of the property in most cases.

That's with homeowners insurance, hazard insurance.

80% is the same cutoff for mortgage insurance.

Congrats, smooth! It's a beautiful place. I love mission-tile roofs, but they aren't common in this area.

We pay less than $2500/month with a slightly higher interest rate over a similar term (might be 25yrs actually).

There must be a different calculation here than there or something.

Interesting.

When is the move-in fiesta?

In the UK before we left, all the talk was about "Australian-style" mortgages and how you could save a load of money because interest was calculated daily rather than monthly or something....

There are different types of mortgages, but our interest is calculated on the minimum monthly balance, so what we do is load all our income into the mortgage account and live off the Credit Card, then pay it off at the end of the month. So in effect, although we're not paying any more off the loan, what we are paying is more capital and less interest. It's quite good really.

Here, at least awhile back, they were offering considerable savings if you agreed to make mortgage payments twice a month instead of once. That extra half month's interest, on half the monthly payment, adds up to a lot of money.

If you pay 13 monthly payments per year on a 30 year loan rather than 12 and ask the bank to put the extra payment on the principle, you'll knock 10 years off your loan.