Can we all get a hundred and fifty grand off our mortgage?

Dave O'Connell

A Different View

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

I have to come clean and admit that I have made a series of critical financial errors right from the moment we decided to buy our family home.

First off, we paid way too much for it – five years in therapy have allowed me to wipe the actual amount from my memory but I do know that the house across the road is now on the market for not much more than one-third of the price the owner rejected around the time that we bought ours.

But my biggest mistake was that I took out an enormous mortgage and I’ve kept paying it religiously ever since.

Stupidly I kept doing it when we could have gone on long holidays instead; I still paid up when we could have changed the car or bought a little hideaway in France or Turkey.

I should have stopped paying and squirreled away just enough to fly to a bolthole in the UK or the US from where I could declare myself well and truly bankrupt.

I’d then have had to hunker down in my condominium with the beach views until such time as my period in financial limbo was at an end – and then I could have come home to start all over again.

But I was stupid – like tens of thousands others out there who have prioritised the repayment of their mortgage over all other debts and who have actually accomplished nothing more than making the hole even deeper than it was at the start.

And somehow, we’re the lucky ones.

We’re not allowed to voice our frustrations at a system, where we pay all of the tax on our income because we don’t have a team of accountants to reveal those little-known tax havens.

Our earnings are there for any taxman worth his salt to see; we have no other sources of income unless twenty quid on a 4/1 winner at Cheltenham qualifies.

Every utility provider has us by the proverbials, because we’re signed up on a direct debit that ensures they get their dosh before my wages have even settled in to their new surroundings.

So we have no hiding places, no secret accounts, no three-month credit window on our bills – we work, we get paid, we pay out and the cycle starts all over again.

And yes, we’re lucky that we have jobs and an income because there are many who don’t – but does that preclude us from anger or frustration because we barely have the wherewithal to keep our heads over water?

I do not, for one minute, begrudge the Dublin couple who had one-third of their mortgage debt written off by AIB last week. I just wish that I could have €150,000 taken off mine.

That wouldn’t even halve my mortgage, but it would give me the security that I crave – the money for college, for pensions, for the rainy day. As it is, every day is a rainy day and with a massive mortgage it will continue so for years to come.

Our Dublin friends owed €400,000 after borrowing to buy their home during the boom, and they are struggling with loans, credit card debt and other borrowings.

They are caught in a trap from which there is no escape – and this represented the only pragmatic solution, as well as being the morally correct route to take as well. 

The Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation are a fantastic group of people who provide the only shelter in the midst of a financial storm for couples who find themselves at their wit’s end.

As the banks close in on repossession and everything you’ve worked for heads down the pan, these angels of mercy come to pull as much as they can from the wreckage to allow you to cling in to your life.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.