Stephen and Stephanie
Equitus saved us 23 years off our mortgage!
Where we were...
Life's pretty sweet at the moment because we can see that working our finances together really puts us at an advantage.
When we got together in 2003 people teased about having such similar names. We thought we were in it for the short term but here we are still together in 2009. I know it doesn't sound very romantic but I put it down to having similar financial objectives.
At first we had some spectacular rows about money. But when we bought a house together in 2005 in Rolleston, we knew we had to think straight because we were taking out a thirty year mortgage.
We laughed at the idea of still being together in thirty years but really being Darby and Joan together wasn't such a bad idea.
How Equitus Helped us...
Before we made this commitment to a "house" we did a bit of research. All the banks looked pretty much the same. Stephen's Dad said we should talk to his next door neighbours because they were on some sort of plan that was saving them money off their mortgage.
We found out they were with Equitus and had a consultant visit us right away. He told us that if we had our mortgage correctly structured and our exit strategy was properly monitored and mentored we could be out of our mortgage in half the time.
Well fifteen years sounded a lot better than thirty so we got Equitus to do a projection for us. It turned out we could be out in eleven years. That blew us away. Saving 19 years off our mortgage sounded too good to be true. I told Mum we'd just won lotto.
Anyway to cut a long story short we bought our Rolleston house in 2005 on the basis that we'd be done with our mortgage before we reached thirty five.
Where we are now...
Using the Equitus system has been dead easy. It takes less than a minute a month to check whether we're on track or not. What's more , we've constantly beaten the forecast exit point and will now own our house in 2012. That's just seven years from go to whoa.
Recently we've been out looking at an investment property because we can easily finance it out of the equity we've now built in our Rolleston property. Life's pretty sweet at the moment because we can see that working our finances together really puts us at an advantage.
To protect sensitive financial data, the names and images of the case study participants have been changed.