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Mortgage
Retirement
Process
You've found a bit of spare cash each week. Where it goes changes when you're debt free by more than a decade — same money, very different outcomes.
Each line is your home-loan balance less whatever that strategy has built. It reaches zero the year your position could clear the debt.
The dashed green line sits almost on top of the blue one — that isn't a drawing error. Paying down a 6.15% loan and earning 6.0% on an investment come to nearly the same thing here, so shares and extra repayments finish within months of each other. What separates them is the risk you carry and whether you can get at the money — not the finish line.
This page asks which strategy clears the loan first. The companion page asks what each one has built after ten years — money you could put on the mortgage, or toward school fees, or anywhere else you like.
Every one of these works. They just work at different speeds, with different trade-offs — and the trade-offs matter as much as the numbers.
The simplest option, and the only one that touches the loan directly. Every extra dollar comes straight off the principal, so you stop paying interest on it immediately — an instant, guaranteed return equal to your interest rate, tax-free, with nothing that can fall in value.
The catch: your money is gone into the house. Getting it back means redrawing or refinancing, and you end up owning exactly one asset — one that doesn't earn you an income.
Salary sacrificing sends money to super before tax. On a $150,000 income that means it's taxed at 15% instead of 39% — so roughly $1.39 lands in super for every $1 you'd have had in your hand. That head start compounds for decades, which is why it beats shares here despite identical returns.
The catch: you cannot touch it until you're 60. It is genuinely building your net position — but it will not pay a mortgage bill next Tuesday, and there's a $30,000 a year cap that your employer's contributions already eat into.
Buying into a diversified fund each week. Fully liquid, no debt, no lock-up, and you can stop or start whenever you like. Unlike super you can sell and put it against the loan the moment you choose to.
Look at the chart and the green line is almost exactly on the blue one. That is the honest result, not a coincidence: earning 6.0% on savings and saving 6.15% of interest are near enough the same arithmetic. Shares and extra repayments finish within months of each other — what differs is risk and access, not the date.
The catch: you're investing with your own money only, so you get growth on what you've saved — not on what you've borrowed. Earnings are taxed at your marginal rate along the way, and the value can fall as easily as it rises.
This is the one that behaves differently, and the reason is leverage. Your $110 a week is not buying $110 of asset — it's holding a $600,000 one. The rent and the tax deductions carry most of the cost; you carry the gap. Growth then applies to the whole $600,000, not to what you put in.
The catch: it's debt, it's illiquid, and it only works over a real holding period — we model a minimum of 10 years. A vacancy, a rate rise or a bad purchase all land on you. It has the most upside and the least margin for a careless decision.
“We've knocked our mortgage down from 25 years — paid off in 10 years. That is the best thing. We wanted to pay our mortgage off as soon as possible so we don't have that debt hanging over our head.”
“We knew we had to do something, we just didn't know what it was. So we looked into investing into shares. … It worked out that all we needed was to have the growth in the house, the equity in the house.”
“Three years on, we have two investment properties that we never thought we'd be able to do. … We don't fight about money any more.”
Click any photo to watch the full video. These are individual clients describing their own experience. Results depend entirely on personal circumstances and are not a guide to what you would achieve.
A comparison is only worth as much as what sits behind it. These are deliberately conservative — not best case — and they're the same figures our modelling tools use. Where a page lets you enter your own figures, your entries replace the matching assumption below.
This page runs on averages. A free Discovery Call runs on your actual loan, income and goals — and there's no cost until you decide to act.
Fill in the form to book your free 30-minute strategy session — a relaxed chat about your goals around paying down debt, planning for retirement, and the options available to you. Appointments can be booked Monday to Thursday 11am–5pm and Friday 10am–4pm (Melbourne time).
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Helping everyday Australians reduce debt and build wealth for a better retirement — property investment experts when you're ready.
