Craig

Interesting, yesterday I saw a piece Paul Ryan from PropTrack had.

He was asking the question, what is mortgage stress?

The commonly quoted metric is

is those spending more than 30% of their income on mortgage repayments.

And official data covers non-performing loans, which tracks loans that are 90 or more days behind on their repayments.

And he says that there is a clear reason for the low current level of mortgage stress.

Most stress is caused by a loss of income.

And of course, the current unemployment rate, the lowest in almost 50 years, means that most people can make those important mortgage repayments.

On the stress side, he says this is the fastest the Reserve Bank has increased interest rates since 1994.

And most borrowers are well placed to absorb these additional costs.

But interest rates will increase further, he says, as markets expect an additional 1.5 percentage points, which would push rates beyond the level recent borrowers have been assessed against and, more importantly, stress tested against.

And at the moment, almost everyone has the option to sell their home to repay their mortgage.

less than 0.25% of loans are in negative equity.

That's according to RBA data.

And Paul Ryan said that while we are unlikely to see a lot of stress, many households may have a tough financial period ahead.

And let's hope that that is not you.

And coming up, we are back in the Gold Coast again, gee, twice in one week.

And we're going to be talking about a unique home that sold there recently.

And we'll be talking with Alex, our man on the ground there who has an interesting double career going on.

Now, if you're celebrating your birthday for September the 15th on this Thursday morning, you are sharing your birthday with Oliver Stone, turning 76, the film director.