Thanks mate for the very informed reply!.

Seeing that you are in Canberra, is it possible to tee up an appointment with you and get some advice from you while at the same time put down a plan fwd. I will pm you my details.

But I like your idea of the interest only loan. Currently we pay principle + interest. And we have set up a mortgage offset account which all our savings and pay goes into (that’s the $38k). So we are actually reducing our mortgage quite quickly since we paid off all our debts. It’s taken us about 8-6 months of savings to get our $38k to date and this included a overseas holiday that we just got back from. So we can be very disciplined savers, however our weak point is that we both like to travel. So we go every year someplace overseas.

In response to your question to the Melbourne house. We will probably go back at one point, but don’t know exactly when as most of our family is down there. The Melbourne property is quite old, it’s a 70 year old house on an 800 square block. So we have loosely thought about knocking the house down one day and building or even sub dividing and buying elsewhere, but this is dependent on getting the mortgage down to a level where we can do this. Canberra being a relatively safe market for rent is making us keen to buy a place here and even if we do move back to Melbourne we can still rent it out as investment property.