Paying the mortgage not always first priority

Almost a third of Australians with a mortgage said they would skip a home loan repayment in preference to doing without utilities and basic consumer items.

In a sign that maintaining mortgage repayments is not as important as has always been assumed, when asked by Dun & Bradstreet what their payment priorities were 31 per cent said the mortgage was the payment they were least likely to make if they did not have enough money to pay all their bills.

Twenty-nine per cent said they would skip their pay-TV account, 17 per cent said they would let the mobile phone bill slide, 15 per cent said they would ignore their electricity and internet bills and 14 per cent said they would ignore the credit card account.

The Payment Priorities Study is the first such survey conducted by D&B, so there are no earlier responses to compare it to.

Respondents were not asked to explain their priorities, so pundits will be left to speculate about the reasons people have become cavalier about paying the mortgage on time.

Maybe homeowners think that the banks, which have become much more accommodating in dealing with hardship cases, have gone soft.

Other findings of the survey are that 41 percent of respondents paid at least one bill late in the past year.