Is It Selfish to Spend Money on Holidays While You Still Have a Mortgage?

It comes up every school holidays, in every group chat, at every barbecue where someone mentions they’re “just back from Bali.” Someone else goes quiet. Because they’re still paying off the kitchen renovation, or the mortgage rate just jumped again, and the idea of dropping a few thousand dollars on flights and accommodation feels less like a treat and more like financial self-sabotage.

So: is it selfish? Irresponsible? Or is it actually one of the smartest things a family can do for itself, holiday or mortgage?

We asked parents on both sides of this one. Their answers were sharper, and more personal, than we expected.

The Case Against: “You Don’t Holiday Your Way Out of Debt”

For Jess, a mother of two in Western Sydney, the maths is simple and unforgiving.

“We owe the bank $650,000. Every dollar we spend on a holiday is a dollar that could’ve gone against the principal, or sat in an offset account earning us interest instead of costing us interest. People forget that a $5,000 holiday isn’t just $5,000. It’s $5,000 plus whatever that would have saved us in interest over the life of the loan. That’s not a holiday, that’s a decision to be poorer for longer.”

Jess isn’t against holidays in principle. She’s against pretending the trade-off doesn’t exist.

“I see friends posting from overseas and I know for a fact they’re stressed about their repayments. I’m not judging them, genuinely. I just don’t understand pretending the two things aren’t connected. You can’t have both the guilt-free holiday and the guilt-free mortgage. Pick one.”

Marcus, a father of three on the Central Coast, takes it further. For him, it’s about what the holiday is quietly teaching the kids.

“We modelled ‘we can’t afford that’ for years so our kids would understand money isn’t infinite. Then what, we fly to Fiji and undo the lesson? Kids notice everything. If they see us stressed about school fees in February and then boarding a plane in July, the message is confusing at best.”

There’s also the anxiety cost, which Jess says never makes it into anyone’s holiday photos.

“I’ve had holidays where I enjoyed maybe half of it because I was doing mortgage maths in my head the whole time. That’s not rest. That’s just moving your stress to a nicer location.”

The Case For: “A Mortgage Isn’t a Life Sentence”

On the other side, Priya, a mother of two in Brisbane, pushes back hard on the idea that a home loan should put family life on hold.

“We’ll have this mortgage for another twenty-two years. Are we supposed to not live for twenty-two years? My kids are seven and nine right now. They won’t be seven and nine again. If I wait until the mortgage is gone to take them somewhere, I’ve missed the actual window where this mattered.”

For Priya, the holiday isn’t separate from the family’s financial life, it’s one of the reasons the financial life exists in the first place.

“Nobody buys a house so they can sit inside it and never leave. We bought a house so we’d have a stable base to build a life from. A holiday, even a modest one, is part of that life. If money is only ever allowed to go one direction, towards debt and never towards the kids’ memories, something’s gone wrong with the priorities, not the holiday.”

Daniel, a father of one in Melbourne, makes a similar point but frames it around burnout.

“My wife and I both work full time, plus the mortgage, plus daycare fees, plus everything else. A week away isn’t indulgence, it’s maintenance. We come back functional. We come back speaking to each other like people who like each other again. Try running a household for two years straight without a single break and tell me that’s the financially responsible choice, because burnout has a cost too, it’s just not one that shows up on a bank statement.”

Both Priya and Daniel are quick to draw a line, though. Neither is arguing for reckless spending.

“I’m not talking about a business class trip to the Maldives on a credit card,” Priya says. “I’m talking about a modest, planned, saved-for holiday. There’s a massive difference between ‘we’re going away because we budgeted for it’ and ‘we’re going away because we deserve it and we’ll figure out the money later.’ The first one is responsible. The second one is the thing giving holidays a bad name.”

Where the Money People Land

We put the question to a financial counsellor who works with families navigating mortgage stress, and the answer was less black-and-white than either side expected.

The core issue, they said, usually isn’t the holiday itself, it’s whether the holiday is planned or reactive. A holiday that’s budgeted for months in advance, sitting in its own separate savings pool, funded without touching the mortgage repayments or emergency buffer, is a fundamentally different financial event to a holiday booked on a whim or a credit card because everyone’s exhausted and it’s been a rough year.

The second version is the one that actually causes the damage people associate with “irresponsible” holidaying, not the act of going away itself.

There’s also a psychological argument that gets left out of the pure-maths version of this debate. Total financial deprivation, where every spare dollar goes to debt with zero allowance for anything that isn’t strictly necessary, tends to backfire. It often leads to bigger, less controlled spending later, the “we’ve been so good for so long, we deserve this” blowout, which is far more financially damaging than a modest, planned annual trip ever was.

In other words: the choice isn’t really “holiday or mortgage.” It’s “planned or unplanned.” And that distinction changes the entire debate.

So Where Does That Leave Families?

Maybe the honest answer is that this was never really a question about holidays. It’s a question about what a family decides money is actually for.

For some families, every extra dollar going against the mortgage is the version of security that lets them sleep at night, and that’s a completely legitimate choice. For others, a mortgage that swallows every ounce of joy for two decades isn’t security, it’s just a longer, slower kind of stress, and a modest annual trip is what keeps the rest of the plan sustainable.

What both sides in our debate actually agreed on, even while disagreeing on the headline question, was this: the problem was never the holiday. It was whether the money for it was planned, or whether it was hoped for.

So we’re putting it to you. Where do you land: mortgage first, always, or is a planned holiday part of a financially healthy family, debt and all?