Mortgages are an extraordinarily important part of many people's lives. We get huge amounts of detailed financial advice when we take out a mortgage but almost nothing to help us with the complex emotional relationship we then have with it.

First Love
Taking a mortgage out is one of the biggest steps you'll ever take in life. It's like volunteering to put yourself in jail for thirty years. OK the jail is a nice three bedroom semi and you're allowed a certain amount of freedom as long as you work hard, obey the rules and pay your debts to the financial institution of your choice. Just remember that when you finally let yourself out you'll be an old person who doesn't remember what to do with freedom. On the bright side, having a house you've paid for means it's one hundred percent more likely you'll get decent care in your old age.

Ongoing Relationship
Having a mortgage is a little bit like having a child in that afterwards your life is no longer really your own. There is always another mouth to feed, one that always gets hungry towards the end of the month, every month for a very long time indeed. This means that a job that previously you would have considered just a temporary post while you looked for your dream job, now becomes a vital tool to feed the gaping maw of the mortgage.

Fixed?
Fixed Rate and Trackers both sound equally attractive because they're very cleverly named. Fixed Rate could also be called The Shackle Mortgage or the Strait Jacket mortgage. For its part the Tracker could be called the Unstable Mortgage or the Roller Coaster Big Adventure Mortgage. What the Tracker gives you is an intense and rather improbable fascination for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and any word he breathes about interest rates.

Or Freerange?
Fixed Rates – you either love them or hate them. You absolutely love them when you lock into a low rate and then interest rates go through the roof. You love them so much you try and get the fact that you've got one into just about any conversation you have with anyone. You may even feel a strong temptation to get a t-shirt printed with 'Yes that's right. I'm Fixed for Five Years at 5%, sucker!" Of course if interest rates do what they've done over the last couple of years that particular t-shirt will be buried deep in your shirt draw or may well be relegated to gardening duties (but only in the back garden because someone might read it in the front garden).

Trouble Spots
Anyone who has a mortgage knows that sometimes the monthly money doesn't quite stretch to cover the mortgage when, for example, you also want to eat. For these odd occasions some mortgage providers kindly provide a payment holiday. This is another marketing gem which gives the impression that the sun will be shining throughout the month you're not paying the mortgage. In a way it probably will be because you've spent that month's mortgage money on actually having a holiday. Like any holiday you have to come back and the bank will be looking forward to the resumption of your payments with open tills. It's at times like this you remember that, while you still have a mortgage, the bank actually owns your house and, if you don't keep up with the payments, it will take it back from you. This seems rather unfair as banks have lots of houses and you only have one. Perhaps that's why bankers live in such big houses because they get the pick of the ones they take back.

Remortgaging
Remortgaging is the critical time, normally once every five years, where you absolutely swear that you will never get into bed with another Fixed Term or another Tracker mortgage for as long as you live. It's also the time when you burn the little voodoo doll of the financial adviser who sold you the mortgage five years ago. You then have to do something that no normal person ever does: you have to take a view on what's going to happen to interest rates in the next five years. You can do this by factoring in geopolitics, the business cycle, money supply, quantitative easing and interbank lending rates. Sounds complicated but you'll probably have as much chance of getting it right as the world's leading economists and your local financial adviser.

Premature Repayment
For a lucky group of people, they have a windfall or a great job that allows them to pay off their mortgage early. They then become a very select number of people under sixty who have a house with no mortgage. This is a very nice feeling. It's like having emotional cavity wall insulation knowing that however bad things get you'll still have your home completely paid for with no debt. Enjoy this feeling while it lasts because you then realise that everything else still costs a fortune and, if your earnings don't keep up, you'll soon be flirting with equity release and giving your house back to the bank again.

Final Goodbye
Paying off your mortgage in the normal way at the end of its term is a very strange event. It's something you've worked almost all your life to achieve, it's the time when your home finally becomes totally yours and yet it's just about the most downbeat anticlimax possible. The final payment is something akin to taking British citizenship in the past – a rather complex and slightly embarrassing shuffle of paper. What should happen is that your bank should lay on some kind of brass band with free champagne and the manager should hand over the deeds to your house on a silver platter and then bow deeply or something. Instead nothing happens. If you listen carefully you might pick up a feint note of peevishness from the bank that they've lost the ability to repossess your home. But then it feels like someone is actually paying money into your bank every month, because it's not being taken out! That's a very nice feeling and goes someway to compensate for the fact that you've been seriously underpaying into your pension in order to pay the mortgage.

<
• Mortgage enquiry