This article is playful look at the origin, etymology, and psychology, of the word ‘amortisation’. The article is intended to be a humorous and poetic dig at the word that has become central to our discussions, and as a historical reference to deepen our understanding. Of course, one of the underlying primary goals we work towards on a daily basis is increasing your equity, reducing your loan in the lowest possible time, and building wealth through your various property strategies, and our debt reduction methods are central to this end.
In the world of finance, there is perhaps no term more poetically laden with irony than amortisation. Originating from the Old French amortir, which means “to kill”, or “to bring to death”, it might sound like a strange and unsettling thing to name the process by which debt is paid off over time. The word carries a profound, almost dark implication — paying to kill something, gradually, slowly, but surely. A slow death is what the process promises, not for the debtor, but for the debt itself.
To amortise a loan is to make peace with time, to stretch a promise of payment across the vast landscape of years. Each monthly payment is a quiet, almost ritualistic act of death: slowly, the principal, the haunting figure of the loan, is killed. It is not an instant death, like the swift and decisive foreclosure, but a protracted one, stretching out across months, sometimes decades. Like a slow burn, amortisation does its work silently, steadily, and with a certain inevitability.
The irony of the term lies in its duality. Amortisation extinguishes the debt over time, but in doing so, it requires the borrower to sacrifice — not the home, as in foreclosure — but a bit of their very life, every month. Money that could have been used for investment, for savings, for leisure, is now designated for the sole purpose of reducing the loan’s principal. Each payment, seemingly benign, is in fact a small death. The borrower sacrifices their autonomy, their financial freedom, as they watch the debt shrink slowly into nothingness. Every mortgage payment becomes a step in the journey toward the debt’s death, and yet each step is weighted with the knowledge that the road is long, and the end distant.
The slow death of amortisation operates much like the way in which we process the idea of mortality itself. We know the inevitable end is coming, but we do not see it immediately. The full weight of the debt — its burden, its shadow—is heavy, but not all at once. Over time, we learn to live with it, adjust to its presence, even normalize it. With each payment, the debt diminishes, but so does the borrower’s income, so does their savings, so does the money they might have used for something else. The borrower dies a little with each payment, slowly fading into the background of their own financial narrative, their aspirations and desires held hostage by a number on a bank statement. It’s not a violent death, but a suffocating one, a gradual relinquishing of what might have been.
There is something almost poetic about this method of extinguishing debt. For in the act of amortising, the debt is not simply vanquished — it is nurtured, nourished, and allowed to live long enough to transform. The loan, once a heavy burden, becomes part of the borrower’s life, shaping their choices, their plans, their lifestyle. In some ways, amortisation is not just about the debt — it is about the borrower’s relationship to time itself. Every payment reflects a piece of the borrower’s future given away, and yet, slowly, a new future is created, one where the debt no longer exists.
In a more existential sense, amortisation also reflects the human condition itself. We all live with a kind of debt to time, to the future, to the past, and in this sense, amortisation is a mirror to our daily lives. Like a mortgage, life demands something from us, constantly, and we repay it piece by piece. What is the difference between paying off a loan and paying off the moments of our lives, one by one? Both involve the surrender of something precious, be it money or time. Each payment is a surrender to the inevitable process of living and dying—of the gradual erasure of what came before and the creation of what will come next.
Amortisation, in its mechanical and financial sense, offers little room for sentimentality. It is a cold process: numbers, deadlines, schedules. Yet, it mirrors the way in which human beings approach their own mortality. The debt — like life itself — is inevitable, unyielding, and omnipresent. You cannot simply wish it away; you must endure it. Slowly, but surely, it diminishes, only to be replaced by new debts, new obligations, new stages of life. The process of amortisation is both a microcosm of financial life and a haunting reminder of the cyclical nature of all things.
But let us not be deceived by the seeming finality of this slow death. For while amortisation promises an end to the debt, it never really vanishes from the psyche. The borrower may live to see the day the final payment is made, but the memory of those years of sacrifice lingers on. The debt may die, but the scars of its existence remain. Like the proverbial scar tissue, amortisation leaves behind a mark that no amount of payment can ever completely erase.
And so, as the borrower continues to pay, the mortgage, like a shadow, continues to follow, its presence ever looming, a constant reminder of the price we pay for stability, for ownership, for the promise of a better future. In the end, amortisation is a reminder that nothing comes without cost — not even the elusive, fleeting sense of security that a home provides.
