No more holiday tours to meet mortgage payments have become the norm for a great number of Australian homeowners, with about 50 percent more revealing that day-to-day basic requirements were being trimmed to cope with the upward surge of housing interest rates.

In the new home finance index furnished by the Bankwest-Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia on Thursday, homeowners were foregoing opportunities to eat out and scrimping on their daily needs in order to honour mortgage repayment commitments.

Polling more than 1000 homeowners across the nation, the new survey said that five out of ten respondents have opted out from dining on restaurants while 47 percent have instituted cost-cutting measures on home expenditures, with some lugging packed-lunch to work, to save more money and make loan repayments.

Bankwest retail chief executive Vittoria Shortt said that as interest rates were relatively higher compared to last year, mortgage holders were increasingly reducing their spending budgets, stressing that "there is a clear move to thriftier spending for many Australian households."

The survey showed that 42 percent of those polled were either cancelling holiday plans or scouring any available options to stretch their vacation money while 40 percent shared that they were saving more cash by resorting to purchase food requirements in bulk.

Also, many Australians were left to devise their own measures on lifting their financial state with about 17 percent putting their stake on buying more lotto tickets, 20 percent re-selling unused household goods, 11 percent getting additional jobs and 15 percent shaving their insurance and superannuation contributions.

MFAA chief executive Phil Naylor said that meeting loan repayments boil down to sound budget management as he pointed out that increasing interest rates were unavoidable though borrowers could minimise the pressure "by considering making an extra mortgage repayment with extra funds that would have otherwise been used for things like holidays."