Mortgage Free in Three Yrs

financialbliss · 4 April 2010 at 10:45PM

Well, this is probably my final post in this mortgage free in three challenge.

Having lurked for about a year before I registered in October 2006, this MFiT challenge was something I really wanted to get into – my first major forum challenge after registering…

For me, this MFiT challenge was always for me about making a big dent in rather than paying off our mortgage completely, due to us being a single income household.

In April 2007 I stated off with a balance of exactly £73,217.00 My first issue with the challenge was setting a rather steep objective to reduce the balance to £35,000.00 which was more than halving the mortgage. In hindsight – possibly slightly too keen an objective.

You may be familiar with my OCD issue on dates – I was originally wanting to set a mortgage free date of 14/07/14 – just slightly more than 10 years after taking our our second mortgage (a term of 25 years), but part of this challenge and after a bit of finding my feet in the forums, about 6 months into the challenge in October 2007 I started my second major forum challenge of my own mortgage free diary and set a public goal of attempting to be mortgage free by 12/12/(20)12.

This challenge has done a lot to help me towards this objective – a big thanks to Dithering Dad, Tall Girl and the sheer enthusiasm and determination of this thread. Congratulation if you cleared your mortgage or exceeded your target and don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t – you’ll still be saving yourself a lot of mortgage interest.

In January 2009 with Maz123, we announced a follow on challenge taking us up to 12/12/12 - my third major forum challenge. Again, despite this being a tough objective to hit, I hope to clear the remaining mortgage balance by 12/12/12.

So, down to the numbers:

Starting amount: 73,217

Interest charged:

2007 : 2,570.47
2008 : 3,057.87
2009 : 2,558.46
2010 : 565.12
Total: 8,751.92

Payments: 38,589.86

Final balance: £43,379.06

Not quite the £35,000 I was hoping for but I’m just short by £8,379 – having attained 78.08% of my goal.

I’m pleased with that as recently as December, I was forecasting a final challenge amount around the £45,000 mark.

Good luck in chipping away with your remaining balance or here's hoping you're having a fun mortgage free time if you've freed the mortgage treadmill...

Thanks again,
Financial Bliss.

taka · 5 April 2010 at 2:35PM

Thought I'd post my final amount too! I started at £56,000 and my mortgage is now £43,595.14!

I was sceptical that I could do it but I managed it! Thanks everyone for the support along the way especially DD and TG! :T

My amount owing has gone up since I last did an update on this thread (~6 months ago?) as I made the decision to no longer count some of my savings against the amount owing but I still managed to beat my challenge!

My savings are looking loads healthier than ever before too! :j

Good luck with future OPs everyone and those that are MF - enjoy yourselves! (The Alaska cruise sounds fab ailuro!)

Kaz2904 · 6 April 2010 at 2:16PM

I've just got off the phone to my mortgage company and got my final figure. Sadly I owed more on the mortgage than I thought (about £480 more :eek:). I then did a quick round up of my other savings accounts (apart from our ISAs which I can't access online so I've conservatively guestimated them).

I'm delighted to report that we had repayed more of our savings than we thought we had by £1100 :j.

Our final number means we have exceeded our target (by the skin of our teeth!) :j.

So :T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T to everyone who's been on the challenge.

Number 6 signing off: Initial debt £92727.75, Current debt £49560.04, Repaid £43167.71 or 100.39% of £43000 target

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:j:j:j:j:j:j:j:j:j:j:j:j:j and a couple of these :money::money::money::D

Redbedhead · 7 April 2010 at 6:55AM

Lovely to read everyones updates. I have PM'ed Tallgirl but thought I should post on here as well.

As at 07/04/10 we have paid off £19734.35 since we got our new mortgage just over 2 years ago. Balance now stands at £185625.65.

I set a target of repaying £20725 off our £60k ish mortgage in 3 years. Then made things more difficult by increasing the mortgage to £205k! So the £19734 repayment is since we have had the £205k which is roughly 2.5 years. For the first 6 months of the challenge we managed to pay off £3,188.82 which makes a total over the 3 years of £22,923 which means we did actually make target!!

I am pretty pleased with that as in the past 3 years we have:

Moved house and tripled our mortgage, also having to do c£20k of work to make the new house habitable.
Had 1 baby with 12 months maternity leave on SMP
Had 2 redundancies
Started saving for our second baby which is due in August!

I think I may join another challenge as well to keep the motivation going.

Well done all, particularly those who have cleared their mortgage.

TallGirl · 7 April 2010 at 10:17AM

There are some amazing figures coming in and lots of PM's which is great. I shall do the chart next week as I am away for the weekend. Might try to do some stats too but not very good at it.

dawnylou · 7 April 2010 at 12:02PM

Just called for my balance - £103,176.36

We managed to pay off a load more than we thought we could!

Well done to everyone else too

cupid_s · 7 April 2010 at 3:46PM

Hi all,
For a while now we’ve been saving all our extra mortgage money in an account paying about 4 times more interest than we are currently paying on our mortgage as this seemed the sensible option. So when calculating the final total I have taken all these savings from our outstanding mortgage balance as this is what the money is for and it will definitely not be used for anything else.

So… taking this into account the outstanding balance is now £3700. Our initial balance was £66746, meaning we’ve paid off £63046 in 3 years.

Annoyingly, we would have easily met our target had we not spent over 9k on a holiday for our 5 year anniversary but at least it was a very nice holiday. We are now working extra hard to save the £3700 so we can reward ourselves with another well-earned holiday!

Thanks to everyone who took part in the challenge, especially DD and tallgirl for setting this up and keeping it going for 3 years. I know I wouldn’t have done so well if it wasn’t for you all.

black_taxi_2 · 7 April 2010 at 3:51PM

9k holiday---must of eaten some nice places

tell us more

Superfast_Gran · 7 April 2010 at 7:19PM

In 2003 we spent £8K on on month's trip to Australia. We flew into Sydney and sayed there for 4 nights until we'd gotten or heads straight again. We then hired a campervan and drove from Sydney up to Cairns - visiting lots of lovely places on the way. We did our share of excursions - blue mountains, animal parks, whale watching, crocodile watching ay night, oh and bats too. We did horseriding through the tropical forest and on the beach. Luxury hot air balloon flight and champagne breakfast at 5 star Thala Beach - chauffeur driven there and back of course!! We snorkelled on my birthday - which was a hug achievement for me as I am afraid of water. We had an intimate, beautiful candle lit progressive dinner by the Murray River - only 4 tables of 8 - with a presentation by Aborigine people that we were encouraged to join in with towards the end. We did the waterfall route on the Atherton Tablelands, where we also dodged the marsh flies - evil little bugs, well, actually not so little. Cream teas, dinner on an evening yacht cruise, the night zoo, bbq's with the locals. Oh, and let's not forget the shopping!! We spent our last few days at a 5 star spa resort situated in Mossman in a tree house with hammocks on the veranda overlooking the river that was safe to swim and canoe in.

We both still agree that it was money well spent, so much so we went back again in 2005. However we only stayed 3 weeks, spending £4K and stopped in Japan for a few nights on the way back. Our 25th anniversary is 7 years away - June 13! - and we plan to have the mortgage pretty low if not paid off and have 3 weeks in Australia and 3 weeks in New Zealand. I think it's pretty certain than that'll be quite costly too as we want to have as good a holiday as the first one over there. So, my point being that it is quite easy to spend several thousands on A holiday and if you can pull it off, go for it!!

~daisy~_2 · 7 April 2010 at 7:46PM

am holding out for my end of year mortgage statement - am anticipating a balance of around 14k

would have made a bigger dent but bought a mini convertible back in november ....

if it doesnt appear i will ring for a balance on monday

Mortgage Free in Three Yrs

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