Sell to rent back

HLK

You say 3 adults infamily, I assume 1 of them is son/daughter .. do they pay towards upkeep ?

margaretclare

Hi sollydog

I think you're too young to go for equity release. We did this 2 yrs ago to pay off an existing mortgage, but we were 68 then. At 50 - no chance.

Your best bet is to tackle those debts and keep the mortgage as it is. There's no great reason why you can't continue with a mortgage into retirement years - we could have carried on with ours until we were 83 (it was with Abbey).

Tackle the debts using the 'snowballing' technique i.e. take the one with the highest APR and throw everything you can at it, keeping the other payments at minimum (don't default on any of them!!) Once that has gone, tackle the next one, and so on. Once you've got rid of the debts you can then sit down and decided whether you can afford to overpay on the mortgage.

I'm sure that renting a house would cost a lot more than paying a mortgage. At the time we were paying £260 a month on a mortgage (2-bed bungalow) a guy 2 doors down was renting, and he was paying £600 a month. It's sure to be a lot more now! You'd only be putting money in someone else's pocket.

From my own personal perspective, I see the retirement years as a time when money should come back to you, rather than having to pay huge sums of it out in interest!! To that end, I save £350 a month, have a stakeholder that I pay £156 a month into (£200 gross) and I've got 2 0% credit cards that I'm using for 'stoozing'. No way would I want to start paying rent again!!

HTH

Aunty Margaret