Mortgage-Free Wannabe Welcome and Explanation

hornetgirl

Excellent new board - just what I've been waiting for.

Our target is to get our mortgage paid by September 2008, 15 years early. We currently overpay by £635 every month, and make additional overpayments as soon as we have extra lump sums of £500 available.

A mortgage calculator on one of the other threads showed that just paying the £635 extra per month means the mortgage will be cleared in 4.1 years, so if we can also come up with enough extra £500s, Sept 08 should easily be achievable.

Can't wait!!

hazelize_uk

Really please to read this board as we have been trying to do the same thing for a few years now - we have an offset type mortgage and rounded the payments up by £60ish a couple of years ago but from December we have been paying anything left over in the month straight to the mortgage. We were putting it into an offset account but the temptation is there to dip into so we now knock it straight off! £43,898 left and hoping to be mortgage free in at least 3 years

I do have a dilemma tho and dont really know the place to put it!

I have recently been involved with sorting out paperwork etc, for grandparents, who have been forced to sell there houses in order to pay for their long term medical care.

It has upset the whole family thinking how hard they worked to buy their houses to lose them in this way and have nothing to leave behind which is what they would have wanted.

I've been thinking about transferring ownership of our house into the names of my children once they turn 18 to prevent the same thing happening, does anyone know if this is a) possible or b) legal or c) have any better ideas??

keith234

im sure u can transfer money, house, or what ever to ur children, but there is a 25 year clause, if u die, CGT, if u become ill n need residential care within the 25 years ur assets given to ur children can be used to pay the bills. Bare in mind also, if ur child own ur house, it is their house.... would u trust an 18 year old with £250,000?

waterrat

Help!
Do i save or do i get rid of the mortgage?

Mortgage tracker due to finish 4 years 4 months
amount still owing £13,000.00 ish
no early repayment charges

Savings.
£20,110.00 in cash ISA
£11,500.00 in FTSE 100 tracking ISA

we are still quite young 44 and 42 with two children 19 and 16
would like to rid ourselves of this debt
no other real debts to speak of
advice please
also will get the family a debt pig asap !

phbaker

I am in the process of controlling and paying off previous debts. I have got all outstanding debt at good rates, £4,300 on barclaycard at 2.9% for length of balance and have replaced an I.F. loan for £8500 at 8.3% with a ZOPA loan at 4.85% over 3 years. My mortgage is fixed at 4.29% for two years and I cant pay extra into it just now. In two years i hope to have paid off the barclaycard and possibly the ZOPA loan and start paying extra into the mortgage.

Which brings me to my question. Some of you have said that you have spreadsheets to calculate when multiple loans with different interest rates can be paid off with extra payments. Can one of you make the spreadsheet available to me please, I am not a whizz on Excel but know how to use simple spreadsheets and i think something like that would be a great help.

cheers in advance

oh and how do you get the signature to show, i have selected it to but it aint! am i bein stoopid?

mayb_2

Help needed!

We have one of those all in one Bank Accounts which contains all debts, including the mortgage. and all savings into one account. However it is cheaper to put debts into a 0% credit card and keep moving them around to avoid paying interest on them. Otherwise you are paying for them at the same rate as your mortgage.

We were advised recently to pay only the interest on our mortgage until the end of term (10 yrs) and spend the money saved on repayments on other things. At the end of the term we could sell up and buy a smaller, cheaper house and pay off the mortgage with the profit from the sale. This only works because our children have grown up and left us with a house bigger than we really need.

I really like the idea of being mortgage free but should we put all of the credit card debt into the mortgage and plan to pay it all off as quickly as possible or should we take the advice and avoid paying off our debts, including the mortgage at this time? If we keep the house we are in we could perhaps sell it for a pension or get equity release later on.

Or perhaps we should sell up now- buy a smaller house and be mortgage free but with less of a fall back if we need cash later. What do you do with the extra money - spend it or try to save it for the future?

There are about a dozen more alternatives running around in my head and I don't know which way to jump! Having had a failed endowment and a failed savings plan for a pension, we are feeling very vunerable and finding it hard to trust our judgement on anything. So what do you think - it would be so nice to stop worrying about money?

rosysparkle

I've just been having a read through of this thread and am inspired to find out if I can pay off my mortgage earlier. I'm a single parent with four children and a £140,000 mortgage. I am going to spend a couple of days getting information together and then set myself a target to get this millstone of a mortgage paid off.

kiwichick

kiwichick wrote:

We are moving in a few weeks and our mortgage is taking a leap of gargantuan proportions. Currently it is £96K and change over 21 years but will be going up to £118K over 30 years!!! At this rate I'll be 56 by the time its paid off.

UPDATE:We've moved but the mortgage is £140k over 30 years :eek:. I am just about sorted with the unpacking and sorting out that comes with the move. Just as soon as I can I am getting back into the ebay/budgeting/saving vibe so I can try to up our payments a little. They are already a mindblowing £714.87pm but I am hoping to up it to a round figure, even if its only to £720 to begin with - every little helps!!

mocolo

hazelize_uk wrote:

I've been thinking about transferring ownership of our house into the names of my children once they turn 18 to prevent the same thing happening, does anyone know if this is a) possible or b) legal or c) have any better ideas??

Be careful with this. It sounds so simple, but if any of your children become bankrupt for example, they have an asset in their name. This happened to someone I know who had a joint ownership with their parents. When this person went bankrupt, the parents had to buy their share out. It was a nightmare.

So I urge caution,
mocolo

seven-day-weekend

hazelize_uk wrote:

I have recently been involved with sorting out paperwork etc, for grandparents, who have been forced to sell there houses in order to pay for their long term medical care.

It has upset the whole family thinking how hard they worked to buy their houses to lose them in this way and have nothing to leave behind which is what they would have wanted.

I've been thinking about transferring ownership of our house into the names of my children once they turn 18 to prevent the same thing happening, does anyone know if this is a) possible or b) legal or c) have any better ideas??

I too would be careful about this. We discussed it with a solicitor for the very same reason as you have given. We wanted to make the house jointly owned between us and our son. He pointed out that a) most people never go into care : b) if one of you does they can't take the house while the other one lives in it and c) (and this was the biggy) if our son got married and then divorced (not unheard of these days) then his ex-wife would be entitled to half of his share.

He suggested if we really wanted to do it, wait until we were in our 70s and he was in his forties as we should hopefully know more then about his marital prospects and his ability to handle money. At the moment we are in our mid -50s and he is 26.

They can apparently still take the house for care home fees anyway if they so chose.

Somebody has also mentioned the problems of bankruptcy.

AFAIK there is NO legal way of protecting your house against being taken for care home fees. Would be delighted if someone proves me wrong!