Hitting 75% LTV

Radionotme

Hi,
New to this forum after posting in the general Mortgages/Endowments forum a few times. Although I obviously want to be mortgage free, my immediate target is to get below 75% LTV so that I have access to the best deals when it's remortgage time.

In September 07 we moved house and had our first child, which required both an increase in mortgage amount and a temporary decrease in income at the same time. From the old house we had a £104k mortgage at a fixed rate of 5.48% till July 2012. The topup mortgage was £69,500 at 5.98% till September 2012. The house cost £221k, giving us an LTV of 78.5%

I decided to go interest only on them both for two reasons:
a) I could treat it as a repayment mortgage via overpayments, but then I would have an overpayment reserve that I could tap into if I absolutely had to, i.e. it gave us some flexibility if anything went wrong
b) I could target all capital repayments at the mortgage with the highest interest rate, making my money work more effectively.
Things very nearly did go wrong as I was made redundant in May, however I managed to find another role quickly, and am actually now earning a bit more, and ploughed some of the redundancy money into the mortgage.

With semi-regular overpayments, my total mortgage is now £163,199.81 which by my calculations puts me about a year ahead of schedule if this were one repayment mortgage - however I've never paid more than £499 on any one mortgage in a month, so that my interest payments shouldn't have been recalculated. The actual interest I'm charged has come down though, and is now £25.15 a day. I'm intending to overpay each mortgage by £499 again next month, from my ISA - as that rate is less than 3% so I'll effectively make double that by putting it in the mortgage instead.

So, as I said my target is 75% LTV, but technically I'm already at 73.84%. Unfortuantely I don't know how much of a hit the house value has taken since September 2007, nor how much it will recover/be hit further by September 2012. Because of that, I'm continuing to overpay as much as I can.

SmlSave

Hi Radio, welcome to MFW

I use Zoopla to get what my house is estimated at and when I remortgaged a couple of months ago it matched up! Hope this helps

Radionotme

Cheers - the good news is that gave me what looks like a reasonable figure - the bad news is that its about £17k less than what I paid!
However, I'm still less than 80% LTV, so I've just got to stick with the overpayments now and see how much further I can get it down by in the two years before remortgaging.

Radionotme

Just a quick update, firstly Zoopla gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling as after refining the details it had on the house, a few days later the estimate of the price had increased to very almost the amount I paid for it, making the 75% LTV much more achievable, so much so that I've actually hit it already!
That's not stopping me though, as I'm not convinced that Zoopla's generous estimate would be matched by a mortgage provider, and so I'm continuing to overpay.

£500 into higher rate mortgage and £499.90 into the other one. I meant to put £499.90 into both, but a quick email to Nationwide sorted it, and they've agreed not to change my monthly payments.

Oustanding capital now £161,702.20 equalling 73.17% LTV. That means I've paid off about £12k extra over the 2.5 years we've been in the house, and as the little one comes out of nursery, costs should drop over the next few years, making it easier to overpay more.:j