Got free of the millstone!

pantsmachine

Hi,
This is my first post and its a happy one! My wife and i went to our building society on the 15th Jan this year and cleared our mortgage. £51,500 cash in a red bank bag, you should have seen their faces!:eek:

Up until this momentous day i had been following the rules? below and they were working well for us, i hope they help someone else. Allowing my ego to show i was 37 when the millstone was removed.:j

I had been overpaying for a few years(£200 per month) and found that really made a difference.
We WERE!!! on a 2 year fixed rate mortgage and could make up to 3.5G overpayments per year without penalties.
I always shopped around when it was time for renewal, never become complacent and have no feelings of loyalty to the tie wearing bandits.
Make sure if you do switch companies that the move charges do not outweigh the lesser reypaments over the term of that specific product.
Make sure there are no tie ins.
If you have an endowment running or have had one running get in touch with Oasis financial services(i ended up £1,800 to the better thanks to them) as i was mis-sold when young and innocent.

BusyLizzie_3

Wow - well done to you and your wife! I have never seen as much as £1000 in cash, never mind £51,500 - did they count it all out in front of you? :beer:

I agree with you about making regular overpayments - we're overpaying by £300 a month at the moment, and also shopping around. We've usually gone for variable rate tracker mortgages, but never with a tie-in for longer than 2 years. Like you, I also got a recent pay-out (£1700) for a mis-sold endowment when I was young, but I just did the paperwork myself with advice from this website, and it was all done and dusted in under a month.

Well done again - we are hoping to become mortgage free within a year, so your story is inspirational.

Lizzieanne

WOW!

Just wanted to say congratulations! :j :beer:

pantsmachine

Yes they counted it out in cash from one bank and then we went to the building society. Not sure where you are based but in Scotland we have a £100 note(not everyone knows this). So a 51.5g pile is not very big!I got onshore on Sat 14th Jan and was in the building society at lunchtime on Mon 15th before i could let my wicked side blow it on a Porsche or similar!

On the missold endowment side of things, there are so many people that are not even aware of the possibility of getting some of their endowment losses back. I only found out about it as we were on a national letter drop from Oasis. I would normally have binned it as standard junk mail but my wife caught this one and we went with it.

There is a cutoff date for people to make a claim on their mis sold endowments, it might be worth while for an admin to make a sticky on the boards somewhere highlighting this. I can't remember the cut off date and i am stuck in Angola at the moment so no file access.

For anyone new reading this, the end result was that even though my original endowment company had been sold on twice since i took it out the current owners had to pay out. The payout was the equivalent of taking out a repayment mortgage instead of a endowment at the beginning of the mortgage. Cheque was for around £2,600. 25% of which went to Oasis as they do a 25% no win no fee. I know i am banging on a bit about Oasis, no i don't work for them! I hate the thought of the big outfits getting away with a long term shaft of the little guy, we already took it up the A**e through pensions( i still have an old limping dog from way back then with Equitable life, is it really Henry)! Here is a chance to get something back!
Although i must say Busylizzie's advice to do the paperwork yourself and get 100% of the payout looks like the way to go!

Thank you both for your congrats. Hope all goes well for you.

WISHIWASRICH_2

You Lucky B*....Concatulations:money: :beer: :j :beer: :j :T

Lotta_Littlies

Well done to you both! Keep applying the same principles you've learnt and you'll be getting that Porsche soon!

Lotta

culpepper

Congratulations! I bet you were on a high all day.
We claimed on a missold endowment and received I think it was 7k .
Our mortgage is now 32k which hopefully will be paid from OH's inheritance later this year. Can't wait to lose the shackles:)

angelavdavis

Well done and congrats!!!! Am dead jealous!

pantsmachine

We were high as kites, sad thing is 1 1/2 hours after paying it off i was on a flight to Amsterdam then Frankfurt, currently in Angola and not due to get back home until the 26th March so i have not yet been in my house mortgage free! That's too weird to think about, left that building society and felt as if i was walking like Bill & Ben, still the Champagne will be all the sweeter when i get back in March.

[Deleted User]

Congratulations!

I am SO jealous!

I still have about 5 months to go and with light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter I am living on next to nothing now.

thriftybabe

I am hoping to be mortgage free by April next year and cannot wait! We still have £155k left however we have a lump sum that we are going to be putting in in the next week of £83k (sold a property abroad). In addition I am still making overpayments of over £1000 a month and will make a dividend payment to myself and OH of £40k. All in all I am aiming only to have a mortgage of £18k - 20k this time next year then in April to have none!