What did you do the day you made your final morgage repayment

sss555s

I was a bit underwhelmed if I'm honest.

hillcats

Nothing better than paying off the mortgage in a timely fashion.
We are managing to reduce our debt by 10k per annum see below.
Quicker it's paid the better, we'll then have more cash to play with.

Loughton_Monkey

vivatifosi wrote: »

......As we're a bit out from our target at the moment, we celebrate each time we hit the milestone of taking a further £10,000 off the mortgage. It may be we go out somewhere, or just have a takeaway, the important part for us is acknowledging that we've passed another milestone. We passed the latest figure last week and will hit the next one in Spring 2013.

Fully agree with this sentiment. It will serve you well.

Every single month, since 1972, I faithfully recorded gross income, net income, expenditure, and hence net wealth. [which, incidentally, as at July 1972 stood at precisely £38.51].

The motivation in seeing this net wealth (sadly not every month) rise and reach different milestones was, to me, the key driver to a 'plentiful' early retirement.

Since paying down the mortgage is not always the 'best', and certainly not the 'only' key to wealth, I would suggest similar milestones should include the value of the pension pot(s), and the amount of cash savings available for emergencies. All of these influence the lifestyle you lead (and its cost).

Ultimately, the absolute level of your entire net assets only takes on real meaning when expressed as a multiple of your 'lifestyle spending'.

YoungBusinessman

Every 10k is good...the target of 10k a year off debt is a good one...would mean my first mortgage is gone in 10-12 years...age 33-35. Perfect!

seven-day-weekend

Just said 'thank goodness for that' and quietly celebrated.

RenovationMan

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Just said 'thank goodness for that' and quietly celebrated.

Surely by the time you get your mortgage below £10k or so, your monthly mortgage bills are so insignificant as to not really raise any excitement once they are reduced to zero?

The mortgage would be dwarfed by council tax and some utility bills and so would scarce register. It's not like winning the lottery, paying off a large mortgage in a single payment and going from a huge monthly repayment down to zero.

That's my take on it, anyway. I paid down my last mortgage significantly to the point where it didn't interest me anymore. I'd be like the chap who said he was underwhelmed.

Niv

RenovationMan wrote: »

Surely by the time you get your mortgage below £10k or so, your monthly mortgage bills are so insignificant as to not really raise any excitement once they are reduced to zero?

The mortgage would be dwarfed by council tax and some utility bills and so would scarce register. It's not like winning the lottery, paying off a large mortgage in a single payment and going from a huge monthly repayment down to zero.

That's my take on it, anyway. I paid down my last mortgage significantly to the point where it didn't interest me anymore. I'd be like the chap who said he was underwhelmed.

I have a fixed repayment mortgage, my monthly repayment does not change as my balance reduces... its also ~5.5% :-(

michaels

If my mortgage rate was 1.12% I would not have paid back a penny more than I had too, any extra money would have gone in to high interest accounts.

hillcats wrote: »

Nothing better than paying off the mortgage in a timely fashion.
We are managing to reduce our debt by 10k per annum see below.
Quicker it's paid the better, we'll then have more cash to play with.

ash28

RenovationMan wrote: »

Surely by the time you get your mortgage below £10k or so, your monthly mortgage bills are so insignificant as to not really raise any excitement once they are reduced to zero?

The mortgage would be dwarfed by council tax and some utility bills and so would scarce register. It's not like winning the lottery, paying off a large mortgage in a single payment and going from a huge monthly repayment down to zero.

That's my take on it, anyway. I paid down my last mortgage significantly to the point where it didn't interest me anymore. I'd be like the chap who said he was underwhelmed.

Our mortgage was paid off last year - we had no plans to pay it off early.

We had been in the house 19 years - never made any overpayments or anything. But we did save money and could have paid it off a number of years earlier than we did. Interest rates on savings until the last couple of years have been higher than we were paying on our mortgage - so to us it did make some sort of sense not to pay down the mortgage.

The mortgage amount we paid was just under £500 per month - when we bought the house in 1993 the repayments were around £650 a month. So a combination of a reduction in mortgage rates and payrises eroded the repayments.

It might seem a bit cockeyed but we had always planned on taking early retirement and planned that the mortgage would be paid off on the date the wages stopped and the pensions kicked in. It seemed to make sense to us - the removal of the biggest bill at the same time our income reduced. We did the same with our credit cards and a car loan we had - all paid off at the same time our pensions kicked in.

Result - the drop in income has been barely noticeable - which was the plan. Our disposable income is around about the same as it was before we retired.

We were able to retire at 55 - the original plan was 50 but that slipped a bit - not everything always goes to plan.

I know the way we did it wouldn't be for every one but it worked well for us.

Pete111

Paid it off earlier this year at the ripe old age of 34 (though technically some of it is offset) Felt pretty good bearing in mind our IO payments in 2007 were £1650 per month.

We now intend to maintain the offset/mortgage facility as we have up to 300k available to take back out if we ever need it - but I'm rather hoping we won't!