When will you call yourself debt free?

Dee123_2

I will consider myself debt-free when I have just my mortgage left and I have put enough away in a savings account to offset my remaining loan payments .

Kez100

I consider myself debt free. We have just a mortgage which we are overpaying by a high degree to offset the endowment loss we face. To my mind a loan/HP for a necessary car and mortgage for a home are acceptable as 'debt-free' so long as repayments are up to date and any endowment shortfall has been made provision for. I would consider a credit card to be debt free if the balance is settled in full every month.

Dithering_Dad

I'll consider myself debt free once my mortgage is gone. I know many people don't see this as a debt, but as far as I am concerned it's money I owe. I hate the thought that I'm in shared ownership of my home with the bank!

Sea78

When I'm debt free - I'll still have the mortgage, but will make overpayments as and when. Also the mortgage we have is very affordable.

Totally debt free woul dbe mortgage free but I would class debt free as being everything but the mortgage cleared.

Sea xx

wannasavemoney

I will consider myself debt free when all debt apart from the mortgage has gone. A mortgage is not a debt unless you are in negative equity and the negative bit is the debt. If your mortgage is below the price of your house then you are in credit surely?

Dithering_Dad

wannasavemoney wrote: »

I will consider myself debt free when all debt apart from the mortgage has gone. A mortgage is not a debt unless you are in negative equity and the negative bit is the debt. If your mortgage is below the price of your house then you are in credit surely?

Ah, but you could use that argument with all debt, not just mortgage. So if you have 25k worth of mortgage debt and 25k worth of credit card debt and 50k equity you're technically not in debt, but you're still making payments on the mortgage and credit cards and still kopping the interest. Plus if anything goes wrong and you can't meet your mortgage payments then your home is in jeopardy.

Unless you plan on selling the house to pay off your mortgage debt, then it's still a debt. Now if you have savings outside of your house equity that were more than your mortgage debt, it's a different story.

prophecy_grrl

We will be debt free when our loans and CCs are paid off. We'll still have a mortgage and student loans, but as per previous posters, I don't feel that these 'count'

At the moment, our debt free date is July 2010, but that's with minimum payments and only my wage - DH starting work in September so hoping to pay off debts asap after that :-)

csarina

I will be debt free when I have paid off the two loans I have, the finance on the car, one credit card which is on 0%, will have to look for another deal soon and the overdraft I have just run up due to a move.........OD should be gone later this year, the loans can then be attacked, neither can be paid by over paying, so I will be putting cash into a savings account until the balance equals what I have in the account, then biff....gone.........the car is another matter, I am hoping once the loans are gone I can save up enough to change the car without having to take finance.......then I WILL BE DEBT FREE!!!!!

elantan

i wont consider myself debt free till i owe nothing to no-one or place...it will be a long way for me with the mortgage but i hope to get rid of the rest pretty soon ....so by the end of this year i should be unsecured debt free ...fingers crossed

seven-day-weekend

The only reason we don't have a mortgage is that we spent twenty years paying it! And our Spanish house was bought with the proceeds of an inheritance. We did until recently have a mortgage on an investment property, but we sold it and therefore the mortgage was cleared.

So I think really, that although a mortgage is strictly a debt, providing it is manageable and you are paying capital off (not just interest) then it is a 'good' debt.

But I don't think you can call yourself debt-free if you still have loans and overdrafts.

I personally would not call myself debt-free until I owed nobody anything.