The Mortgage Free Roll Of Honour

sampugh1

So i bought my first house in October 2009 at the age of 25 1/2 for 94k with a 25% deposit that i had saved saved and saved to amass. The house was run down, i renovated the house on a shoestring budget and sold in 2011 for £116,750. Stretched myself a bit and bought the next run down house for £122k, renovated again and have just sold this one for £189k giving me £105k equity. There are houses selling for £100k in my town which i could buy and be mortgage free at 29. But why would i want to live in a small poky 2 up 2 down? Its all well and good being debt free but to make more money i dont want all my available capital locked away in one house? I want to make it work for me. Is this a post for people who are content with where they are and like to boast how they have no mortgage? As long as your repayments are manageable and you are sensible surely it doesn't matter if you have a mortgage or not?

..dont get me started on people my age who cant muster up a deposit!

Muser1

It's a post on the mortgage free wannabe thread celebrating peoples fantastic achievements. The old saying 'if you have nothing nice to say...' springs to mind. Love this thread, congratulations to all on it.

hazymemory

a. The date you decided to become a MFW
Oct 2007

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest
150K, while lots of redundancies at work.. nice

c. Mortgage-Free Date
Oct 2013

d. Your one pearl of wisdom.
Using an offset mortgage. Proved better overpayment. Effectively it is overpayment with easier access to money if something goes pear shaped.

RosieTiger

sampugh1 wrote: »

So i bought my first house in October 2009 at the age of 25 1/2 for 94k with a 25% deposit that i had saved saved and saved to amass. The house was run down, i renovated the house on a shoestring budget and sold in 2011 for £116,750. Stretched myself a bit and bought the next run down house for £122k, renovated again and have just sold this one for £189k giving me £105k equity. There are houses selling for £100k in my town which i could buy and be mortgage free at 29. But why would i want to live in a small poky 2 up 2 down? Its all well and good being debt free but to make more money i dont want all my available capital locked away in one house? I want to make it work for me. Is this a post for people who are content with where they are and like to boast how they have no mortgage? As long as your repayments are manageable and you are sensible surely it doesn't matter if you have a mortgage or not?

..dont get me started on people my age who cant muster up a deposit!

Maybe you should start a new thread called " I could be mortgage free in 4 1/2 years but don't want to live in a "poky" 2 up 2 down because i am sensible and it doesn't matter if I have a mortgage or not" to see how many want to go boasting with you.

This is a thread for like minded people who have opted to take a certain route to feeling free.

While your at it count yourself fortunate that you can muster a deposit up, there are plenty of people your age (and older) struggling to get by in life, living on low incomes and effectively caught in a trap of renting and so unable to save for a deposit. Maybe your post is just so you can come on here and "boast" about how you managed to be able to get a deposit for a house??

Former_MSE_Andrea

Huge congratulations to all of you who've cleared your mortgages. You should see some shiny new badges on your badges tabs

Travis_Bickle1972

It gives me so much pleasure to be typing this at last:

a/ It probably dawned on me shortly before I gave up the single life and my flat in 2007. MSE hammered that decision home. When the base rate crashed I knew I needed to make the most of it.

b/ £84,000 for £243k purchase of our modest 3 bed terrace on the outskirts of London. Thankfully I'd bought my previous property in 1997 when the market was sensible.

£48,000 interest only at 1.8% above base rate for life of mortgage (the original mortgage on my flat).
Plus £36,000 repayment @ 5.63% fixed for 5 years (just months before the base rate crashed!), taken out in 2008.

c/ 21/3/14. After finally finding employment again after my job was made redundant in Dec 2013. Thankfully our lifestyle was already frugal due to our two small children. My redundancy payment dealt with the remainder. My wife's small part time salary kept us going in the interim.

d/ It was one hell of a slog. My wife's job was made redundant as soon as we moved in together. I used her payment to knock £10k off the interest only mortgage because of the expected shortfall on our endowment.

I then concentrated on the more expensive loan by paying the maximum £500 overpayment each month for 5 years. Once the 5 years were up ( and our savings couldn't out perform the mortgage) all but our emergency fund was used to clear the repayment loan and halve the old interest only.

Seeing our payments become more and more affordable was hugely motivating. I must have checked our online account at least once a week!

e/ MSE all the way. Saving money everywhere we could by using the tips on this site. Not buying anything unless we could afford it, meal planning and preventing any waste. Two children removing any social life was probably the biggest money saver.

f/ No diary but I have lurked for years. Reading all the diaries and tips on this site really kept me focussed. Now I intend to relax a little and enjoy spending a little more than usual. My next project will be how to make the best use of the endowment when it pays out.

I should have said, I'm 41 and my wife 39.

MuffinTops

I'm so happy to be able to add myself to this thread.

Before finding this site I didn't think enough about my mortgage to realise I could pay it off early. So once I was here I realised that's what I needed to do. So it would have been around 2011 that I started figuring things out.

At its highest, my mortgage was £120,000. I was very lucky with my interest rate and that my fixed rate finished just as the mortgage rates started dropping. I'd initially signed up for another 5 years at 4% but then I got that first letter of a drop in interest rate that stated I'd never pay more than 1% over the base rate. That was a saving of around £60 to my prior payments so I kept it on a variable of base rate +1%. So happy I made that choice, still with very little knowledge or understanding. The bank kept on taking the amount they had when I was at 4% and I never changed that so automatically overpaid substantially each month.

My Mortgage Free Date is TODAY! 01 April 2014! Seeing my mortgage amount as 1p in credit early this morning and knowing it was real and not an elaborate April Fool is a high that I'll be on for quite some time!

My one perl of wisdom is to work out how much interest you can save if you reduce your mortgage term by various amounts. That high figure staring back at you is quite a motivator. Particularly as the amount you pay back doesn't increase substantially.

For me it was getting into the DFW diaries that boosted me to move onto paying off my mortgage. The Mortgage calculator is good to keep an eye on what savings you are making and if there's more you could be doing, or the effects of stepping back when you really can't maintain higher payments for a while.

This site is a wealth of knowledge and support. A great place to be! Thank you all. x

schoolrunmum

Officially MF as of last month! Bought house for 163k, now valued at around 850k so happy bunnies here!

Breast_Cancer_Survivor

I'm mortgage free but only because I won compensation in a clinical negligence case against my local hospital for botched surgery.

Does this still count?

rara32

Hi


As a long-term lurker on this thread I am so happy to be able to post on this thread


a) Date Mortgage free - 2001 when we bought our first flat after we got married. When we moved to our house in 2007 we decided to over pay by the maximum every month £500 and save money in ISAs so we could pay the mortgage off early.


b. Mortgage Debt at its highest - £134,000 we bought in 2007 and took out a 10 year fixed at 5.48% with Nationwide. We had put down a big deposit but because it was at the peak of the housing boom the mortgage rate was high.

c. Mortgage-Free Date -Today :j paid off 18 years early and saved £76000 in interest.

d. Your one pearl of wisdom - The main one that has got us here is Balance - we have always tried to live within our means and we really focus on what is really important to us regardless of what others may think. We are not the sort of people who want a massive house with a massive mortgage or flashy cars etc. but appreciate that others may. Our philosophy has always been to enjoy life now but part of that is reducing unnecessary stress and pressure i.e. debt - spent on things that don't matter. On the other hand we don't go without either but we just choose to not put ourselves in debt to achieve this - so we are happy to save and wait and get the best price for whatever we do. We earn good salaries but basically live on one and now we aim to continue with the lifestyle that we enjoy and save the extra money and spend on things we enjoy - family holidays, days out - anything that we get to keep as memories really because these are priceless.

e. The MSE Mortgage free guides and others that helped you - I don't post on the MFW thread and don't have a diary but I read the diaries daily and every one is an inspiration. In particular those that really touch on the deeper reasons for MFW - giving yourself opportunities and choices in how to live your life. It's been great to read the diaries of others in the same situation as us and those in very different situations and I can honestly say that I have picked up MSE tips from all of the diaries I have read.


Good luck to everyone on the forum still working towards MF I wish you all the best of luck and thank you all for your inspiration in helping me meet my goal.


Rara x