The Mortgage Free Roll Of Honour

Jo_Blogs

a. The date you decided to become a MFW - June 2008
b. Mortgage Debt at its highest - £85,000.00
c. Mortgage-Free Date - December 2014
d. Your one perl of wisdom. - always have a rainyday fund and plan for the unexpected, that way you never waste money on rubbish you really don't need .

wildcherry

This thread is SO inspiring! I've tried to find this thread for a while and I'm so pleased I've found it today. I've subscribed, and I can't wait to one day be adding my MFD on here!

vivatifosi

Good luck with your mortgage free journey wildcherry.

stedwell

Today we officially have reached the point where our savings are higher than our mortgage! I consider that as mortgage free!!!:
:T:beer::j

a. The date you decided to become a MFW .... April 2010 when we moved to our last house

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest .....110,000

c. Mortgage-Free Date March .....2017 (5 years early)

d. Your one pearl of wisdom.....make regular payments if you can and then it becomes part of your budgeting and you don't notice it as much.

Cornucopia

I've been Mortgage-free for a couple of years, now. I downsized to achieve it.

a. The date you decided to become a MFW .... 1989, when I bought my first property and realised that the mortgage would cost way more than the property itself.

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest ..... £283,000

c. Mortgage-Free Date... May 2014

d. Your one pearl of wisdom..... For most people, their mortgage is the most expensive thing they will ever buy - choose wisely, and manage it well.

Shecar

The date we decided to become Mortgage Free was around 2012

Our debt at it's highest was £200k

We became Mortgage Free on 14th May 2013

Our 1 pearl of wisdom - overpay as much as you can afford (if your mortgage allows this without penalty)

:beer::j:D:T

JimLad

a. The date you decided to become a MFW:

October 2011 when we bought our first house together

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest:

£155,000

c. Mortgage-Free Date:

TODAY! 22/03/17

d. Your one perl of wisdom:

Its all about the side hustle. Anything and everything you can do to make a buck on the side. Highly recommend Airbnb for renting out a spare bedroom.

e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you.

This forum and reading everyones diaries. Too many kind comments to name them all.

f. And if you had a mortgage freedom diary on MFW, a link to it.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5308207

Pinkiepenquin

The date we decided to be mortgage free was when hubby got made redundant for the 3rd time. (2003)
We decided to move to a low priced part of the country that was since then we live roughly in the same area (ish) but bought and sold 2 more properties and remain mortgage free
Our biggest debt would have been during our time of paying for the mortgage.

grannybiker

We didn't set out to be mortgage free initially, but switched to an offset mortgage when we were both working full time.
We're also of an age where we benefit from lower property prices in the 1980s. Our first house in 1986 was £21,500 and our repayments were about £80-90 per month. That said, Mr GB only brought home about this amount per week. I was unqualified and a Mum.
As interest rates began to soar I had to seek part time work as the repayments rose to £200 a month! Our children were small, so I could only work evenings and weekends when Mr GB could do the child-care. I also became a registered childminder. It was really tough and we got stung by an ill-advised loan linked to our mortgage which fortunately Dad repaid from his pension lump sum which we then paid at no interest. But we did it!
After a few years, I went and got a degree so my earning potential increased. As we weren't used to having this extra monthly income I repaid my student loan in full the first year I was working. (I was one of the last wave of students to get a grant.)
When we moved again it was 1998 to a house costing £71,000 and our mortgage rose to £47,000.
As we'd had to be so frugal in the early days of our marriage, we always had some money left at the end of each month. We still had holidays with the children, usually camping in the UK which was great fun despite the weather. We ran older cars with Mr GB doing all our servicing which was easier on older cars- no computer systems! I enjoyed scouring the charity shops and jumble sales, (Remember them?!) and grew adept at altering clothes, making curtains etc. I still look in the Whoopsie / yellow stickered / reduced items when shopping! I discovered Grabbit on MSE and was an enthusiastic DTDer, especially when they ran the promotion with Asda
We've had endowment, pension and repayment mortgages, but our last was offset. We threw all our savings into the pot and it's amazing just how quickly our total owing diminished. We were paying more in council tax than mortgage for some time!
So now we're mortgage free. I no longer work, Mr GB has reduced down to 3 days a week and we can enjoy spending time together.

Mortgage / debt free and proudly liberated

EdKings

Our circumstances were different in that we'd lived in West Herts for 19 years with a never declining mortgage of £103,700 (interest only deal done when we hit a difficult period about 1998). In 2011 letters started coming asking what plans we had to repay the whole amount by September 2017. We had no real plans to be honest and being near to retirement age it initially looked ominous to say the least. The house was a lovely but very small 1932 semi in a parking-problematic (no drive) street. We had thought of one day moving north to Nottinghamshire where my wife is originally from (where we met) but never thought it a possibility.

Mortgage free was looking very ominous indeed!

So we called a couple of estate agents and they relayed to us the solution to our challenge - our pokey little semi turned out to be worth £450,000! What? Wow! and other expletives abounded.

Got mucked about by one agent but eventually we sold for £445k and today we live in rural Nottinghamshire in a lovely detached 1998 house with all the trappings that we'd hoped for and we are finally mortgage free, plus with some of the spare money realised we bought another property which we did up and rented out and all thanks to our long slog of paying 19 years mortgage on a property that to our amazement had rocketed in value.

Got there in the end.