The Mortgage Free Roll Of Honour

Lomcevak

Guess I finally get to post here too

a. The date you decided to become a MFW

Probably some time around around 2009, back when I used to post on TMF. However, I overpaid very little for the next three years, and so the real MFW journey started on 1st January 2012 when I joined the 2012 mfw challenge here.

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest

£229k when we purchased the house in 2006, just under £196k when I joined 2012 mfw

c. Mortgage-Free Date

11th June 2020

d. Your one perl of wisdom.

Um, I've never been good at pithy words of wisdom, but guess mine would be to make it routine. I just set up a standing order to pay off a bit extra each month, and forgot about it. I found the extra outgoings are rapidly forgotten, and if you can always cancel it if you need to. Even a small monthly amount makes a big difference in the long term.

Oh, and a bit boring, but treat overpayments as part of a bigger plan - pension payments are often a better bet for many people. Do both!

e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you
The annual mortgage-free wannabe challenge, and the mortgage free in three challenges. They helped break things down into achievable chunks, and provided much needed support

icklehelen

Finnaly getting around to posting on here

a. The date you decided to become a MFW
When I was looking to remortgage in 2010 and came across a lifetime tracker with no fees although my first OP wasn't until March 2012

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest
£95,000 thanks to buying just before house prices went through the roof and then moving into a bigger doer upper with a large deposit

c. Mortgage-Free Date
1st May 2020

d. Your one perl of wisdom.
For me it was keeping the mortgage to a nice round number with a 0 on the end. I had a s/o set up to round up the payment each month and once interest was added I would round that down with another OP (for the last 18months I paid the full interest off each month)

e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you
Too many people to mention but the annual MFW and MFin3 challenges have been great for motivation and giving me mini challenges 

f. And if you had a mortgage freedom diary on MFW, a link to it.
You can find my ad hoc ramblings here: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4506491/wishing-on-an-ickle-star/p1

Now to find a new challenge 

Youthgonewild

Congrats, both. Well done x

Moneyfordreams

Congratulations Icklehelen and Lomcevak.. 

grannyx2

A. The date you decided to become a MFW

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest
c. Mortgage-Free Date
d. Your one perl of wisdom.
e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you
f. And if you had a mortgage freedom diary on MFW, a link to it

A. It’s been a desire of mine since we took out a secured loan to consolidate in December 2007 but if I’m honest I didn’t think it would ever happen.

b. £80,000 mortgage plus £80,000 secured loan in December 2007

c. May 2018

d. Don’t swap unsecured debt for secured. It just puts you in a further weakened state and if you struggle you run the risk of losing your home. 

e. The debt free wannabes diaries were the thing that got me to the point I’m at today. Not quite debt free but in a fantastic position from where we were and so much better off financially 

f. No mortgage free diary but a debt free diary - return to solvency

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3958715/return-to-solvency#latest

Granny xx 

hugheskevi

a. The date you decided to become a MFW

Around January 2018, shortly before I took out a 2 year fixed rate re-mortgage that I decided would hopefully be the last mortgage I'd need.

b. Mortgage Debt at its highest

£179,000 in May 2013

c. Mortgage-Free Date

1st May 2020

d. Your one pearl of wisdom.

Ensure an optimal balance of pension, ISA and mortgage - multiple goals require multiple strategies.

e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you

Didn't use any - mortgage was 3rd priority behind pension and ISA saving and just started to get paid down faster when I reduced pension contributions due to having built up enough pension. The chart below plots the entire life of the mortgage, through increasing borrowing in 2013  after some over-payments (re-mortgage was to get lower interest rate, and took opportunity to borrow a bit more to redistribute debt), then overpayments in some years before a larger overpayment on remortgaging in 2018.

Geebsie

a. The date you decided to become a MFW - The day I took the mortgage out, aged 26, in June 2007: I had a long term desire to have it paid off before 40 and managed to do so aged 39 and 9 months!
b. Mortgage Debt at its highest - £142,000 ish on 5 June 2007 - I took a 100% mortgage for the purchase price (£140,864) in those heady days of free and easy money, and even added the legal fees on to the top of that.
c. Mortgage-Free Date - 2 July 2020, having been overpaying by 10% in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and having had a decent bonus year at work in 2018 and 2019 and a reasonable bonus ahead of me this year, I decided to use savings to clear the outstanding balance of circa £62k. That gives me the certainty that whatever is ahead of me, I own the bricks and mortar in this flat and in the unlikely scenario a “wealth tax” is introduced on savings, there is less there now to lose.  I also had to pay a 3% Early Repayment Charge (having taken a 5 year fix at a time in early 2018 when it appeared to me that I would do nowhere near as well as I did in the intervening period and there was some long term uncertainty over interest rates) but that ERC was still far less than the remaining interest over the term. Overall the 25 year mortgage became a 13 years and 1 month mortgage.
d. Your one perl of wisdom - Start the overpayments as early as you possibly can - my only regret is I didn’t start doing so earlier!
e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you - It was the MSE Mortgage Guide that really opened my eyes in 2018 to how beneficial overpayments could really be.
f. And if you had a mortgage freedom diary on MFW, a link to it - I wasn’t that organised. 

AlwaysPondering

Like many others finally getting around to this
a. The date you decided to become a MFW
April 2002, the day I got my first mortgage. Aged 24. For various reasons I had a 16 year mortgage term. But wanted to pay it off well before I was 40.
b. Mortgage Debt at its highest
£80,000 (I know small compared to many on here, but I'd managed to cover the legal fees etc with savings)
c. Mortgage-Free Date
I don't know exactly, as I had an off-set mortgage, so in theory I had the savings off-setting all the mortgage some months and not others for a while. I used to transferred the amount I had set aside for the mortgage every month (which was the actual mortgage amount and some extra I could afford) into a savings pot* each month as soon as I got paid. Then the actual month mortgage amount was transferred back into my current account just prior to the mortgage being taken. That way I saved extra in there which helped with the off-setting. Any addition 'bonus' money was also transferred into that savings pot (be that bonus from work, selling something I owned, overtime money) so that grew quicker. I know it was a very nice feeling when I ended up just paying the capital back as the savings were covering the actual mortgage amount remaining. I vowed that I would just continue to put the same amount into there each month until the normal end date of my mortgage, which I did. Result was that just after my 40th birthday I had my mortgage paid, and a nice lump sum sat in there. 

*my bank had one savings account, in which could could divided the money into various pots - have to say I loved this as makes budgeting so much easier

d. Your one perl of wisdom.
Overpay as much as you can as early as you can, but don't kill yourself in neglecting other areas of your life that will need money in the process. That way you can either reduce the term or if something happens reduce the monthly payments over the remaining term

e. The MSE Mortgage guides and others that helped you
No real guide helped me. For me it was a combination of a)seeing how stressed my parents were growing up over the mortgage (they had one in the 15%plus days) and b) not liking debt or paying interest. So I was determined to get it paid off asap. 

Butterfly_Brain

Mortgage free as of March 2018 .
Got really fed up with the Halifax after an argument about house insurance where they were insisting we used their overpriced insurance, which was £450 pa dearer than our current supplier!
We paid off two years early by using our savings and saved over £2,000 in interest payments.

Youthgonewild

Well done, you lot. Fab!