The "Mortgage-free in 2025-30" club!

choccielover

I know what you mean Amy, I love getting down into another 10k bracket, cool news about you adoption approval too. Fingers crossed they match you with a child soon.

Turtle moose, did you get everything sorted? You must be excited at the prospect of getting the bathroom and garden done. You in full planning stage?

Lucky, good luck with the remortgage, hope it goes well.

Ramellino, welcome and good luck with the remortgage. Are you going to keep payments at the same level as now and use the difference as an op?

Pink, it's grounding when you look and see the numbers isn't it. but the past is the past and lessons learnt.

Chocs

shangaijimmy

10k brackets are very significant milestones I think, and deserve mini celebrations!! We'll hopefully dip down a bracket by October!

rammelino

Thanks for the welcome messages, folks!

In answer to your question, choccielover, I am indeed going to keep my payments at the same monthly level to give me a head start on my overpayments.

Doing a bit of ebay selling this weekend so hopefully that will provide a few more pounds to chuck in the pot!

pinkteapot

Luckyinlife - we remortgaged after only six months. When we moved, I was a contractor and HSBC (who we wanted to use) don't do contractors. :mad: Had to go to Santander, and pay 0.5% more for the same product (lifetime tracker). I was made permanent at work just before we exchanged contracts - argh!

Couldn't switch to HSBC until we'd had the house six months, as mortgage companies won't lend on a house that's been owned for less than six months. Finally got there though. Annoying that we wasted the Santander application fee and our broker fee (being a contractor caused a mortgage panic so we had to use a broker), not to mention six months of slightly higher repayments.

Did work out this morning that so far this year we have knocked 22 months and about £8k in interest off the mortgage though.

We go on holiday for the last two weeks of July, and my first nephew is due, well, yesterday (!) so I've gone a bit overboard on presents. So I doubt there'll be any OPs above and beyond the one we make every month this month.

Luckyinlife

Hey tea pot ya i know how you feel for me for its a case of i didnt have 2 years records but i really wanted this particular house

As its in the estate iv grown up in for 27 years but on the outside of the estate where its much quieter 2 min walk from the beach plus a lot more reasons like build a garage at some point haha just in a nicer area of where i live.

i guess if i do get it ill be with these till its all over and as well all know the mortgage thing is a long old journey in life so id rather pay the fees and get it sorted now and least then i can forget about having a poor rate and enjoy having a good one :]

It also means my 10k Emergency fund will go from a year and halfs worth of mortgage payments to nearly 3 years

pinkteapot

Luckyinlife wrote: »

i guess if i do get it ill be with these till its all over and as well all know the mortgage thing is a long old journey in life so id rather pay the fees and get it sorted now and least then i can forget about having a poor rate and enjoy having a good one :]

Absolutely. We had to pay about £500 to move to HSBC, but it was going to save us about £60 a month on the repayments (so pay for itself in less than a year).

Synonymous

Hey everyone :wave:

Don't know how I've missed this thread so far, but can I join please? Sorry this is going to be a long post, as I'm getting things straight in my head!

I've had my house 5 years, with a mortgage term of 30yrs - so at the normal rate due to be MF by June 2040 :eek: My current overpayment projections have me on course to be MF by August 2025 (when I will be 40), but I intend to keep chipping away at that before anything like marriage and kids can get in the way

I've been kicking myself, as my OPs in the last five years haven't made much difference so far. I now know that this was because although I have switched to lower interest rate deals twice and continued to overpay, I didn't up my overpayments in accordance with the savings I was making each month. It's not like me to drop the ball like this and I wish I could go back in time and fix it! I think I assumed that the reduced monthly payment was because I was paying less interest, when in fact they were smoothing out my repayment timeline back to 30 years, and cancelling out all of my hard work! I also wasn't upping my OPs to account for inflation

So I have today made a change to ensure this never happens again! I've created a new standing order to top up my standard monthly payment to £500 every month (more than this payment was when at its highest). With my normal OPs continuing as usual. I will commit to correcting that top-up standing order every time I get a better deal, so that it always totals £500 - and I will never miss the money, and I can forget about it in between switches.

I OP by a set amount quarterly at the moment as I am on a student scholarship paid in quarters, and I plan to up this when I'm working again at the end. This will get me below 60% LTV by the time my deal ends next year (based on my house's original sale price). I'm not going to mess much more with OPs until then as any other spare money is going elsewhere.

I've never remortgaged, as I stayed with the same provider, but should have the option at the end of this deal, although I will only just have started work again, so will have to think about the value of my house and any easy work I think needs to be done on it in that time. There are much better rates right now, but not good enough to make it worth ditching my fix early - bit worried interest rates might rise before I can get a new fix though (where's that crystal ball?)

Sorry for going on; it's more for me and getting things clear! Nice to meet you all :beer:

shangaijimmy

welcome on board!

pinkteapot

Hello, Synonymous! I'll add you to the list in a sec.

If I've understood correctly, it sounds like your lender is one who uses OPs to reduce your monthly repayment, instead of the term. As I understand it, this approach still saves you interest over the life of the term, but not as much as if you reduce the term.

Have you asked them to stop recalculating your monthly payments? Ie have you made sure they won't do that again?

Synonymous

pinkteapot wrote: »

Hello, Synonymous! I'll add you to the list in a sec.

If I've understood correctly, it sounds like your lender is one who uses OPs to reduce your monthly repayment, instead of the term. As I understand it, this approach still saves you interest over the life of the term, but not as much as if you reduce the term.

Have you asked them to stop recalculating your monthly payments? Ie have you made sure they won't do that again?

Thanks pinkteapot and Shangaijimmy. No, my lender doesn't do either of those (although of course the term would be shorter, but not officially). The recalculation was only made twice, when I switched deals with the same provider and the term stayed the same, so I've saved interest, but not as much as I could have done. They only recalculate the monthly payment if you make a single overpayment exceeding £1,000. And also in my lenders case, when they !!!! up their calculations and have to correct them with a 'fake' overpayment because they can't make the system reverse the error! Can't wait to leave, but stuck here whilst I'm a student!