It's all happening this year!

ahealthiermoo

This year I turned 30, started a new job, got married and I've just bought a bigger house with my new husband! It has literally all happened this year and I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed...especially about how much debt we've just gotten ourselves into!
Time to get organised and start working out how to pay off our mortgage...
The house we are currently living in has £77,000 mortgage remaining, and we have just sold it for £125,000 - much more than the £84,000 we bought it for as we did a lot of work during the four years we were there.
At the end of next month we will be moving to a larger four-bedroom house and our mortgage will increase to £146,449 to be paid off over 25 years. Twenty-five years scares me as that will mean I'm 55 before I own the house and I wanted to be MF much sooner than that!
Both my husband and I have career jobs so make an OK-ish income between us. Now I just need to work out the best ways to generate extra income for OP each month...
I've been stalking the boards here for several weeks now and decided it was time I finally signed up and started my own thread to stay motivated. It seems to have worked for lots of other people, so time to give it a go!...

gallygirl

Good luck, starting early will stand you in good stead :T.

Are there any penalties for overpaying? What is your mortgage rate?

Could you get a better rate saving the money - e.g. 1st Direct do a regular saver at 6% gross if you have a current account with them, between you and new hubby you could save £600 a month. M&S also do one at 6% for £250 a month. Set up a spreadsheet to track the savings and 'offset' them against your mortgage, then when they mature in a year's time make a lump sum payment off the mortgage and start again :T.

However, you need to ask yourself what are you actually trying to achieve by overpaying the mortgage? If I knew then what I know now I wouldn't overpay - I'd have bunged the money into an S&S ISA (well, a TESSA or PEP in those far off days :rotfl:) and let the funds accumulate in there instead. And share the overpayments between that and my pension. Getting rid of your mortgage can be done without just overpaying it. Decide what your long term goals are and work towards them - don't be too blinkered and just concentrate on your mortgage.

ahealthiermoo

Thanks for your response gallygirl.

There are no penalties for overpaying our mortgage up to 10% of the value. It stands at a fixed rate of 2.84% for the first 5 years (and then we would jump providers before we got hit with a higher rate).
Ideally in the future we would like to buy a couple of houses to rent out and provide a second income so that we may start a family and not have to worry about only surviving on one main salary. Alongside my current teaching job I take on odd part time jobs already which I would continue to do, but despite this, we currently realistically could not afford to have children and at the moment we really do not live a luxury lifestyle (no holidays, neither of us smoke or gamble, social nights out are only once every 6 weeks or so and we have no TV!) so I really wonder just how other people manage as I know between my husband and I we are earning more than many.

Paying off the mortgage for me would be just one less thing for us to worry about and the idea of being much more financially free appeals to me. I have never had an ISA so I'm afraid I do not know much about them, although will have a look into it after your comment.

ahealthiermoo

Just had our moving date confirmed as 29th May! It's all feeling very real now. Time to start putting that extra money aside...!

Firegirl

Gally girl is right - you can def make more by putting your money in an ISA or regular saving.

I think it depends on your comfort levels and attitude to risk. I have a stocks and shares ISA that is doing really well at the moment but until I get my mortgage below the £200k mark, I need to feel like I'm chipping away at it. I think after is get to that point I'll set up a regular saver because I don't want to invest any more in stocks and shares.