£165k in 10 years. Can it be done?

juicygirl

Hi !!!128075;

Any opinions? Success stories? Where to even start?

(We are 2 adults with joint income of approx £80k and 2 young kids).

Thanks!

[Deleted User]

Yes, it can be done.

Looking at your income and outgoings is your starting point.

zagubov

Yes.
We're Londoners in that situation, 150k over eight years.
As zx81 says, make a spreadsheet of your income and outgoings.
Pay off all credit and store card debt.
Get the cheapest (re)mortgage you can find. Overpay when possible.
Shopping in Aldi and Lidl.
Run second-hand cars bought in cheaper parts of Britain, using cheapest insurance and breakdown service.
Changing uitilties and insurances annually if necessary.
No takeaways, plan and cook all our meals, and make lunches.
Do all the overtime we can get.
Stuff the maximum into pensions we can get.
Cheap non-fancy phones on cheapest monthly contracts.
Timing purchases to avoid current account overdrafts.
Avoiding the lure of new consumer toys, fripperies and gewgaws.Paying off credit cards completely to avoid interest while getting consu.mer protection.
Spending far too much time on this website.

VDOT47

Yes, very much so. On that income you should be able to set aside up to £1000 per month for savings and overpayments, which would see a mortgage that size paid off in 6 or 7 years, so doing it in 10 if definitely very doable ..... unless you have some massive unsecured debts or other big outgoings each month which would make overpayments of that size difficult.


Put it this way, we have a lower combined salary than you and I think we could have paid off a mortgage of £245,000 in 7 or 8 years.


Good luck!

louloubelle79

You can do it if your sensible; we are aiming to clear our mortgage in 10 years ( 115k) starting total on joint salary of 45k with two small kids. 18 months in total 102k still a long way to go but working hard to save; pay pensions and being frugal :money::money:

kev2009

Interesting thread and opinions, i'm hoping to clear my mortgage in 13 years fingers crossed. I'm on a 5 year fixed at the moment (ends in 2020) and then i'm currently thinking of fixing again for 5 years and then re-evaluating where i'm at and then possibly fixing for 2 years and then maybe 1 year fixed or variable (depending on the rates) and then pay off the remainder after that. I currently owe approx 118.5k, income of 35k, single person. It might be a bit tight tbh. To date I have not overpaid anything as I've been buying bits and pieces etc for property etc so its taken a while as i put all i had down for deposit etc, leaving myself a bit of a cushion should anything drastic happen. So fingers crossed, 13 years i hope to be done. I was looking to overpay this year but had some unexpected things to come up and its currently on going (along with costs) so i don't have a exact figure it will cost so makes it hard to say right i need x for this and i can put the rest on the mortgage so at the moment i'm currently thinking to overpay maybe 2k on my mortgage this year and then next year i'm going to try get as close as I can to the 10% limit i'm allowed before i have to pay a hefty charge for overpaying.

So fingers crossed, i'm hoping i can do it in 13 years, would be great. I figure if i work at it and meet or get close to my targets then worse case scenario, i'll low a much much lower figure and my repayments would be pretty low if the worst happened. I'm also paying into my works pension so its all a balance.

Kev

aj9648

Yes it can be - we did £150k in 5 years. We have 2 kids and all made sure we didn!!!8217;t sacrifice a lot

Discipline is key and overpay as much as you can.

[Deleted User]

The only thing I would add is not to focus solely on the mortgage.

We cleared ours with large overpayments, but in retrospect, it would have been far more financially rewarding to have ploughed more into pensions.

zagubov

Deleted_User wrote: »

The only thing I would add is not to focus solely on the mortgage.

We cleared ours with large overpayments, but in retrospect, it would have been far more financially rewarding to have ploughed more into pensions.

Good advice. Unless your mortgage is an offset, it needn't be your top investment. That has to be your future income, meaning your pension.

juicygirl

Thank you all for taking the time to respond. Plenty of food for thought,

My main weakness is nice foreign holidays. That would need to be our biggest change!

Lomcevak

Deleted_User wrote: »

The only thing I would add is not to focus solely on the mortgage.

We cleared ours with large overpayments, but in retrospect, it would have been far more financially rewarding to have ploughed more into pensions.

Agree with this - we are on track to pay off £188k in seven years (have paid off £113k in five, plan is £50k over next two followed by £25k from savings to finish) so your target is perfectly possible, but I have also used the full pension allowance during this time. As a HR tax payer I would cut OPs before pension contributions.

(We are 2 adults with joint income of approx £80k and 2 young kids).

Our joint income is a bit higher than yours although not massively so, with three teenagers - oldest two both in university. The key thing for us is that our outgoings aren't significantly different to when we were both on £30k ten years ago - so as our incomes have risen, we just push more and more into savings.

Overall goals are important too, i'm early-40s and want to have options to either retire in my 50s or at least step back from a high-pressure job, so a high savings rate (both pension, mortgage, and other savings) is a particular priority. Your situation might be different.