Keep the house or rent and invest?

DiggerUK

ejchopshop, there is an old english proverb, "enough is as good as a feast" which I would ask you to mull over. Especially as it seems you are in a comfortable position and have no aversion to frugality, well, at least you claim no aversion.

I can understand why you would prefer to be more 'time rich' and live a good life, but it seems you are not yet in that perfect sweet spot of a comfortable retirement for now. In fact that is why it is normal to be quite an age before you can retire.

I do believe you are wanting to hear it said here that your plans are viable and to go with your imagination. Nothing wrong with that, just not now in my opinion..._

ejchopshop

DiggerUK said:

ejchopshop, there is an old english proverb, "enough is as good as a feast" which I would ask you to mull over. Especially as it seems you are in a comfortable position and have no aversion to frugality, well, at least you claim no aversion.

I can understand why you would prefer to be more 'time rich' and live a good life, but it seems you are not yet in that perfect sweet spot of a comfortable retirement for now. In fact that is why it is normal to be quite an age before you can retire.

I do believe you are wanting to hear it said here that your plans are viable and to go with your imagination. Nothing wrong with that, just not now in my opinion..._

Thanks That is a good saying, i've not heard it before! The purpose of the post was just to see if it was a thing that people do, if it makes sense (or not), and consider other options for the future. I really do appreciate everyone taking the time to reply and it has provided very valuable information for us to think about. We really do live frugally and are more than happy doing so as it allows us to live the lifestyle we do. We were simply wondering if there was anything we could do to accelerate our savings for the future. It has become very apparent though that it is not a sensible idea so I think for as long as we don't want to do another project house, we'll be staying put, enjoying our home and just trying to stash away a bit more money each month. Easier said than done as I'm on maternity and hubby has spent a lot of the year working on our own house 

DiggerUK

Another favourite proverb of mine is "patience is a virtue".

You could possibly exercise the options you want if you didn't have a mortgage. Then you could rent out your property to part fund your travels.
We are in retired bucket list territory, sadly with planes, boats and trains going nowhere fast for now. We have met numerous people on our currently suspended bucket list travels in the past who funded their lifestyle by Airbnbing their homes to fund travels. Some even went the whole hog and rented their homes and stored their stuff. 

They could only do this because they were mortgage free. The plus side was that they had a home to fall back on if circumstances changed, I'd imagine that those covid changed circumstances has meant they are all at home now.

Do the sums, if it means you could travel and rent out your property........clear the mortgage ASAP. Just a thought..._

Lost_Property

What kind of property is it and where?  Would it rent to a good quality family or would you have to let it out to sharers or room by room as an HMO? If you came home to a tatty pile of bricks would you be heart-broken? At present Landlords are stampeding for the exit due to onerous and unfair tax treatment or rental income - if you have income, including rent, that takes you above the basic rate tax threshold then the maximum tax credit you can claim is 20% even if your mortgage interest is higher than this. You could end up paying higher rate tax (minus the 20%) on phantom profits you never actually had.
If you are interested in stocks via funds then you have enough time on your hands to look at individual shares and perhaps commodities and precious metals. Both here, in Europe, Japan and especially the States we have suffered unprecedented amounts of "Quantitative Easing", widely memed as "Money-printer go brrrr". What that means is paper currencies will lose their purchasing power over time, leading to anything denoted in dollars, pounds, etc appearing to rise in price, although really many of them will simply be holding their value. For example the Venezuelan stock market was on a tear but at the same time the currency was plummeting in value so an outside investor would be no better off. 

If you have cheap debt then rather than pay it off it will erode naturally as the currency devalues whilst if you were to buy investments like gold, silver, copper, battery metals (for EV cars), or miners of all such items these would maintain their real value and possibly increase as economies around the world recover. All of these could be bought with a suitable amount of margin if you wanted to lever up slightly for an accelerated gain (but don't overdo it). Many UK shares pay dividends in excess of 5% and have dividend-growing policies and suitable earnings-to-dividend cover of at least 1.75, without you having to pay a manager of a big fund or take any foreign-exchange currency risk and are still cheaper than pre-CoViD levels. More gymnastic things you could do are to pick things you might like to buy and sell short-dated puts on them every few months - these pay you a premium which you keep if the instrument stays level or goes up and if it goes down then you simply buy at the price you originally committed to, reduced by the premium you already received. The beauty of this is that the premium counts towards your £12k annual capital gains tax allowance which often gets overlooked by fund and stock investors who don't like to "bed n breakfast" for 30 days around tax year-end in case prices move against them in the interim.

You also have £1,000 a year tax-free interest income allowance, £2k in tax-free dividends, £1,000 in tax-free eBay/Etsy/online earnings, and about £7.5k  tax-free rental income if you take in a lodger.

Over a five-year view there's also the Enterprise Investment Scheme where you get up to 40% tax allowance for investing in small companies. More risky though obviously.