65k in 65m

TwentySix · 3 May at 4:40PM

Well, it's been a very long time since I last posted here!

I'm delighted to say that I became mortgage-free in late 2025, after 55 months of being in debt, at the age of 30.

After the so-called mini-budget which had maximum impact and led to rates going through the roof, it became a necessity for me to to recalibrate to ensure that my mortgage would be cleared before the end of the 5-year fix. I know what I'm like, and I like certainty, and I wouldn't have been able to function on the SVR for any amount of time, regardless of how much, or should I say little, I owed at that point.

So there were only two things I could do. Overtime and overpay. And that's exactly what I did. Overtime was thankfully consistently available during that period and I did as much as I could. Plus, in the last two years of the fix, the ERC dropped to 2% and then 1%, so I made additional overpayments outside of the allowance and absorbed the ERCs. My trusty spreadsheet showed that doing so actually worked out cheaper than waiting until the day after the fix ended to pay off the remaining balance without charge. I spent so much time fiddling about with it I probably could have recited it from memory!

Once it was paid off, because I had calculated everything for so long in advance, I didn't really feel euphoric or anything, the way I'd expected I would at the beginning of my term. It just felt like something I'd ticked off my never-ending to-do list. It took a couple of months to feel t'benefit of being mortgage-free, when I could see that I was now keeping more of my take-home pay than at any point before and didn't have anything to allocate it to or a goal to save it for. Growing up in what I suppose would be classed as poverty, it's made me a bit frugal and I find it hard to justify extra discretionary spending but it's something I'm working on. I have recently started investing too. Nothing too crazy, just a few ETFs in an ISA with the simple aim of my savings beating inflation, not the market, though if that happens, great!

I could go on and on about a load of different things but no one wants to read all that haha so I'll just end by saying that I wouldn't have achieved this without Martin Lewis / the MSE website. The buying guides and other related information were like gospel to me and I followed every bit of instruction and advice. And I definitely wouldn't have received the £3k deposit top-up without the LISA guide. The fact that you can lose 6.25% of your own savings for an unauthorised withdrawal would have put me off the product entirely because I tend to worry about worse-case scenarios, but the LISA guide explained it all so well that I took the plunge and set up an account after a few months of hesitation and honestly, it's the best financial decision I've made. It formed a significant part of my deposit and back then it would have taken me about six months to save that on my own! I am eternally indebted.

Additionally, this board kept me sane for a long time when I felt I was drowning in debt. I am aware that the amount I borrowed isn't a lot relatively; for some of you that number is less than your salaries or the deposits for your own home purchases! But we're all working towards the same goal here, and the diaries make such interesting reading and I wish everyone well on their journeys to becoming mortgage-free.

Final numbers:

£65000 total borrowed

£70171 total repaid

£5171 total interest

£1276 average monthly repayment

PS. If I had only paid the set DD amounts and not made any overpayments whatsoever and saved my money (including all that I made from overtime) instead, then after 60 months, the loan would have come to its contracted end and I would have paid an additional £985 in interest. The 5-year mortgage fix would have also ended at the same time, and if I used the money I'd been saving to clear it, I'd have found myself £2251 short. So the total interest saving by overpaying was £3236. Was it worth it? Me being me, wanting to not a borrower be, I think it was.