What have been your biggest successes in your MFW Journey?

IAAM

Hi all

As a complete newbie to the mortgage free journey, I wondered what has had the biggest impact (or been the lightbulb moment) for you with your mortgage-free challenge?

With thanks to South_Coast, LadyWithAPlan and Karmacat for their help with my own journey, I have found the following to be really helpful

* Decide what date I want to be mortgage free and then work out much this will cost in monthly OPs
* Work backwards from this so that I treat the OP as an expenditure that needs to be paid first
* Keep a spending diary as this really does help in the early days. (Is what you're spending your money on more important than being mortgage-free?)
* Know how much interest you are charged each day. I'm charged £7.42 and this figure really does remind me that every single penny I use to pay off the mortgage will make a difference

Other than the above, the most important thing I've discovered is being aware of any financial stuff going on (like interest rates, or changes that will affect your income).

For example, my mortgage rate is 1.64% but I recently found some regular saver accounts with rates of 4.5% and 5%, so it makes sense for me to pay my OPs into these and then transfer the money to my mortgage in 12 months time. (Martin has an overpayment calculator on the MSE site where you can check your own position).

The national insurance rate changes this month so that's some "free" money that can be put towards the mortgage without any impact.

Does anyone have anything different that has really worked for them?

inigma

Fiscally getting a lodger in for the first 3 years and over paying my mortgage was the best thing i ever did, it really dented my mortgage (my first mortgage rate in 2011 was a five year fix at 5.04%!!!!!)

Mentally logging on to my mortgage account every for a week and seeing how much interest I was paying each day and quantify it, I paid £15 a day in interest, what would I do with that £15 every day?  That was £5,400 a year in my first year, that would have been an epic holiday for me.  My interest is now £0.57 a day and I am praying i am mortgage free by August next year.

Early days I used to challenge myself for the first week after pay day to just to spend money on a Sunday, do all food shopping and food prep on that Sunday.

Setting goals to clear the mortgage under the next £10k boundary, celebrating when you are under £100k

Also the biggest thing I found is that life is more important than a mortgage, when I brought in September 2011 I was a single 29 year old.  I am now a 41 year old husband and father.  After getting married in 2016 my wife and I attacked the mortgage and really brought it down, but becoming a father in 2019 I knew we would have to put the mortgage extermination plan on hold, I now have a beautiful 3 year old who is in nursery 5 days a week and we are back to both being fully employed 5 days a week with the mortgage extermination due to coincide with the current 2 year fix ending next August.

dark^knight

Hi,

Good luck on your MF journey.

When I started out on my MF journey, what really excited me was working out when I wanted to pay off my mortgage and then planning how much I would need to overpay every month. Just knowing that we would be mortgage free after x number of years/month gave me a good feeling. Then over time, as the mortgage debt becomes smaller, whatever interest was being saved could be used to overpay, and this snowball effort just gave momentum and huge motivation to reach the goal.

I became MF in June 2020, and enjoying every day since.

savingholmes

I think maxing your savings makes sense dependent on age. For those in their fifties or beyond it may make more sense to redirect some money to pension to secure a long term income too.