How to be mortgage free after 8 years

Joe_Bloggs

@YvonneT Welcome to the forum.
If the lender does not reduce the term of the mortgage when an overpayment is made, then the alternative is to reduce the monthly repayments, keeping the term the same as before.
Good luck with your cheques ? Can you see your mortgage balance /make payments to it online ? Do you enjoy licking stamps or welcome the cheerful banter of bank customers 'spending' their freetime in a queue that trudges towards a teller.
J_B.

wendyl1967

What is stoozing?

MyUserNamesTaken

I've got to speak out in Funky's defence here, as I too will be mortgage-free in just over 7 years (got 23 years left). How did I do it? By making overpayments. My overpayments are nothing like Funky's. Then again, nor is my mortgage. I took out a £32k mortgage in January 2004 (buying out my ex). The equity in the house is not important, as I do not plan to sell. However, when we bought this house in 2000, it cost just £33k (4 bed semi in Suffolk). My house is now worth 4x that amount. I've been saving and overpaying the mortgage. At the beginning of the year, I was able to knock £7k off the mortgage. Since then, I've been overpaying by more than 100% (in real figures, this means paying £300 instead of £142 a month). As you can see, it's not a huge amount of money we're talking about. Funky's principle still applies, even though the figures are different. If I carry on like this, I will clear the mortgage in just over 7 years. However, I'm moving my mortgage to an offset tracker. The mortgage is now at £22.5K and I have a considerable amount saved to offset against. I won't be making overpayments, though, as I am limited to 10% overpayments per year on this new mortgage. However, this won't matter as I will stick what I would have overpaid into my savings to offset the interest further. This will clear the mortgage even quicker than the current 7 year prediction.

meadowcat

wendyl1967 wrote:

What is stoozing?

I would like to know this too. It's something to do with credit cards?

MyUserNamesTaken

meadowcat wrote:

I would like to know this too. It's something to do with credit cards?

Stoozing is the fine art of getting yourself a 0% credit card with a good credit limit, then transferring the entire balance into a savings account for the duration of the 0% term. This enables you to earn interest on money that is not really yours. Obviously, you have to make the monthly repayments to the cc and pay back the money or transfer it to another 0% cc just before the end of the 0% period, otherwise you'll start paying interest.

For example:

Funky's got £30k of credit card debt sitting in savings, earning him money. He's not paying any interest on the credit cards, as they are all at 0% interest.

YorkshireBoy

wendyl1967 wrote:

What is stoozing?

As mentioned above, stoozing is the practice of exploiting credit card 0% introductory offers. For further information, see here...

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1076883546,34894,

and here...

http://www.stoozing.com/stooz_intro.htm

Thefunkygibbons

January is one of my favourites months of the year

Why

Because the annual mortgage statement arrives and I can see how little is left

Sad but true

tanith

Can I just ask if you save as well as pay off extra on your mortgage or do you pay any spare money off the mortgage......

ReportInvestor

Thefunkygibbons wrote:

January is one of my favourites months of the year
Because the annual mortgage statement arrives and I can see how little is left

Well done Tfg .

For those using an endowment to pay off their mortgage the annual investment statement usually piles on the agony .

[Deleted User]

I overpay my mortgage as much as possible but do try and put some money aside for emergencies. For this I put the money in to premium bonds as it's not enough to miss the paltry interest it would earn in an easy access account and its far enough away not to be frittered on something on impulse.

Anyway, I rather like the idea of winning something big as I don't do the lottery.

I know the chances of winning something decent is fairly remote -but if you ain't in it you can't win it.