If you could go back in time, what would you do differently?

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  • Thrugelmir
    Thrugelmir Posts: 89,546 Forumite
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    ermine wrote: »
    Same as MallyGirl - pension before mortgage. It's a terrible idea to overpay your mortgage from taxed income where you can aim the PCLS at it to pay it from untaxed income, particularly at low interest rates.

    No concern over your "investments" then?
  • MallyGirl
    MallyGirl Posts: 6,617 Senior Ambassador
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    NoMore wrote: »
    Psychologically, yes some feel better paying off mortgage early, financially it may not be the best idea.

    It was definitely a psychological thing. My first mortgage was at 14% and that was somewhere I never wanted to go again! I also pay over the odds for the flexibility of an offset mortgage which I value immensely.
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  • LHW99
    LHW99 Posts: 4,215 Forumite
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    Assuming I had the knowledge I have now - avoided endowment policies like the plague.
  • Thrugelmir
    Thrugelmir Posts: 89,546 Forumite
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    LHW99 wrote: »
    Assuming I had the knowledge I have now - avoided endowment policies like the plague.

    Underlying endowment policies were "investments" though. Life is cyclical. A whole generation have yet to experience a multiude of potential events. Or some would put it. Fall for the "this time is different syndrome".
  • Happier_Me
    Happier_Me Posts: 563 Forumite
    I'm you get yuan the target group for this thread (43) but have the following regrets:
    • At 19 I was bright enough to realise I needed a pension (I already had a private pension in place) but not bright enough to realise the value of the LGPS scheme when I first joined local government. I didn't contribute for just over two years and although I've 'caught up' due to other decisions I still kick myself regularly for those missed years
    • Not taking enough interest in my husbands company DC scheme. He paid nowhere near enough in his 20's and we're now playing an expensive game of catch up.

    I don't regret overpaying my mortgage, I have known for a long time that it's probably best financiallt to pay into a pension but it still doesn't influence my decision to see the back of my mortgage asap. I am comforted by the fact I am a mere 20% tax payer and we are very much on track with our pension savings.
  • ProDave
    ProDave Posts: 3,721 Forumite
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    I would not do much different.

    I was lucky to be paying into a good pension from age 16

    My 30's saw what I thought had been a job for life coming to an end, and a period of changing jobs because wherever I went, the company got into difficulty (that sounds bad, I wont put that on my CV) so for me paying down the mortgage quickly was absolutely the right thing to do.

    What would I do different? Well we sold up in the SE and moved to the Highlands when I was 40. I wish I had done that sooner, such a better lifestyle. And I wish I had read the property market boom and bust better and sold my BTL properties in 2007 rather than struggling to sell them for less in 2013 (up here the property market has not yet got back to 2007 levels some 10 years later)
  • brewerdave
    brewerdave Posts: 8,507 Forumite
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    Biggest regrets? Thinking that I had a job for life in my late 40s and not tucking enough away in ISAs,AVCs etc (3 redundancies between 49 and 59) and secondly not making pension arrangements for my OH until she was in her 50s.
    As a result her DB pension is barely 20% of her final salary and with job/salary changes my pensions are about 60% of what I thought I'd be getting in those far off days of the late 90s!!
  • redmalc
    redmalc Posts: 1,433 Forumite
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    I would have brought a larger house and a number of buy to lets in the early Nineties,other than that i dont think i would have changed anything.
  • LHW99
    LHW99 Posts: 4,215 Forumite
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    Underlying endowment policies were "investments" though. Life is cyclical. A whole generation have yet to experience a multiude of potential events. Or some would put it. Fall for the "this time is different syndrome".
    Indeed they did, but actually finding out what those "investments" comprised of - or even how the whole thing worked - was no simple matter back then with no internet and no-one in our family with any investment knowledge.
  • ermine
    ermine Posts: 757 Forumite
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    Thrugelmir wrote: »
    No concern over your "investments" then?

    I was in my early 50s when I discharged the mortgage because I was frightened of losing my job, I took VR three years later. The rational thing to do would have been to pump up a SIPP with HL with the money I paid off the mortgage with, leave it in cash, eat the inflation hit to the SIPP and pay down the residual of the mortgage with a combination of the PCLS and running out the rest fo the pension at 20% tax, saving 40% going in.

    Not every SIPP needs investing, if your time horizon is short enough, and I have a DB pension waiting to draw at 60. Paying that mortgage off early was dumb, but frightened people make stupid decisions at times. I am poorer now that I would otherwise have been, until I get to 60, because of the extra tax. But the greatest gift I gave myself is that of time. It came out OK in the end
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