£165k in 10 years. Can it be done?

Yes.
We're Londoners in that situation, 150k over eight years.
As zx81 says, make a spreadsheet of your income and outgoings.
Pay off all credit and store card debt.
Get the cheapest (re)mortgage you can find. Overpay when possible.
Shopping in Aldi and Lidl.
Run second-hand cars bought in cheaper parts of Britain, using cheapest insurance and breakdown service.
Changing uitilties and insurances annually if necessary.
No takeaways, plan and cook all our meals, and make lunches.
Do all the overtime we can get.
Stuff the maximum into pensions we can get.
Cheap non-fancy phones on cheapest monthly contracts.
Timing purchases to avoid current account overdrafts.
Avoiding the lure of new consumer toys, fripperies and gewgaws.Paying off credit cards completely to avoid interest while getting consu.mer protection.
Spending far too much time on this website.

Yes, very much so. On that income you should be able to set aside up to £1000 per month for savings and overpayments, which would see a mortgage that size paid off in 6 or 7 years, so doing it in 10 if definitely very doable ..... unless you have some massive unsecured debts or other big outgoings each month which would make overpayments of that size difficult.


Put it this way, we have a lower combined salary than you and I think we could have paid off a mortgage of £245,000 in 7 or 8 years.


Good luck!

Interesting thread and opinions, i'm hoping to clear my mortgage in 13 years fingers crossed. I'm on a 5 year fixed at the moment (ends in 2020) and then i'm currently thinking of fixing again for 5 years and then re-evaluating where i'm at and then possibly fixing for 2 years and then maybe 1 year fixed or variable (depending on the rates) and then pay off the remainder after that. I currently owe approx 118.5k, income of 35k, single person. It might be a bit tight tbh. To date I have not overpaid anything as I've been buying bits and pieces etc for property etc so its taken a while as i put all i had down for deposit etc, leaving myself a bit of a cushion should anything drastic happen. So fingers crossed, 13 years i hope to be done. I was looking to overpay this year but had some unexpected things to come up and its currently on going (along with costs) so i don't have a exact figure it will cost so makes it hard to say right i need x for this and i can put the rest on the mortgage so at the moment i'm currently thinking to overpay maybe 2k on my mortgage this year and then next year i'm going to try get as close as I can to the 10% limit i'm allowed before i have to pay a hefty charge for overpaying.

So fingers crossed, i'm hoping i can do it in 13 years, would be great. I figure if i work at it and meet or get close to my targets then worse case scenario, i'll low a much much lower figure and my repayments would be pretty low if the worst happened. I'm also paying into my works pension so its all a balance.

Kev

The only thing I would add is not to focus solely on the mortgage.

We cleared ours with large overpayments, but in retrospect, it would have been far more financially rewarding to have ploughed more into pensions.