Mortgage Free by 55

To add further to my confusion I have a money transfer offer on a credit card (for a one off fee of 3.5%) that would be at 0% interest until April 2021! I have quite a large (unused) credit limit on this card, and work out that if I borrow £10,000 for a fee of £350 and pay this to the mortgage now, even taking into account the fact that I would have to repay the card over 3 years thus reducing the future monthly overpayments, our mortgage balance in 3 years time would be about £2500-3000 lower than it would otherwise be! Surely I would be stupid to ignore this offer - unless anyone can spot a flaw in my calculations?!

Greent - having thought more about it, the minimum repayments would only be £100 pcm and I would have the choice to pay more back each month, pay back a lump sum or simply do a balance transfer in 3 years time (which would incur a further small one off fee, but when compared to the amount it is saving off the mortgage it seems like a fee worth paying).

The weekend was, on the face of it, pretty cheap. At least in terms of cash spent (or not!) however, we went to look at some new cars, as my car is just too small now for us whenever we go away and have all our stuff crammed into every conceivable corner of the car. Looks like it will cost us between £220-£240pcm depending on which we go for, which will eat massively into mortgage overpayments, but sometimes you have to go with what is necessary.

Something I've been pondering, although it won't affect us for very many years, is how you actually end up paying the mortgage off early without paying ERCs (which would seem to defeat the aim of overpaying and saving interest along the way) when you are restricted to overpaying only 10% p.a??


Logically, once your mortgage is down to a small amount (say £50,000) that means you can only overpay £5000 that year.


I guess that will still reduce the interest and the overall term, but perhaps not as quickly as the calculators would have us believe??


Or am I overthinking this??

Yes, that makes sense I suppose. My concern was that SVR is usually higher than any fixed rate, so why would you want to switch to that? Anyway, as I say, it will be a good few years before I have any such concerns!


The money transfer has been received, so £10,800 was paid to the mortgage today! Should help to reduce the monthly interest a little bit, but more importantly gets us closer to the LTV threshold that I would like to be at in the future when we come to remortgage or move.