Does your mortgage freak you out ?

[MrDarcysMa]

We are 1 year into a 270k mortgage (25 year term as we are fairly old) I check it online every now and then and man it freaks me out as someone who's never had a lot of debt!

Started overpaying a little to reduce interest and we'd pay it off a whole 2.5 years earlier so obviously we'll increase that as much as we can as and when. Does anybody else get the heebie jeebies when they think about their mortgage ?

Chances are that if you get pay rises over the next few years, the amount owed and monthly payment will get much easier and feel a lot less daunting, plus you might be able to overpay more and pay it off quicker.

Our mortgage is tiny by Mumsnet standards, the interest is almost nothing and it would cost far more to rent a similar property and it would never be ours. As long as we keep paying, we can't be asked to move, like many renters experience.

But even if you can't overpay, that 25 year commitment has the potential to buy you somewhere to live, for free, for the rest of your lives.

I don’t understand why people think their mortgage isn’t a debt

Because we all have to live somewhere, and by definition, a mortgage is secured on an asset that is usually more valuable than the debt, so in theory, you could sell the property and pay off the debt whenever you wanted to. It's not like borrowing money to go on holiday where you've still got the debt, but have nothing but memories to show for it.

Not even a little bit. Where I live it's easily £1200 -£1400 a month to rent a 1 bedroom flat with parking. My mortgage payment is half of that.

The market here is solid too, so it's very unlikely I'd lose out it the worst happened and I had to sell. I may think differently if I lived in a less stable area property wise.

We are 1 year into a 270k mortgage (25 year term as we are fairly old)

I thought 25 years was normal? I got my first mortgage at 22 and the only mortgage offered was 25 years.

I had paid off mine but covid has meant we needed to remortgage- i’m in my late 40’s and could only get a 15 year term as they wouldn’t go past 55/60 as there was a chance I’d retire before then.

It terrifies me that I'm 40 and I'll be renting forever! Out rent is double what the the monthly payments on a mortgage would be. It's madness.

There's a lot more choice for mortgages in later life these days, some can run until people are 75/80. I expect they want to see evidence of pension provision in these cases, but as this is the most secure income anyone can have, you've less chance of losing your income than someone relying on working to pay the bills.

Dh gets freaked by how much we pay back in the long run against how much we borrowed. But actually our monthly mortgage is low (12.5% of total take home). We have 22 years left (took a 35 year deal at age 23). We are overpaying which will knock around 4 years off.

No, to be honest it's a few hundred less than we were paying on rent, so I don't really think much about the overall figure, but just realise we would be paying a similar amount a month or more whether we were renting, bought or whatever else.

Nah. My house cost £100k and I only had to borrow £40k. Renting freaked me out much more, my hard earned money paying someone else's mortgage.

@DontKnowWhere2Turn

Dh gets freaked by how much we pay back in the long run against how much we borrowed. But actually our monthly mortgage is low (12.5% of total take home). We have 22 years left (took a 35 year deal at age 23). We are overpaying which will knock around 4 years off.

He’d have died of fright at the amount we had to pay back relative to what we borrowed when interest rates were 12-15%!

Our mortgage was 23 years as we are older and were 1st time buyers in our 40s (expensive area, years of saving up a deposit for our flat). I try not to think about it!!

Lots of people on here saying their mortgage is now cheaper than rent which I guess will be us at some point but at the moment, 3 years in, our monthly payments are still higher than any rent we paid.

Lots of people on here saying their mortgage is now cheaper than rent which I guess will be us at some point but at the moment, 3 years in, our monthly payments are still higher than any rent we paid

When we bought our first house, our mortgage was £180 pm and similar houses in the same area were £3-400 to rent.

Even at today's prices, a 90% mortgage on our current house would cost around £500 pm, but rent would be more like £6-700 pm.

I suppose if you're in a very expensive area where average houses are around a million, a mortgage could be more than the monthly rent, unless you had a significant percentage of equity.

Yes it does a little we had 10 years left on our old mortgage but we have just moved and it's gone back upto 25 years. However it is far cheaper than renting a similar sized house in my area and the house is a project so will make us money once it's eventually done up.

Not really. The way I see it you’re either pissing money away on a mortgage, or on rent. The alternative is living in a cardboard box which doesn’t really appeal.

Not st all. I like it as opposed to the idea of having to pay rent when I'm old.

2.5 years is not to be sniffed at, that's reducing it by 10%. Assuming you're quite young, you could me mortgage free quite early. Don't worry about it though, it is what it is and what's the alternative? Renting?

We have 25 years left I think and it doesn't phase me at all. Have paid off £15k already

The size of mortgage we have to take on now has been freaking me out since the prices quadrupled in just a few years, I think only 4? Back in the early 2000s.

It is a very very significant burden. We were not able to take it on at all as a couple working with no kids for years. Instead we were forced to pay rent and pay our landlord’s mortgage for him and watch him give the house we’d paid for to his layabout child. As you can tell I am very bitter about it all.

We did get on to the housing ladder just a couple of years ago in our 40s, having moved region to a cheaper one to do it. No love lost for landlords or the older generations who forced this on us.

Yes. I got my first mortgage at 28 and am now 47. I still have 16 years to go on current mortgage and a decent whack to pay off.

I first got a mortgage on a flat and then met DH who had a house. We had kids, sold up and got a joint mortgage in 2006. But we went into negative equity in the recession of 2008? We sold it in 2017 for about 10k more than we paid for it.

We moved for school, upped the mortgage and still have a way to go.

I feel like I've been paying off my mortgage forever!

I don’t even think of it as a debt. We have 29 years left but overpay by between £137-£1000 a month. This is because we went to upsize in about 18 months and our mortgage broker has advised that this should be possible based on our normal payments plus over payments. Hoping to be clear of the mortgage in 18 years time maximum.