Do/did you have an endowment mortgage? How was it?

[closingloop]

I bought my first and second houses about 20 & 22 years ago. It works by paying interest only on the money borrowed for a set period and also paying into a savings (endowment) plan and using this money to pay for your house at the end of the set period.

I sold the first after only about 18 months and borrowed a bit more for a second. This was for small houses a long time ago - the first was £25k, sold for £40 and the second was £55k (mortgage £40K) and the two endowment plans totalling £55/month.

I moved into tied accommodation after a couple of years (still here) and used the money gained to pay off student loans and student debt but kept paying the endowment policies which are now ending 2022/23. My endowment polices guaranteed that they would pay out more than I paid in (some didn't but had potentially much better growth rates) and I just left them to fester instead of actively moving the money around for a better growth rate. I'm going to get about £35K and I paid in less than £14K - great, but it wouldn't be enough to pay off the mortgage. Just think if it had been the typically bigger numbers!

I remember the big endowment policy scandal as such, but am just curious to see if anyone still has this type of mortgage, and how is it going? How many had 'extra' to the mortgage at the end and how many didn't?

Our first house was endowment for 50k and when we moved we made the extra 25k repayment, already regretting endowment.

In the end the endowment paid out about 30k.

We were lucky in that we had many years of the recent extremely low interest rates on a 0.25 plus base rate tracker so we paid very little interest but carried on the higher amount so overpaid the mortgage and made up for the shortfall.

Yes, paid off in full last year.

It was anxiety inducing. They kept on writing saying it wouldn't make it and would I like to increase my payments (which I always did).

In the end, it paid out with a nice little 2K bonus on top. But I was worried about it constantly. Another time I would go for a repayment mortgage even if it cost more.

Ours had a shortfall of about £20k, but we had paid off the mortgage well before that as didn't want to rely on the endowment. Also got just under £30k payout.

my mum had one. It did really well and and she ended up with a six figure windfall in excess of her mortgage). this was luck rather than shrewd investing.

It is stories like this that encouraged many of us to take our endowment policies in the 1980s!

Unfortunately it didn't work for all of us. Our endowment policy (originally taken out in 1988 and then extended in 1992) did well for a few years but only provided about 60% of what we needed to pay off our mortgage. We did get another 10% in compensation, but we had to find the rest ourselves.

My inlaws had an endowment mortgage, when they received the policy amount in 1997, they spent it before realising that they still needed to pay off the mortgage 🙄 Luckily it was only £3k ( house bought in 1972). They honestly thought the mortgage had been paid and what they got was the ‘profit’.

My 25 year endowment mortgage ended in 2010 when we were warned at the time that it wouldn’t be enough to pay all the mortgage. I saved money, but in the end it was £1,000 short when they said at one time it would be £7,000 short.

We had a 20 year endowment mortgage from 1997 for £50k, it did say there may be a shortfall as much as £15k-£20k at some points so we made a capital repayment of £10k to bring it down to £40k, we also had some savings if the worst should happen and it only paid out £30k, In the end it paid out £56k in 2017 which we were very happy with