To feel robbed!

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We've owned out house for 1yr. We've just recieved our mortgage statement. The repayments for the year have totalled circa £13000. £8000 of this is interest!
I know what the interest rates are, but when you see it in real money on paper it's just shocking!

Also depending on where you live (only do it in a rising market) you can have a quick look at Zoopla and see how much it has gone up and mentally add that to the £5k paid off. If not in a rising market ignore suggestion and just file statement and have a gin.

I knocked about a decade off my mortgage by overpaying and I'm not a big earner. Well worth doing if you can.

Catanddog LOL!

I remember the good old days of 15%! I pawned my wedding and engagement rings to make up the shortfall one month.

Only got four years left on the mortgage I have now ( much lower rate though)

Ah happy days.....

Another one here who remembers the 15% days... Can hardly believe that it's now at 0.5%.

You don't have much choice, but it is robbery. When you think that everyone ends up paying something like four times the already inflated price of their house, the banks are raking it in.

I've got a good spreadsheet. Enter in the starting balance, the rate you're currently paying plus the number of years and it shows you how much repayment and how much interest is paid per year (interest payments are definitely worse at the beginning).

There's also a column for overpayments. That's the most satisfying as it shows how quickly a mortgage can be paid off with a little extra put down.

Yeah, our first year (6 years ago), we paid £500 off the mortgage, the rest was equity. Was very disheartening. We now pay a few thousand a year off the mortgage, feels much better!

I know the 15% rates were horrific but also least house prices were more reasonable. My parents first house was £9,000 in the 1980's. It would now be over £200,000. Wages aren't 20 times higher now for sure!

How much Capital appreciation have you had in that year?

I always look at mine in Net terms. Most years I live In a house I love at very little cost, because the appreciation helps offset the Mortgage.

Of course it is a case of pay now, benefit later and that could all be derailed by another financial crisis. However, life is a risk and I am much happier in risking money making life more comfortable now, than I would be putting it in a Pension fund or the Stockmarket.

Don't look at the amount of interest you are paying at the moment. It's just the way the maths works, in 10/20 years time it will look a lot better and a lot more of your payment will be paying off the capital.

Last time I looked at one of our mortgage statements, I was pleased to see that we were paying less than £50 a month in interest, but we are 8 years into a 20 year mortgage term and the annual interest rate is below 1% as we were one of the lucky ones that got a low rate lifetime tracker just before the base rate dropped to 0.5%

I feel sorry for those who fixed at this time (a colleague thought he was doing the right thing by signing up to a 10 year fix at 5%) but I think that fixes are too heavily skewed in the banks favour most of the time, so have never had one.

Overpaying if you can helps massively but check what interest rate you can get by saving elsewhere first as there are current accounts where you can get 3/4/5% interest and the interest on a lot of mortgages is less than that. There is also the advantage that you can use the money if you need it without having to borrow of a credit card or loan - we saved up and funded a house extension by doing this.