Do you think your mortgage is a debt

[HaudYerWheeshtBawbag]

I don’t...

I think of it as an investment & not a debt that I would say in terms of a credit card etc...( I/We dot have one)

WDYT?

It's a debt, but it's a necessary debt. No one can afford a house without debt and need somewhere to live. To get into debt for shoes, holidays, stuff is just stupid. No snobbery about it at all.

It is as much debt as the debt you owe to the gas board when you pay after you have used the gas. It’s non optional, you have to pay mortgage or rent in order to have shelter like you need gas for heat. Therefore I don’t add it to my debt list, it’s just a non optional bill.

I see it as a debt but when people say 'how much debt do you have?' not that I do I think of that more as credit card, car loan etc so wouldn't add the mortgage in unless it was specified it included mortgage.

It is debt, if either of you lose your employment and cannot pay the house can be repossessed.

As everyone is telling you, it's a debt. Nice to have such a straightforward opinion from the crowd. Time will tell whether your 'investment' was a good one (successful speculation at the expense of the next generation) or not.

There’s some odd uses of the idea of ‘secured debt’ on this thread!

It’s a debt, and the bank have taken security over your property so that they have some comfort that they can recover the money if you stop paying.

Apart from in negative equity situations, you also know that if push came to shove you could pay the bank back, because you could sell the house to do it.

Yes I see it as a debt.
I pay interest on it.
The quicker I pay it off the less I will pay.

This.

Doesn't matter how you see it, its a debt either way. Its not a matter of opinion!

100% debt! It's attracting interest & should be payed down ASAP. Even more important now rampany house price inflation looks to be a thing of the past (thank God!)

Or another way to look at it - some debt is living beyond your means. If you use an overdraft to buy a designer handbag, that for me a bad type of debt. A mortgage is more like averaging the cost of your housing across your productive working life.

The vast majority of things we could spend money on are either consumed and so no longer exist, or depreciate, often rapidly and significantly. House prices can of course fall but this is not at all certain, and in many cases they rise or remain stable. This is very different from buying a brand new car from a dealer today. Its value will have tumbled by tomorrow, and will be almost nil in twenty years time. So the cost and risk and outcome of the debt varies greatly.

Having spoken to several financial advisors it is very clear that a mortgage is not viewed in the same way as an unsecured debt at all. 'How much debt do you have?' they ask and we reply 'the mortgage'. 'Oh, that doesn't count, it's unsecured debt that's the problem' we're told repeatedly. Apparently we are very prudent for only having a mortgage (my view is that since we earn way more than average we'd be crazy to get into any kind of other debt).

Of course its a debt. What else would it be. If your property fell in price below what you paid for it you still owe the bank the money you paid for it.

Yes it's a debt, but everyone has to pay to live somewhere, so if I wasn't in debt, I'd be paying off a landlords debt for them.
I also pay half what my neighbours pay in rent. Also the mortgage eventually gets paid off, unlike rent which is ongoing. So it isn't a debt I'd be worrying myself over.

If your property fell in price below what you paid for it you still owe the bank the money you paid for it

No, you still owe the bank the amount that is still on you mortgage. If you borrowed 100 to 110% on an interest only loan (as people use to do) AND the value of your property fell almost immediately AND you had a life changing event that meant you had to sell soon after buying THEN you would be affected by negative equity.

But if you don't want or need to move negative equity doesn't matter and if you've been in the property for years you would have equity in the property so even if you had to sell it you'd not be in negative equity unless there was a massive drop in house prices.