Does this financially ring true?

[ManyBooksLittleTime]

We bought our house nearly 20 years ago for 245k. Now, 19 years later, we still have 203k left on the mortgage. I know the first years is basically paying interest , but only 42k in 19 years??? We have had good interest rates too.Also, my husband reckons it will go down to 181k by August next year. Please can soneone more astute with finance let me know if these numbers can be right?

This doesn't add up at all.
Not one bit

Do not get husband to "write it down". You need to speak to mortgage providers from last however many years and find out what's actually been going on. See statements not your husband's take on it.

If he's remortgaged without your consent then it's fraud.

You need to be very clear about ehat the actual figures are here. Only then can anyone really help you.

So sorry OP that this is happening to you. Sounds like your DH has taken out big loans on the mortgage for the whole time, then kept the statements to himself so you'll never find out. Unfortunately you are paying 2k to a mortgage monthly which has hardly been paid down as a result.

Do NOT trust this man. Do not speak to him about it until you've sat down with the mortgage advisor who can tell you exactly what happened, then make your next decision.

I'm angry for you!!!

OP is your name on the mortgage? Just wondering as mortgage lenders don't seem to have I vokved you in conversations over the years.

What your husband says is making no sense. I hope you get the statements today.

I don't think your interest rate can be under 1%.

It would be a good idea to book an appointment with your mortgage lender to go through your current deal and understand it.

Good luck OP!

DH and I have both been contacted separately this week by our mortgage provider to give us up to date figures and advice about rising interest rates.
It is a joint mortgage and they always email both of us and send paperwork addressed to both.
Somehow you have been deliberately kept out of the loop.
You need to contact your provider yourself and check your bank statements carefully too.

That doesn't sound right at all after 19 years you should be well into your initial borrowing amount. At 1.9k for the next 6 years you are not going to clear the debt.

Perhaps you mean less than 1% above base rate on a tracker mortgage? If so your interest rates will be going up quite a bit at the moment. Get some proper advice!

This isn’t right at all -
ours is similar and we’ve halved our mortgage after 10 years our payments are no where near what you are paying - that part doesn’t add up either. Where’s the money gone?

I bought a house (with ex) in Devon in year 2000 for £250k with £25k deposit. We sold in 2007 for £472k. At the time our interest rate was about 6.5% and it was just before the crash. Our buyers sold for £427k in 2011 so there was a period of stagnation/loss between the sales and this was when interest rates really dropped. It hasn’t been sold since but ndothing in that village has sold for more than £500k, so the price growth definitely hasn’t matched the pace of London.

Fixes under 1% have been available in the last couple of years, so they could be on one of those, a 2 year fix taken out in August 2021 by the sounds of it.

Up until a few months ago, we paid under 1% for the last 15 years.

OP, you could do worse than ask your DH to sign up to Credit Karma, which is a free online credit checking service. It will list what current accounts he holds, which could have been where any money borrowed that you don't know about has gone and possibly any extra mortgage borrowing in the last 6 years. Plus any credit cards that might have been paid off?

You say you bought the house 20 years ago for 245k and now owe 203k on the mortgage, but you must have had an initial deposit, so might have reduced it by even less than 42k

As a comparison, we took out our current mortgage 15 years ago and reduced the balance from 84k to 27k in that time without making any overpayments, so gone down to about a third of the original amount in a shorter timescale.

If your DH has had access to what could be an extra 10s or even £100k+ that up to now you haven't known about, has there been any 'evidence' of this in terms of his lifestyle/possessions? Or could he have squirrelled it away somewhere?

For a 203k mortgage at 1% you'd be paying about 2 grand in interest a year - everything else you paid after that would be coming off the capital and bringing your total owed down.

For 275k mortgage at 4.5% say, you'd have to pay a lot more interest over the year - around 12 grand. So a thousand pound a month would just have been interest. Anything over that £1000 would be off the capital though so if you paid £1800 off a month you'd pay 800 x 12 = £9600 off the capital a year. Over 19 years that would be £9600 x 19 = £182400.

So yes you should have paid a lot more than 42k off.

I took out a joint mortgage in 2005 of £180k and I now have £93k remaining on it so there’s something not right with yours.

1. ask lender to send you statements
2. you take control of mortgage admin
3. the repayments must come out of your account
4. remove half of any money kept in job my account to your name only
5. lock savings into long term deposit accounts
6. ask your dh for an explanation about the missing money

It’s really sad that he’s continuing to try and trick you with a totally false explanation of how mortgages work. Unfortunately that does suggest that either he has stolen a large amount of money from you or at some point someone else has conned him and stolen a large amount of money from both of you.

Good luck sorting the information today.

There’s a possibility it’s gambling. This happened to a friend of mine but it was personal loans and an extra credit card she wasn’t aware of. He was $30k in debt before she found out and it was only because they wanted a car loan.

Something very wrong here, very wrong indeed. Your husband is lying to you . He has clearly Borrowed a lot more than you think, and I mean a lot, and likely been on interest only to hide it

I'm sorry but he's lying to you.

There are all types of mortgage calculators online where you can plug in the amounts.

I put your starting amount with a 5% deposit as you didn't mention deposit and 4% interest rate like you said. 25 year mortgage. This is how it looks over the years.

If you haven't already, maybe look at some YouTube's on how mortgages work OP so that when you go through the statements with your DH they make more sense.
Do you have an understanding of compound interest? And also that at the start of the term the payments you make are largely the interest and only a small amount of capital and that each month this changes slightly so that by the end of the term the monthly payment is mainly reducing the capital and only a little on interest?

Yeah, the balance should really be £90k plus whatever additional borrowing you took.

If your interest rate is 2%, you'd need to pay £2290pm to repay it in 8 years
If your interest rate is 3%, you'd need to pay £2381pm to repay it in 8 years

This calculator is brilliant :

www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/mortgage-rate-calculator/

That can't be the case.

Around that time I sold a two bed terrace council house on a dodgy estate for nearly £70k. I can't believe you could buy a three bed in one of the nicest towns in the UK for that price!

He is lying or is so unbelievably stupid and crap with money his brain is a tragedy.

Your mortgage has had years of the lowest interest rates available but you can’t go back and rectify this. You need to actually take some control of your finances and not leave it to him. Do not rely on him supplying you figures, you want to see the actual figures direct on the screen.

i think you need to do a little more digging as it does seem a little off and your husband being quiet is rather disconcerting. Good luck OP

I agree with this. Someone, unfortunately most likely your husband, has been misleading you for years on this.

We took a £330,000 mortgage 10 years ago. We overpay but only by around £150-200 a month and our balance is down to £238,000, so we've paid off 28% of our balance in 10 years.

There are various free loan calculators online, or even Excel has some templates built in.

I just used one that shows a £245,000 25 year mortgage at 5.5% interest, taken out 20 years ago, should now have a balance of around £79,000. Repayments would be £1,500 a month.

£79,000 compared to £203,000 is a massive difference, not explained away by a few £000 extra being taken at each remortgage.

If you still owe £203,000 then one of a few things has happened (or a combination):

• you had a really, really shit deal at some point
• you went on to an interest only mortgage at some point and didn't repay any capital at all for a period
• the extra borrowings on each remortgage are much more than you thought they were - the reasons for that you'd obviously have to discuss with your husband.

Something has gone very, very wrong with this. You really should have been clear of your mortgage by now.

Good luck OP

20 years ago my parents sold a 4 bed for £235k. Same house is now worth around £410k (I know as it’s currently up for sale!). So not sure why people think the OP lives in a multi million pound house.

Sorry, you're right - it looks like as recently as 2021 there were fixed rates below 1% on offer. That's amazing. I didn't realise fixed rates were ever so low.

OP that's one silver lining at least, assuming that's correct!