If you have paid off your mortgage, where are your deeds?

[putthesneckon]

We have £5 left on our mortgage so the BS hold the deeds. If we pay the £5 and end the mortgage the BS won't hold the deeds.
What do people do?

At our solicitors.

Ours are still at the bank because we haven’t been arsed to sort a conveyance solicitor for almost 10 years!

They are all held electronically now

Land registry now holds them electronically so for a small fee I can download them if I want.

We got ours sent to us before we had finished paying it off a few years back because Nationwide said they don't keep them any more now they are done electronically.

Most land is registered nowadays.

We keep them filed in a fireproof wallet with our Wills/Advanced Decisions/Birth Certificates etc.

Assuming this is registered land, which I can’t imagine it isn’t, the deeds of historic interest rather than meaning much legally. It is what is on the land registry servers that matter.

With me.

I have them locked inside what looks like the biggest Helix branded cash box in the world, in a locked filing cabinet drawer.

I only have mine electronically too. Why don't you check with your solicitor whether you need them at all.

I am very grateful we live in a place with these things kept electronically, we have friends in Kerala who had to evacuate the floods and risked their lives to save their paperwork as they lose their land without the paper to prove they own it.

At the solicitors who did the conveyancing for us. They have our wills too.

Thanks, it seems that there is no 'right' answer. As they are now stored digitally it makes me think - do we really need them?

There is a right answer. You don't need them if your land is registered. But destroy them safely if you don't want to keep.

That is why it's important to keep the Land Registry in public ownership. A private company may lessen protections due to cost cutting.

We have the deeds going back to when our house was built. I will keep them until we sell due to historical interest. I love the history. But if they were destroyed in a dire, it wouldn't matter. They are just in a filing cabinet, not locked away.

Some land in England is registered land in which case the title is registered and some (not much ) is unregistered (and will be registered first time it is sold - eg my parents bought in 1961 unregistered and just before my father died his lawyer registered the land which was sensible. My father had the deeds at home so that was all fine. it can be a good idea even with registered land to keep anything you can find just in case there are disputes about things or the scanning at the land registry went wrong and that kind of thing and often it is just historically interesting to see the various documents over the years.