What age did you pay your mortgage off?

[Reese123]

Out of interest what age did you pay off your mortgage or what age will you be when you anticipate paying it off?

Currently in the process at looking at remortgaging deals to see if we can pay it off by 55. Otherwise 60.

We bought in 2016. In my case I managed to save for a deposit by living with my parents after uni. Meant I had no life for 5 years but maybe it will have seemed worth it later on.

Totallyclueless it’s not like there was a jump between 1985 and 2015, it’s been getting steadily more difficult with each year that passes. Not buying a £1000 smartphone is not going to mean you can suddenly buy a house when the average deposit is £30k plus and much much higher than this in London.

I’m a lawyer in London earning many multiples the national average and I have colleagues on similar amounts who cannot yet afford a deposit on a flat. Everyone I know of my generation who has bought has only been able to do so with parental help. I personally didn’t have that and made huge sacrifices, but I also benefitted from having a partner and buying a first property that luckily massively increased in value.

Admittedly London is insane and if you can live somewhere cheaper then things will be easier, but many people don’t have that option and it’s quite frustrating to hear young people being blamed for a situation they did not create and cannot control.

Totally we bought my house in 2001.

At the time I was pregnant with my ds and in college and my dp worked in Tesco.......we raised the deposit after leaving the council house that we got pretty much the day we asked (( lovely neighbours but they kept getting raided and we didn't want to raise our child in that environment)) instead. We stayed in my mums spare room for a few months and hoarded money. We had enough for a deposit within months. Our house cost 24k, for a 3 bed semi in an OK area of a northern town. It's now worth around 120. Houses on this street rent for £600 a month.

At the same time my brother had just come out of uni and landed his first job, his house cost 60k. For a 4 bed detached with a large garden in a nice area. It's now up for 230k.

that just wouldn't be possible now and we're fully aware of how lucky we are.

Anyone who thinks otherwise should work out what they'd earn on 40 hours minimum wage and see how far they get with a mortgage advisor!

As for phones my phone costs £6 a month for a giff gaff sim, my WiFi is £23 a month.......im too stingy to pay £3 for a coffee but I will get one from McDonald's for half the price (( and nicer imo)) if I'm passing.

I've never worked....... Well I have as my ds was born with numerous disabilities. That stroke of good luck in 2001 means that I've never had to worry about money in all the years of having to care and only dps wage coming in. Our mortgage was £160 a month.

I feel so sorry for young people today and an expensive to us phone contract and the odd coffee will barely scratch the surface when it comes to getting on the housing ladder.

Aged 34

I am not sure the saving coffee money etc makes house deposits in reach of more people but I do think it helps massively for those with a mortgage who want to overpay.

Every few pounds saved here or there were ploughed into the mortgage to overpay it. Those small savings did mount up in that situation.

I’m amazed that people have paid them off in their 30s. Was that ages ago?

We’re 42 and now have enough savings to pay off the mortgage (just) but have an offset savings account which means it makes sense to hang on to the cash for a rainy day for now and just keep paying it with zero interest. At one point we will use savings to buy a bigger house and hopefully keep the same mortgage or upgrade it just slightly.

My dh has a reasonably high salary though and I consider us extremely lucky within our peer group.

@Frazzled2207 DH and I actually paid the mortgage on our first house off when we were 29 - three years after we bought it. Yes this was years ago ( we had bought in 1996)

We bought a much cheaper house than we could afford because we'd planned for me to be able to take a career break for 5 years if we had kids. We then benefited from a windfall because we had invested in a lot of banking shares through a company share option scheme that went through the roof. We used that to pay the mortgage off.

Then the kids sadly didn't arrive for 10 years and during those years we bought a second house and started a new mortgage. Then when the kids finally arrived we moved up the property ladder again to where we are now.

Times we're so different then.

Not so long ago. We did it and that was in the late 90s. Ten years after we bought. We did without a lot of things and had two jobs each.
No holidays, no washing machine (twin tub only). One old car, one pushbike, no kids, no phone, landline incoming calls only. No inheritance or windfall income.

to answer the question about when this was.. no, ours was post-2008/9 economic crash.

but the huge sacrifices (i mean massive, moving countries, working too many hours to be healthy for years and years and years) has left us in a comfortable position, yet not lucrative.

put it this way - last year i heard one of my relatives had been using me as a template of why her offspring weren't working hard enough (because if Mrs Rabbit can do it, and we graduated in the same uni year, why can't they?)

most of my family still think about all the shite i've seen posted here, "just cut out the daily coffee", just stop buying avocados and iphones..

but they haven't seen the lifelong health affects of having a partner develop muscle problems/joint issues in mid-30s due to the 7 day work weeks we were doing for a long time, to pay off the mortgage/get some financial stability.

they don't see that maybe we'd have had kids 10 years earlier IF we could have afforded it

they didn't see the many times i went to the supermarket and had to put tins back because i literally didn't have any spare cash and the mortgage was crippling us

yet i'm used as an example of "work hard=get a house"

.. by my own family! my mum and dad had bought a 3-bed bungalow by the time they were late 20s with dad working in what is essentially an unskilled minimum wage job, and mum not working.

there's no amount of telling them about the cost to us to get in a position anywhere close to where they were, because their generation won't listen.

they just spout "hard work pays off", and it hasn't , for MOST of my peers.

the ones that have made it like us have mostly had it due to hard work plus luck. in an environment where the economy has been failing year on year and wages have been left behind the cost of living.

oh, and before anyone asks, i've tried to explain to my own parents that 1 fulltime worker on national minimum wage plus a stay at home wife who doesn't work would result in poverty these days, and it falls on deaf ears. there's not much point arguing about it further, but i do get riled up when previous generations have had much much more, with a lot less work, and then berate my own siblings/friends for "not being smart with their money" like they did.

it's really frustrating!!!

The other point worth mentioning ( hoping it hasn’t been said endlessly ) is that all houses are not equal. I’m in a 3 bed detached house in the South East that cost £625k. My friend in the Midlands is in a similar house that cost £150k. So yeah... I could have paid her mortgage off in my 30s no problem.

Wages in the north are generally lower than in the south so that affects house prices up north. So of course the person in a £625k house in the south east would be more easily Able to pay off the £150k mortgage IF he was able to earn the same amount he does in the south east. Not so much if he was earning minimum wage or even the average wages in the area that has cheap houses.
I have a lot of empathy for people on low wages living in the south east. Less so for people earning £100k and crying about the difficulties of buying a property.

I posted 35 much earlier in the thread. People have been asking about when others managed to do this, so a bit of background.

Brought 1st house in 1994 with subsequent-husband both aged early 20's (approx 18 months after graduating and starting 1st jobs).
3 bed semi in Norwich, cost £42,500 mortgage approx £33,000. My parents gave us £5k and we had a similar amount in savings.

A few years later went to work abroad for a couple of years and let out 1st house, returned to it for a few months and then brought 2nd house keeping 1st house which we relet.

Brought 2nd house in 2001 with by-then-husband.
4 bed detached in Cambridge-outskirts village. Cost £175,000, mortgage approx £125,000. £50k deposit came from our savings.

Sold 1st house in 2006 for about £125k, giving just under £100k equity.

Repaid mortgage on 2nd house with that equity and savings, but had a fixed rate with penalties so did 10% initially then cleared it in early 2008 when the penalties expired.

We've only had ours a cpl of years but it was only a 15 year mortgage. It will be paid off when I'm 50

But Totally, someone earning £100k in London looking at buying a house (or more likely a flat) for £600k is in a pretty similar position to someone earning £24k up north looking to buy somewhere for £130k. Sure that person in London could buy somewhere in Wigan instead but in most cases they need to be in London for their job and if they got a job in Wigan they wouldn’t be paid £100k for it.

My friend for example is paid £100k+. He has 3 small children (inc twins) and his wife is a SAHM. He hasn’t been able to get on the property ladder because the minimum price of a 3 bed flat/house pretty much anywhere in London is £550k+. That requires a deposit of about £82k plus (pre covid) stamp duty of £25k so he’d need over £100,000 in cash. He’s currently paying 40% of take home in rent. His wife is a SAHM because the nursery cost for 3 children per month was over £3000, which was significantly more than her take home earnings.

That hardly leaves any room for saving, no matter how frugal you are, and even though the salary sounds high.

The property prices are the problem, but maybe you think he shouldn’t buy the odd take away coffee?!

I got 55 months left on mine but I overpaid by 45k recently.
I've got 14,000 left on the mortgage and have most of that money in a separate account. It will be paid by october.

I earn £45k in the South East in a public sector job and if I did the same job up north I would earn £35k. My sister is a teacher in the Midlands and earns a little bit less than me. Don’t assume everyone in London / South East earns £100k Plus and anywhere else is minimum wage.

We kept repayments at their original level when interest rates dropped in the last recession and dropped a 25 year term down to 17 years actual repayment as a result (as the extra money went straight off the capital). We were lucky we could still afford to do that (there were many other parts of life that we tightened the belt on instead). Paid off this spring, so much more confident going into whatever this recession looks like.

All being well, I’ll be 50 & DH 62.

In 24 years and 3 months! I'll be 67.

Though we are over paying and hoping to knock a few years off that.

House prices over the last 30 years as a %age have gone up far faster than earnings.

Most people need two incomes to even consider buying a house.

I bought my house in 1998 for £140k. Husband and I were earning £50k between us in London. So 3 x income. We needed £10k deposit.

Same house is now £500k. So 3x income plus £10k deposit means we would need to be earning between us £163k. Ha ha. Who earns that kind of money??

Now tell me that The reason young people Can’t afford to buy Is because they have expensive phones and buy too many coffees. A coffee a day and a no new phone a year will save me £1,156. That’s a long while to save for a £50k deposit.

indecision the problem with your friend is not what he earns or even the house prices, it’s that he had 3 children Before getting on the property ladder . Most people who choose to have 3 children are not able to save very much. If he had been earning that amount pre children and his partner was also working they would be in a different situation with regard to saving.
But some people are happy to rent and that is a valid choice.

Surely it is a moving target though. You can pay off your mortgage in your 30's but if you move, usually to a bigger house, you will need another mortgage. We have consistently paid down mortgages, although never to zero, but then moved and needed much larger mortgages, at one point we had a £380k mortgage. It will be paid off soon, mid 50's, but that's also because we have had some endowments, although they performed well below what they should have done, and didn't pay off the original anticipated balance, and some bonuses.

Well totally not everyone has the option of waiting for various reasons, particularly in circumstances where you’d need to be working a decade or more to save the deposit needed, and sometimes life can surprise you (with twins for example). Also in the example I gave salary has obviously increased over the years, it certainly wasn’t that much when he started his job, whereas rents have been this high throughout the time I’ve been working certainly.

And my point applies equally to people who haven’t had children yet, or who are single and so can’t combine a partner’s income and savings with their own. A salary that looks high on paper doesn’t actually go that far in London property price terms.