If you are mortgage free...

[DarthVader]

how did you achieve this?

Dh and I have almost acheived this by doing the following;

-not spending money on the house when we first moved in;
-shopping at aldi/lidl/netto whenever we could
-using my redundancy money when i was made redundant
-making a small profit on buying and renovating a house with my brother
-not having children until we were almost there
-not spending a fortune on our wedding
-not having regular expensive holidays
-not buying expensive cars
-not buying designer clothes
-using a current account mortgage so that everytime i got paid i saw my mortgage go down and then trying hard not to make it go up again.

ie generally not increasing our standard of living when we could afford to.

We have 5k left to go on a mortgage which started at £115k in '99 but are just about to start an extension so will now go up again!

Bought and sold at the right times then moved to a cheaper area and used our equity to buy the Hotel (now a big house) with my Mum, so although it is not all ours, it is plenty big enough as two large separate dwellings and we all share the bills.

hats off there
I fritter away too much methinks

Well......initially I got my mortgage down 90% by ploughing 70-90% of my salary into it, plus any bonuses for seven years.

Then I married a man who owned a house.

But I think the things I learned was:

(1) You don't need to buy the 'stuff'
(2) You can live cheaply and still have friends and fun and actually people love simple dinners and spending time having a cuppa or a walk in the park as much as posh meals out.
(3) If you are motivated enough, you just find a way to do it. For me I couldn't stand being in debt.

I am mortgage free. I acheived it by the simple expedient of not buying a house.

Message withdrawn

lol @ SP .

We're not mortgage free yet, but it is very low relative to where it started 6 years ago.

We've achieved it by having well paid contracts (both self employed prior to me becoming a SAHM) and a flexible mortgage account.

We are now mortgage-free. Hoorah. We do not go to expensive restaurants - instead we have simple suppers at home with friends. I cook rather than buy ready-made meals. I buy most of my tiny children's clothes from charity shops and the big children I buy plain t-shirts and underwear and socks from primark and the remainder from TKMaxx.

'I am mortgage free. I acheived it by the simple expedient of not buying a house.'

Snap!

Tell me about these flexible mortgage accounts. Do you think it's easier to pay off the mortgage with one than with another kind?

I am mortgage free (I was tempted to say Spartacus for a moment there)

We did it by:
Having children late in life
Not owning a car
Taking out no loans
Having no credit cards
Not indulging in adult toys like ipods or the latest mobile phones
Travelling on the cheap
Whenever we got small amounts of extra money (gifts, rebates etc) we put them in a 60 day savings account where we couldn't easily fritter them away.
Neither dh nor I are fashion plates. New clothes when the old ones wear out. (Having said that, he wore a lab coat at work and I'm a teacher, so no need for smart clothes there)
Cooking from scratch
Doing our shopping in the 'reduced to clear' section of Tescos
Inheriting a small amount of money
Not having a big wedding, nor a honeymoon (well that's not strictly true, we spent a week driving around the West Country)
Generally living below our means.

Definitely for us NKF, as being self employed we would both be paid gross, and then pay tax twice a year in arrears, which means that in the mean time all of our tax payments are stored in the mortgage account, saving us lots of interest.

Only had a mortgage of 60k anyway but 2 years ago enquired how much the endowment part would be worth if we cashed it in and it nearly covered it so paid it off. Only had 5 years to run but it feels FAAAAAAAANTASTIC

We made sure we had the type of mortgage that doesn't have penalties for over-paying and then we overpaid pretty much every month, sometimes not by very much. The mortgage term was also shorter than 25 years (18 or 20 I think) so the payments were a bit higher.

Then we got lucky with 2 things at around the same time. Firstly we happened to buy in an area that was quite cheap but about to boom (Balham in 1995-ish), and we bought a house that was structurally sound but vilely decorated which brought it's price down. Secondly, dh got a lucrative contract in Germany for over 2 years and we saved a lot. Just before dh came back from Germany we got a handyman/decorator in and touched up the whole house, got new carpets and put it on the market. The house had almost tripled in 5 years. With the profit from that and the savings from Germany we bought our current place for cash.

So, a bit of saving and self-denial, and a lot of luck really.

We will be in a couple of years - largely by paying as much of our salary as possible into the mortgage and not spending it on other things like holidays - we never spend more than £400-£500 on a holiday for 5 of us, and often don't have one at all in a year, or go to family or something like that.

We are mortgage free (Spartacus). We did it by:
(1) only buying a small house in the first place rather than stretching ourselves by buying a big house;
(2) cashing in our endowment policy (not that that was much!!);
(3) waiting years to have children;
(4) living very, very frugally - right down to not spending money on buying a newspaper!!!

But it is worth it - when dh was made redundant and was out of work for nearly a year we appreciated not having a mortgage to pay!

we did manage it - DH had the house before we met - when we met I was on a student income - when I got fulltime employment we put my salary into paying off the mortgage since we were used to living without it anyway.

I guess also we are both quite unaffected by the need to own stuff - so we can happily live without spending on a regular basis.

We now have a mortgage again because we have built a big extension - wish we could be mortgage free again.

Check out the mortgage free wannabee board on moneysavingexpert.com for help and support to

forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.html?f=98

There is some other great forums there to for money saving.

we still have about 3-5 years to go on the mortgage but barring a divorce we will be free in about 2011 or very soon after

Here's our list

waiting until we were in our mid thirties to get married and start a family.

not spending a fortune on our wedding but still managing a full church do with 90 guests for the reception.

buying practical cars rather than the lovely ones we could have afforded and not buying brand new cars.

not spending money on the latest fashion in clothes, designer or otherwise and not paying designer prices for accessories like sunglasses etc.

not buying a lot of CDs or any gadgets like ipods/MP3 players or PSP or Wii and all the games that you then want to play on them.

cutting out and using money off coupons and only paying a premium for "luxury" food if it actually tastes better.

not having any holidays abroad since the dc's arrived - they don't care or understand about any of that stuff yet.

accepting second hand baby equipment bought cheaply or given to us and buying baby/kids clothing/equipment/toys on ebay or in charity shops.

wearing some of dh's larger clothes around the house when pregnant so I needed less maternity clothes and friends/ebay came up trumps again on those.

not going out together much as a couple since the dcs arrived unless we have family babysitting for free (we do put on a nice supper spread for them though in return).

making do with old furniture painted up or re-varnished and buying second hand sofas etc.

not having loads of pets

not smoking (neither dh or I have ever smoked)

not paying interest charges on anything because we had to have it before we had the funds to purchase it outright

going back to work quite quickly after having the dc's, not to pay the mortgage funnily enough but because I just needed to go back to work but even after childcare fees it made a big difference to our mortgage

making sure mine and dh's employers took up the childcare voucher scheme by lobbying them and providing more information and proving to them that it didn't cost them anything (£2,000 each year paid off the mortgage from this saving alone)

having a current account mortgage so that any extra monies reduce the balance and it makes you think twice about even spending your christmas money from your parents because after you've banked the cheque you really like seeing that the mortgage has dropped below a certain point and seeing if you can try really hard to keep it that way until the next payday.

I suppose a lot of my points are about the fact that I want to see the mortgage dropping rather than see myself looking good in that new coat this winter or in those new boots when I'm sure there's a perfectly good pair at the back of the wardrobe somewhere.
I'm pretty sure the other mums at ds's school must think that we are just scraping by or that I don't care too much about my appearance but ds always has clean smart uniform and I know that our cars are paid for and we only have a few years of mortgage left to pay off. So what if I haven't had a new winter coat for 5 years. I still have 3 perfectly acceptable alternatives to pull out of the cupboard as I always bought classic designs rather than this season's fashion so they don't look dated.

It's funny a lot of you seem to have as one of your strategies 'waiting until mid-thirties' or whatever to have a family.
We have taken the exact opposite approach. We got married and had children relatively early (married and had all 3 children by the time we were 30), and also had our first mortgage in mid-20s.

We have also overpaid on the mortgage and should pay it off in the next few years, when we are still relatively young, say 46 or so.

The difference is that by the time we are 51-ish, not only will we have no mortgage but we will no longer be supporting our children - they will all have left university by then. Whereas if we'd waited until late 30s or even early 40s to start or finish our family, the financial implications would be there until our 60s.

Perhaps it's just a different way of approaching the same problem. Interesting...

We are nearly there; did it primarily by stoozing from credit cards into our offset mortgage account, driving old cars, shopping at Lidl and Primark, and living carefully - no magazines, no cable tv, no cleaner, no shop bought cups of coffee. As we get closer to the zero mark I find myself trying even harder.

SO is there nobody else who has done all this prudent stuff and still has a bloody whacking great mortgage with 15-20 years left to go on it?? You are all making me feel depressed.

UQD, we still have a whacking great mortgage, and have only just really started taking steps to reduce it.
There, do you feel better now?

we did it by:

saving into TESSAS, then paying off lump sums

cashing in shares from employee share scheme and paying off lump sums

redundancy money