Is it worth keeping our mortgage with a very small amount left on it?

[Mull]

Hi, we have a plan for paying off our mortgage early. We have one year left until the fixed term is up and (luckily, I had no idea when we signed up to it 4 years ago) are allowed to overpay by 20% a year.

Anyway, we will go onto the SVR Sep-22 and then are going to throw everything at it and pay the balance off by Sep-23.

My question is, is it worth keeping the mortgage account open with a tiny amount left in it, in case we need to clawback any of the overpayments? Or apply to increase to mortgage amount for any reason? I can’t think why we would need / want to but is it prudent to do this rather than close the mortgage account down?

Many thanks for any help

I randomly had my deeds sent to me recently. Still have the mortgage, but the building society said they no longer keep deeds and sent them to me via courier. No warning.

I’d been wanting to pay the mortgage off and as a reward to me, get the deeds, no incentive now. Deeds were huge historical interest to me.

Good point about keeping a small mortgage for line of credit.

I also thought that the only flexible mortgages were the SVR ones! Good to hear that’s not the case because my mortgage term is ending in the summer of 2023 but I won’t be ready to downsize (various valid reasons) until the winter of 2024. I thought I’d have to suck up being on SVR for approx 16-18 months .... clearly not.

Great thread. 👍

Also worth looking at what bank account you have. Eg HSBC Premier gives free travel insurance but you must have a mortgage or savings of x amount. Worth keeping mortgage open in that case.

We ended p paying about £10 a month for two years as my mortgage had a discharge of mortgage fee of a couple of hundred£ that I didn't ant to pay. We still had 5 years left on the mortgage. In the end I wrote to them and said I would pay off the balance if they waived the fee. I think it was costing more for them to administer that they were getting in my token payments by this point so they agreed. This was Northern Rock who had enough of their own problems without worrying about the residuals of my mortgage by then! We got our deeds in the post - quite interesting to have, but as pp have said you don't actually need them as everything is online with the land registry now.

We didn't get a nice congrats you own your home letter either. But it was lovely to know it was all ours now!

Our mortgage was commimg to renewal time and to get a new product ,it was lk ,so we paid it off. ( 12k).
Had no idea what to do otherwise as we did not want to pay 1k for a new product when the whole thing was 12k.
Never thought about keeping one open and for current lender to offer a save plan etc .

@HerNameIsIncontinentiaButtocks

We didn't even get a letter when we completed ours, so don't expect an Olympic medal ceremony!

To be fair ours was one of those all-in-one accounts which was briefly fashionable, with current and mortgage in one.

We have just closed our One Account after 22 years. It proved very useful to us during that time and saved us a fortune in both mortgage fees and bank loans. Probably why they are no longer available, not enough profit for the bank. I too was very underwhelmed with the closing letters. Would have been nice to have had a certificate confirming it was paid off.