Have you paid off your mortgage? We need tips

[drspouse]

DH is older than me so he's now retired and also not eligible for many mortgages due to age.
We'd like to try and pay off our current mortgage before the fixed rate ends so we don't have to try and find another one.
I won't give amounts but I'd really like some general tips.
Currently I use Plum for auto saving and have an ISA, I will pay all the Plum money into it every month or so.
I transfer £50 a week into a Starling account for my lunches at work and any I don't spend also goes into Plum.
I sell quite a lot on Vinted and get a lot of the kids clothes from there (DS doesn't wear uniform to school and I have an M&S credit card and buy DD uniform sometimes with my vouchers).
I do meal plan (every 4 weeks with rotating meals).
Some other things I'm not totally sure are actually savings (e.g. Too Good to Go bags, but we wouldn't buy those pastries so maybe it's an extra expenditure).
We do tend to have a takeaway every Friday - the kids get to choose every other week - our choices tend to be more expensive unfortunately!
As a couple we have a regular night out once a month when a specialist babysitter comes (DS has SEN) and she's paid for by direct payments but obviously there's our meal or whatever!
What else did you do to get the funds?

Hard to give advice if you don't say how much you owe, how much you earn and end of the fixed rate.

First of all, stop spending £50 a week on lunches! You could make your lunches for a month at that cost.
Instead of paying money into savings accounts, overpay your mortgage now by as much as you can. There’s a calculator on Moneysavingexpert that shows how quickly you can repay it by overpaying.
Save the take aways for a monthly treat, and have a go at doing fake aways. The Too Good bags are, as you say, not a real saver because you’re buying food that you don’t need.
Your night out is a good idea and probably helps massively with your relationship, but do you need to go for a meal? If so, make it somewhere cheap and cheerful!

The easiest thing for you to do would be to cut down the takeaways to every other week. Also does your night out each month have to be a meal out every time? Could you switch it up and do some cheaper things sometimes like dinner round each others houses sometime instead?

Well, i haven't paid off my mortgage yet but we both work full time, we are both in the work share save scheme and we have maxed our contributions to get the best contribution uplift from our employer.

To me it sounds crazy you're spending £50 a week on work lunch when you could make your own for a lot cheaper at home.

Id have a play around with an overpayment calculator so you have a firm idea of what amount gets you to your goal. Then work backwards from there. You might decide 6 months of really tightening the purse strings (I find this easier in summer months!) is worth it for the long term gain.

Op there's an app called Sprive that's aimed at helping people pay off their mortgages.

As per pp, overpayment of mortgage if allowed is the way to go. If you're on a fixed rate you need to check for potential early repayment fees.
Otherwise get on a free budgeting website like moneysavingexpert and go through it bit by bit.
Nobody here can really give you much info if you don't want to give details.

Check all the direct debits out of the account. Get rid of everything you can. Check the value of everything else (Insurance, utilities sort of thing).
Stop £50 a week on lunch. Reduce weekly takeaways.
But frankly, this is just touching the edges. If DH got a job for just 10 hours a week, that would be £122 a week. Very little is going to beat that for getting more money.

It’s all been said.

Think of it as saving towards something, rather than denial of what you want. Mind set is everything

I don't spend £50/week on lunch, don't worry! It's an incentive to make me feel like I'm saving more.
I do occasionally have coffee with a colleague but usually make my own. I have a favourite lunch place near work and that's £7 for a drink and a wrap and I have that about every other week. I also buy food for the DC if we are at the leisure centre etc. using that account so it's a good incentive to persuade them to wait till we get home!

I'll definitely look out for cheaper nights out for us - though @Overthebow not sure what you mean by dinner round people's houses? DH and I, er, live in the same house?
@GoatCatTaco DH actually gets more in pension than I get in my 4 days a week job and he's got a lot to do with DS needs so I don't think we'll get him to earn any extra! Sadly he can't get carer's allowance due to being retired. But some of the "do we really have to eat at that restaurant yes we do because of DS needs" comes out of DS DLA and he's past the "break the tablet because it's crashed" stage.

We are both just into the 40% tax bracket (but usually keep it under with pension payments etc., we pay back some child benefit but not all) and we have about £225k left on it. Can't remember exactly how long for. We can only pay lump sums once a year - we've done this year's. So that's why we use the ISA.

Sprive looks good - thanks!

Ah boo. Sprive don't support our lender yet.
We use Snoop as well though which is good on bills.

I’ve paid ours off, I chipped away it at, having a higher standing order than necessary and then putting random £50s at it (probably weekly), so we didn’t miss the money in our bank account. We probably have max 2 takeaways a year and only go out for birthday meals now our kids eat more than us. I had a timeframe in mind, wanted it paid off by the time I was 50, which helped.

We can't pay in a higher SO due to the one payment a year rule - so that's why we are using the ISAs as a stepping stone.

Sorry I miss read and thought you were having nights out with another couple. When we see friends now we often go to each others houses or do something a bit cheaper to save money as eating out is very expensive now.

Just chatted to DH and while DS usual choice of takeaway is cheap as chips (literally) the rest of us have more expensive tastes and we could definitely get an M&S meal for 2 X2 for much less so we're going to try that next time as a treat.
Nobody else in the family would attempt to dupe a takeaway and me doing it wouldn't be a treat for me!

What else did you do to get the funds?

We just overpaid by loads every month. We don't buy lunch or dinners out or takeaways very often at all. I buy clothes from Vinted and take sandwiches to work.

This!

We had our regular monthly repayment and a regular monthly overpayment on the same day. If we'd had a particularly unexpectedly expensive month, then we'd stop the overpayment for that month, but the default position was that we prioritised an overpayment from our funds over eg; meals out, takeaways, foreign holidays. We did have these things, but had them with what was left after overpayments, rather than making overpayments with what was left after meals out etc.

Paid off the mortgage 2 years ago, on a joint income of £80kish. I don't think we made any overpayments at all when we had 2 dc at nusery.

Our overpayments were limited to 10% of the outstanding balance a year, in as many transactions as we wanted. If you are limited in how often you can overpay, then using the ISAs as a staging post sounds like a good idea, but the key is to ring fence the money as soon as it comes in.

How much was your mortgage and how much faster did you pay it off than if you didn't make the overpayments?

These are all little tweaks, which while are a good start - to have a proper handle on things you need to sit down and properly go through your spending and your income, work out what the difference is and where you want to get it to. Then adjust your lifestyle to get it there.

Lifestyle creep is a big feature in not being able to make more headway with mortgages as income increases or costs in theory decrease. People also fall into the trap of feeling like they’re being tight on everything and slipping the extras in here or there, which then add up to more than feeing a bit more lavish consistently on stuff that’s important to them.

@Hungrycaterpillarsmummy from memory, from the point where we started making overpayments, we had about £140K over 17 years, and we paid it off in about 9 years.

DH and I focussed on developing our careers to allow us to pay off our mortgage off before we had children.

Earning more is always an easier route than spending less.

I paid my mortgage off early by making overpayments. I saved what I could from my salary, I did "no spend days" to save more, I sold unused close, etc. I used the MoneySavingExpert "Mortgage Free Wannabe" forum where I got lots of tips and followed other peoples "diaries" on what they were doing. There is a real community over there. https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/mortgage-free-wannabe

You’re better paying an increased monthly amount on the mortgage rather than saving that money into an ISA and paying one lump sum a year.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/mortgage-overpayment-calculator/

We can't overpay more than once a year so we can't do that.
No spend days are a great idea - thanks @ThirdStorm

It’s worth looking at whether you would pay tax on interest

It sounds like you may well not. If you wouldn’t, then you will probably get better returns on cash savings accounts outside of ISA wrappers. There are some accounts around with >5% interest rates for putting money into monthly. They’ve got relatively low caps on what you can pay on (usually £200-£500 a month max depending on which bank) but they work well for some to get into the habit of regularly putting the money in and targeting to hit the cap each month.