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?

When you re-mortgage try and find a mortgage where you can overpay monthly. I can pay off 10% a year, but I overpay £200 each month, so the interest is coming off quicker. Once a year I look at the remaining balance of the 10% and pay a lump sum if I can afford it).

A lot of your spending is lifestyle choice, lunch out, takeaways, Too Good bags etc. I prioritise the mortgage over luxuries and non essentials, so we rarely have a takeaway or eat out. I only buy clothes when needed. I don't get my hair or nails done. We do still go to the cinema and theatre as that is our interest. (Me and DD).

I sell things on vinted and use that money for presents. I buy everything I can via Top Cashbook and use that cashback for Christmas presents and vouchers.

What you can save and overpay is completely down to your own choices and where you prefer to spend your money.

I had to re-mortgage at 41 due to divorce and would have been mortgaged until my late 60's. I should have 13 years left but I only have 8 thanks to all my overpayments.

A small random thing but I actually enjoy it because it makes my current account look neat. Every night I make a payment into my mortgage so my account is rounded off to the nearest £10. So if my balance is £758.10 I would pay £8.10 if it was £750.90 I would pay 90p etc it adds up and I don’t notice I am making the payments. Have a monthly standing order to overpay in addition to this.

Because we save almost everything in ISAs, we don't pay tax on it, so the interest rate is often higher than the mortgage rate, so we're happy with the ISA/lump sum situation.

We can't overpay more than once a year, as I've said, but the "rounding up" is one of the things Plum does which also makes things look neat!

If we don't get it paid off by the time the fixed rate is up, we are going to reassess and see if we need to take out another one (fixed rate will be the up side, but possible early repayment charges and DH age/my retirement getting closer will be the down side), or stay with the same one where, at that point, we WILL be able to make monthly overpayments.

I do this but monthly with our savings when credit interest goes on. Just because I like neat figures but every little helps...I pay a credit in to take it up to the nearest £10.

Twice now, the credit interest in a month has been an exact round figure in a multiple of ten so nothing needed doing. So unsatisfying! 😡🤣

Yes.

But if you wouldn’t be paying interest on the savings outside of an ISA you can get a higher interest rate on non ISA savings than you do on ISA savings.

Ah sorry, I misread.
We would be paying interest on savings outside the ISA, some at higher rate, so it depends on the savings rate. When we've maxed out our ISAs for this tax year we'll have a look at that.

Do you have an emergency fund saved/ other money you don't want to lock up in mortgage payments?

we have paid off two mortgages now (we upsized after paying off the first one) and have always used offset mortgages - basically unlimited overpayments. It allowed us to throw everything we could into the offset to minimise interest and psychologically we hate withdrawing from savings and so really thought about spending but also having the comfort that we could get at that money if needed. We were fortunate that we worked in industries with bonuses so we just used to save those and lived to our "basic" income.

I think this is the obvious move too. That's extra money to throw at the mortgage.

We do have to keep some for tax bills (I did not mention, because it's not totally relevant, but we have a rental flat, used to be my home till we got married, then we weren't sure if we were moving so kept it, then kept it as a pension top up). We usually see what they are when we file our taxes (usually before the July due date) and save the money in a side account for both the July and then, nearer the time, for the Jan payments.

Unfortunately we could not get an offset mortgage this time due to DH age. We have had them in the past - they are great.

We round up our monthly payment so we overpay automatically. Our payment is £630 but we pay £700. We think of our mortgage as £700 and budget for that. We also overpay when we can, even ifs it only by a few pounds. It all makes a difference.

Sell the rental flat?

Can DH get a job a day or two a week and that goes into mortgage fund?

Ahh sorry I missed that you couldn’t pay more than once a year! That’s such a pain. I suppose you could still do it into a separate saving account then add that to your other funds. I haven’t heard of plum I will look at that. I am autistic and it makes me happy to go to sleep with a tidy balance 😳

As I got closer to the end of my final fixed rate, I got more and more frugal and wasn't at all sure I could get there, but just managed it.

I was good about finding the best interest rates on savings too (as my fix was lower than savings interest even after tax, so no point overpaying).

Been mortgage free for a couple of months now and put the mortgage payments into pension instead now.

Bank switches are a good earner, I'm over £1000 in switch bonus money for these so far. I've used them from all available banks. My recommendation is to set up a donor account (never use your main current account), easy to this with your current bank as a second current account. Set up 2 DDs to it, I use PayPal and an empty credit card. No transactions have to through the DD, just that they are active on the account. Action the switch with new bank, takes about 1-2 weeks, pay money in as required, I always transfer this straight out. Sit and wait for £175- £200 switch bonus reward to be paid in, transfer it to you account and then move onto your next switch. MSE has a list of all banks offering switch rewards so check these often.

We're also working hard to pay off our mortgage in under 2yrs before our incredibly cheap rate shoots up. We're not making overpayments but saving in ISAs until the fixed rate ends and then paying a lump sum (hopefully all of it but more likely to be around £20k left).

We make money from it - way more than DH could make with a little part time job.
We could, if we don't pay off the mortgage, sell it and buy a smaller one as income but it would be preferable to keep the larger one.

If DH worked, he'd be paying 40% tax on very small amounts because of him needing to be around a lot with DS needs.

@EveryDayisFriday that switch trick is genius - I don't use any CC other than my M&S card (and a zero charge one for holiday spending) but I didn't realise the DD could just be set up and never used. I'll check out the MSE list.

@LongLiveTheLego Plum is v clever - you don't notice you are saving. I get very satisfied to see it saving on my behalf. Chip is similar - DH uses them.

If anyone wants a Plum code I think you get £20.

So you own a second home / flat and have enough savings and / or income that you'd exceed your tax free allowance on interest from non-isa cash savings?

Any you are talking asking mumsnet how to pay off your mortgage more quickly by saving a few £ per month on takeaways etc?

The two circumstances don't really add up. Your in IFA territory with the former scenario....

I don't think I said that @Whoknows101 I said we are at the border of the higher rate tax so if DH worked a few hours a week he'd pay 40% tax on it.
We hardly have any non ISA savings so I'm not sure where you got that from.

The main thing I did was put any savings I could accumulate in an offset account, so it was reducing how much mortgage interest was accruing. Over time this has saved me a lot.

We used to have an offset @nocoolnamesleft but we can't get one any more due to DH age.

Ours was paid off within 24 months using a small inheritance, overpayment and savings. In that order, as inheritance made it possible to do the rest.

However, it required some serious lifestyle changes for a short time, no holiday days out or meals out. Keeping buying anything but food & other essentials to the bare minimum and picking up extra work when possible.

(Not sure if we could do it in the current climate with everything going up tenfold. So do your maths and build in some contingency for the contingency!!)

It sound like you’ve got lots of things you can cut back on.

take away - move them to end of each half term only

Bought lunch out - once per month only

even the M&S meals are expensive for other weeks. Maybe limit that to 1 per month of those meal deals.

there must be loads more you could drop of those are your examples.

good luck though it’s painful !

He could learn to cook better takeaway dupes.

I cook a lot and some of the stuff on YouTube is great and better than most takeaways.

Like I said, DH spends a lot of his time - especially after school - dealing with DS and his therapy, homework, activities, tutors, and general needs and wants. He doesn't particularly like cooking new things - for me, it's a fun hobby but I'm extremely time poor too. Hence why we have a no cook day once a week. Currently a takeaway, but ready meals would be a lot cheaper (and possibly healthier too).