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?

We paid our mortgage off by 45, but I was militant about.

Pick your poison. I don’t like housework, gardening, cooking, but I do like saving money and ensuring we are healthy. I’d rather cook and make it great, than spend excess money. Depends how much you want to get onboard…

Have you gone through your dd’s? I recently moved our SIM only deals. Sky wanted £11.50 a month each for 8GB data, Lebara (via Money Saving Expert) were offering 35GB for 75p per month for 9 months (with no contract). It’s annoying having to keep moving things but we’ll save over £270 over 9 months across 3 SIM’s. I know it’s a drop in an ocean against a mortgage but it all helps!

What sort of percentage are people paying on an offset mortgage?

I really liked the idea but couldn't get the sums to work as percentage rate on the offset was 4.5% but standard repayment mortgage was 1.2% at the time.

We are aiming to have our mortgage paid off by this time next year. Not especially early (5 years) as I will be 59, DH will be 61.

We have been able to get into this position by me getting a better paid job about 3 years ago.

I have a large spreadsheet which I use to record all our income and outgoings. I then use this to feed a forecast of what our future income and spending will be.

The future view gives me an estimate of what our savings should be each month. I move that amount as soon as I am paid. This has a psychological effect of making me less willing to move it out of savings.

We have an offset mortgage so every time I have built up a chunk of money in savings I transfer that to the mortgage savings account. To my mind, once it is in that account it isn't supposed to be touched again.

For me, the big thing is the spreadsheet. This gives me a clear picture of where we are spending and on what.

We paid off our mortgage in our mid/late 40’s with an offset mortgage (base rate tracker for mortgage term) since we had jobs which had bonuses when times were good and we took advantage of having significant savings which we could still access and have it work for us to minimise interest. We paid off a 25 yr mortgage term in 17 years with regular overpayments especially from age 40 onwards and occasional lump sums from employee share options/incentives/bonuses. Not having to renew a mortgage every few years with its associated costs was also appealing. DH & I had overlapping redundancies back in 2009/10 so paying off our mortgage was a great feeling and we had our first family skiing holiday that year to celebrate. We’re now in our early/mid 50’s and have focused on boosting our pensions and general investment portfolios. I’m not looking at our pensions this week - I don’t want to know how bad it is!

This is spookily word for word my mortgage situation too!

I love an offset. Can’t understand why they’re not more popular.

If your DP has pension income there is no reason he can't be on a mortgage far into retirement- 80 isn't uncommon! Get a good broker and it can be done (then reduce term by overpayments etc as you wish!)

We do have that as backup but we'd prefer not to rely on that - we had limited choice last time we applied.
A mixture of both is possible of course.

I always think of Dave Bedford (gold medal
cycling coach), incremental gains. If you do the SIMS (we have), cancel 1 rogue DD, don’t buy that drink (always carry a water bottle), drop the branded food, cook more, hunt out house insurance etc etc, it all
helps.