Will you pay mortgage off.

[Autumnisintheair]

We are in a position to pay our mortgage off this year, 43k and releasing £600 per month. We will have some savings after this.

Would you do it? Was reading the other thread reg leaving a bit as it can help avoid fraud.

Paying your mortgage off or having enough money to pay your mortgage off whenever you choose is effectively the same thing to me.

I wouldn't pay the mortgage off if I could get better returns on the money with low risks i.e. a savings account.

I probably still wouldn't pay the mortgage off if I was getting better returns with some risks i.e S&S investments.

I probably wouldn't pay off the mortgage if I didn't have a 12 month cash emergency fund.

If you get lower returns and have a decent emergency fund, with no other big expenditures on the horizon then at this stage I would likely pay off the mortgage.

This actually happened to my Aunt and Uncle who own several properties that they rent out. They happened to drive past one day and there was a sold sign outside 😮 the fraudsters were brazen about it. It took years to sort although they did in the end. I was gobsmacked when I heard about it. Didn’t even know it was possible.

The idea that you could invest the money and make more depends on your appetite for risk. Unless you are lucky to still be fixed on a very low interest rate from before rates shot up, you won’t be able to get an interest rate on a savings account that it higher than the mortgage rate. That’s how banks make money - on the spread. You deposit money and they pay you 2%, while lending it out to me at 4%. You can potentially (and indeed likely) make more with an investment that carries risk eg managed portfolio of shares, but those investments can and do go down as well as up. I could deal with the downs much better if I knew that whatever happened to my savings I owned 100% of the roof over my head.

We have been effectively mortgage free for the last 7 years but on paper we have an offset mortgage. Means each month our mortgage payment comes out of our salaries and into the mortgage. At the same time we have a regular payment out of the offset and into an investment account. So that investment account has been growing steadily over 7 years from drip feeding money in and from growth and now compound interest.

this has prevented us doing massive splurges on stuff and frittering out mortgage payment amounts away on a monthly basis.