If you’ve recently bought: How big is your mortgage / how old are you?

[polka62]

FTB. Early 30s with a 350k mortgage. Glad to finally be a homeowner and not renting. But in the 6 months or so of paying a mortgage, feel like it’s not even been chipped away at with the interest being added back.

Is this how everyone feels?

32 - 230k mortgage - 30 years

You do have to make a conscious effort to overpay. You can either do this monthly or we used to do it when we remortgaged to take us to the next LTV.

You can also get into an issue with overpaying and maximums. So when you have overpaid enough to cause a gap in current payment and original payment (as our mortgage wouldn’t allow you to reduce term only monthly payment). You then should remortgage with a much lower term.

Bought 3 years ago, 23 at the time, partner 25. £380k house with £215k mortgage 35 years 5 year fixed

That’s usual OP. You’re in the most disheartening bit (second to being stuck renting!) - don’t stress it. As your term goes on you’ll pay back less interest and more capital and you start to feel better when you open your annual statements. As you get older and your career progresses, you’ll earn more and can start making overpayments if you want. If you haven’t paid it all off by retirement you can downsize - you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need! ;)

We've just moved and upped the mortgage from 90k to 275k. I'm 47.

We have a different plan than normal mortgages - it's a 25y term but we are not expecting to pay it off via the mortgage. We plan to downsize in 10y or so to pay it off.

We have 4 children and now 3 of those are teens, we needed more space. Moved from 4 bed to 6 bed. But there's no way we want to stay in a 6 bed when the children start flying the nest.

So we deliberately increased the term to 25y with no intention of actually keeping the mortgage for 25y. It just meant we could buy a bigger house without increasing the monthly payment too much. In around 10y we will downsize to a 3 bed. We already have enough equity to do that mortgage free.

@Polik that's an interesting concept, almost like you're "renting" the extra three bedrooms at the lowest possible cost for a few years. I think that's quite clever.

I'm 26, we bought in June 2019 so just coming up 4 years.
We have 122k left on our mortgage.

Fixed term ends very soon and I'm dreading how much our monthly payments are going to increase. Everything is so stretched at the moment.

Yes! That’s how it is. But it does start to chip away. We bought a flat with £233k mortgage and had it for 3 years - with some overpayment we sold and mortgage balance was only £205k.
we’re buying a house now, mortgage is £356k. I’m 31, DH is 36. Taking a 33 year term to reduce monthly payments

Extend the term to keep payments lower

Yep, we felt like that too, but cleared our mortgage in ~10 years through a bit of inheritance, salary increases that allowed us to overpay, and no longer having to pay nursery bills. We then moved to a much bigger house and took on a much bigger mortgage so we're back at the beginning and it feels enormous, but it will be paid off before retirement and earlier if we overpay again. That said I expect overpayments will be limited as I doubt we'll make the same gains in salary as we did over last 10 years, and whilst we won't pay childcare we'll have to pay for 2 teenagers. Worth it for the extra space though.

DP and I are mid 30s and bought last year with a mortgage of 115k.

Our income is low so the repayments are low. and then the interest gets added so I feel like we’ve barely taken anything off it. DP has an opinion similar to Polik I think. He thinks we’ll just have a manageable mortgage until near retirement and either pay it off or downsize. I’m trying to balance throwing everything we have at overpayments against still enjoying life.

We bought last May. Ours is £120k, 10yr fixed, aged 52. It will be paid off before then.

27. 140k left on mortgage. Thereabouts. Going to have to extend the term when fixed term ends otherwise it'll be too much a month.

I got a quote last week, 15 year term, I am mid 50s. They will only lend me 1.7x my salary. Kind of depressing, will put me off buying for > 12 months after which I should have a lot more capital/deposit.

32 and FTB in December. Mortgage was £280k

Yes, totally disheartening but as PPs say you chip away at it and the more you do the faster the interest and outstanding capital drops.
We bought in our mid-30’s: £600k mortgage but our property valine and equity have gone up in the meantime such that our LTV has dropped from 50% to 35%. We are looking to borrow another £200k for home renovations to future proof for us, elderly parents and boomerang children. We can downsize if need be but much more expensive to upsize as we get older.
Our term is 23y, we have secure jobs and life/critical illness cover etc to pay off the capital and provide regular monthly “salary” should one of us not be able to work.

Just increased borrowing from £155k to £170k when we remortgaged after 5 year fix ended, also increased the term back to 28 years.

Repayments £770pcm.

Aged 39&38.

Household income c.90k pa.

We have a 4 bed detached, c. 50% LTV, in the midlands.

We want to live life without worrying about money, so didn't stretch ourselves.

We get more interest on savings than the mortgage is costing us so we don't make any overpayments. I favour liquidity!

We bought two years ago for cash so thankfully no mortgage. This was down to being in the fortunate position of getting the money at the right time and living in Scotland where prices are far more manageable! We are 34.

I bought my first home at 18 with a relatively small mortgage (80k). The first 3.5 years of paying it off it felt like we were fighting a losing battle. It didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere. Then we had a change in circumstances financially and paid off the maximum we could for 18 months and it made a real diffence. We moved after 5 years in the home (23 then) and took on a 210k mortgage, so substantially larger. We were there two years and whittled away 6-7k, but we also gained 45k equity in that time. We’ve just moved again (now 25) and our mortgage is now 290k. We hope now that this is our forever home and we can make a real dent in it. Unfortunately we’ve spent an enormous amount on stamp duty, solicitors fees, estate agent fees, mortgage exit fees etc.

Over £500k, early 40s. Like the PP we plan to stay here c20 years until DC are all flown then downsize, paying off any remaining mortgage then. We upsized from a home that was ok to have a spare room and a decent garden. I’m very relaxed about it, payments are fixed for 5 years and affordable for two professionals in the South East.

Try and overpay and it will chip away at it. Ours is smaller, the overpayments didn't seem to make as much difference at the start, at some point you reach a tipping point where it starts going down faster. It's hard when costs are going up, I would recommend overpaying (or saving the money in a higher rate savings account and ringfencing to overpay at a later date) if you possibly can.

39.5

222,000

43- no mortgage. DH and I have paid it off with profit from our pre-marriage properties and our first home we bought together, an inheritance savings, and over-paying monthly. It has increased in value substantially. Our plan is to sell it when our 3DC (currently aged 3-8) leave home and we can downsize. It has 6 bedrooms.

39, £185000 left to pay. No intention of increasing our remaining amount now, ever.

46 and 51 years old. £290k on mortgage, recently renovated (before that was less than £100k. Did renovation for resale in 10 years as its a very desirable area and we're extremely central with all best schools too so would be stupid to have moved rather than renovate. E we're very lucky as bought for a song and worth a lot now. Saying that it was a long term plan and not everything worked as planned but very happy with where we are.

42 bought 4 years ago with 114K as had a large deposit and cheap area.
After 4 years I'm on 106K so it does go down albeit slowly.