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I said maybe.....
Due to pay mine off by the time I hit 55. Should give me a good 10 or so years of mortgage free time to save up a little nest egg for retirement.
Would have been due to pay it off earlieir as was overpaying when I was with my wife, but since she buggered off and left me with the whole mortgage on my own I can't afford to overpay anymore!
Yes it makes more sense financially in this era of extremely low interest rates to salary sacrifice more into your pension and leave the mortgage but you have to consider surety of income and job stability as you get older.
3 years ago I was made redundant a few weeks before my 50th birthday but luckily offered alternative employment with the same company. That was when I decided that we need to be debt free as there is no chance of finding a job with the same pay in this area. I vowed that should it ever happen again that I want to be in a position that I can take the redundancy payment and be able to take a much lower paid job without fear of going broke.
We're nearly there and from 2022 onwards a significant portion of our income will be disposable as we will be 100% debt free and I will be maximising salary sacrifice to the full annual allowance for as many years as I can hack it or they can give me that 20 years redundancy payment and will run out the door clicking my heels!
I'm not too worried. I am hoping I can knock a few years off each time I switch mortgage deals, and even start to overpay.
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Looking back, I wish we’d started overpaying earlier on but we are in a good place now with over 50% equity (at current values).
However, I reckon we’ve got at least one more upward move in us, so that could all change.
It it’s financially realistic for you, go for it and don’t look back.
I was 36. I took a mortgage out at 27 (when interest rates were at their peak). Repayment rather than endowment (best choice ever), as interest rates dropped I kept repayments the same so as to pay off the debt quicker and prioritised saving as my career progressed. In 1999 I inherited a sum equivalent to 2/3rds of the original purchase price of the house, by which time I’d covered the remaining 1/3rd through savings. Once I paid off the first house I carried on with my savings plan plus what I would have been spending on the mortgage.
Although I was naturally a saver what really drove me was when a couple of colleagues were made redundant in their early 50’s. Both very competent guys but I guess that they didn’t fit and this came at them out of the blue. It made me realise that you couldn’t rely on making it to retirement age (65) and so I made a plan that would allow me to retire at 50 should I have to (you could access your private pension at 50 in those days). Then the retirement age moved to 55 but, more significantly, my son came along when I was 41.
I retired through choice at 56. I’d reached my savings goals, we’re happy with where we live, I could have bought more guitars but what I really wanted was more time to play the ones that I already have. I'm very happy.
Circumstances and priorities change over time. I had to extend my mortgage term a couple of years ago which means I will hopefully be mortgage free (pending any further changes to our current situation) in my late as opposed to early 50s.
Many of us will be fortunate enough to receive some form of inheritance in our lifetimes (unlike many families from the previous generations). My wife did and with it we chose to invest in our home and extend it to make it the space that we would like our family to live and grow in. After all this is the place where you spend most of your time. We could have chosen to pay off a chunk of the mortgage but we feel that we have made the best choice for our family. Live for what you know I guess and not for what you don't.
We know that we will be here until our kids are through school. Then we will make a decision for what is right for us as we move on to the next chapter. Somewhere less busy, somewhere near the sea, who knows, but definitely somewhere different to what we have now.
There's a few sites locally which are kinda like posh trailer parks. You can buy one for about £30k and then you pay £400 a month plus electric and gas. So live in one of those in the warm months, Spain and Tenerife in the winter