I paid off my mortgage today

Got 8yrs left on mine and can’t wait to get rid. I look at the balance after each payment so I can see it slowly getting lower. Down to £59k and would love to be able to pay more each month but with the joys of kids etc I’ve got no chance yet.

Well done OP,
Finally paid mine off about 14 months ago at the age of 63, started paying a mortgage at the age of 24 on the first two house's that we had then when we bought the house that we are living in now I opted for a 25 year mortgage again.
The reason I did that was because we had just gone through the 15% interest rate period and when I was a teenager my parents went bankrupt and lost everything so it has always worried me.
It was a good feeling paying off the last payment, we are now using some of the money to do work on the house and save for some good holidays

Congratulations OP. Sounds like you've done it well ahead of what I managed last year mid 50s. Don't let any naysayers put you down and enjoy the freedom that it should give you as you'll have much lower monthly outgoings now and less tied to working to cover it.

We had 5 years left to go, but my wife and I both had inheritance coming through. Our rate wasn't fixed and had gone up to over 5% and at the time the best savings accounts were around 3% so we just paid it off last summer. Compared to many on here it wasn't a huge amount (seeing some monthly payments that younger people have to pay makes my eyes water ), but it was 50% of my monthly outgoings on household bills.

I know some say that we should have invested that money, but (at the time) anything that might better the interest we were paying would have carried more risk of losing money too. Since I retired last year, just removing that monthly payment from our outgoings has made a big difference and those higher savings rates that were increasing my mortgage are now giving me a better return too; pretty much the same amount per month as I was previously paying on the mortgage.

Many might live in a mid-terrace house in some awful area of Kent though

All relative

Congrats - don’t see how you will ever have an ounce of regret.

Better house obviously. More land. More rooms etc etc. There’s no stress moving up on the world, to a better area or from terraced to semi detached to detached.

Unless of course you have a nice detached house with land by 30, then well done.

I was 28, so 21yrs ago when I bought the house I’m in now, I bought a 3 bed detached which was the best I could afford at the time. We did think about moving to a 4 bed about 10yrs ago which actually fell through and then we decided this is big enough and I’d rather finish paying this one off 10yrs earlier than have a bigger house. It’s big enough and especially seen as the kids aren’t gonna live here forever; hopefully anyway!
I’d of been paying more a month and over a longer term. I’d rather have a smaller house and more spare money when I’m younger to enjoy better holidays and cars than a bigger house.

Ah well yeah I’d agree if it had been a 1 bed flat, but my move at 30 was from a detached house on a nice street to a larger detached house on a nice street with everything we need & excess, a move again would be hassle with little gain.

That I can appreciate, well done you

I was 32 when we moved to our current house. We had a 2 year old baby (and an 8 year old) at the time and were paying nearly as much again in child care fees, so we rejected the idea of further stretching our budget.

It was scruffy, nothing done for years other than a budget kitchen 4-5 years before we bought it and decent double glazing, but it had the extra bedrooms we wanted, decent sized rooms being a 1970s build and detached meant we could make as much noise as we liked. I've spent the last 22 years doing DIY knocking walls down, installing a new kitchen bathrooms, bedrooms, had a conservatory built (which we love, contrary to many on here) and more recently built a SIPs garden room ourselves.

We could have got a bigger mortgage and bought somewhere already done and/or even bigger, but it turned out that 3 years after moving in we both got made redundant almost at the same time. Due to not overstretching ourselves we had some savings to dip into while we both found new jobs. We've done jobs as and when we could afford to buy the materials over the years and have gradually got it where we wanted, without overstretching and we were able to take the kids away on some great family holidays over the years. Those memories are more important to me than getting further up the corporate ladder than I eventually did, just so I could earn more to pay trades to do the same jobs I did.


Call it 'lacking inspiration' but on the contrary; I think we both had a plan to find a home we would stay in for the rest of our life (as far as possible anyway). We knew it would take time, effort and money (when we could afford to do it). It certainly wasn't instant, like many seem to want these days...we'd been in 7 years before we properly sorted out the living room for instance. Constantly moving house to 'upgrade' over the years might work for some, but I don't think I'd be retired at 56 with the mortgage paid off if we had. Probably I'd be cursing those higher rates on an even bigger mortgage and stressed out trying to deal with the corporate schtick that I would have been trapped in.

Sometimes having more modest aspirations pays off.