Owning your own home

I don’t think that’s right.
If you overpay your mortgage it reduces the principal balance and the amount of interest charged.

If you choose to invest in your pension instead you are making a bet that equity returns will exceed your mortgage interest rate. The tax saving on a pension is only a deferral as you have to pay income tax when you draw down during retirement.

Also, your money is worth more today than it will be in 30 or 40 years.
And your pension earnings are unlikely to exceed your mortgage interest.

My understanding was that if you are a higher rate tax payer then slamming an extra £10k in to your pension would yield you £2,000ish (even £4000ish?) in tax breaks. Assuming your pension is managed well, you might see 6% growth PA on that.

Compared to what paying an extra £10k off your mortgage might yield you - about £200 per year assuming you are charged 2% - it looks pretty attractive. Mortgage debt is crazy cheap. Now. Of course that might change.

Pension rules can change though I guess, and who knows what the tax environment will look like when it comes to withdrawal. There was a discussion on the investment thread about whether ISAs would be a better bet given it's supposed to be tax free gainz forever.

I'm on 3.4%. Plus there are human factors to consider: I don't like debt, even mortgage debt, so always feel good about making an overpayment.

Yeah like I said on the previous page it's difficult to 'lose' making overpayments unless there was an obvious and risk free way of making more money dangling in front of you.

Like Bitcoin, obvs.

If you are on 3.4% it might be worth paying ERCs to remortgage.

Here's another thing to consider if you have a partner.
You may die before you get your pension or pay off the mortgage.
If your partner is joint owner then they get the house. If you have adequate life insurance this pays off the mortgage. If you have specified your partner as beneficiary for your pension then they will also get your pension and possibly death in service benefit.
In this scenario it pays you (them) to put any extra cash into the pension.

My thinking is that interest rates are only going to go up. Plus I'd like more equity in my house as a bit of a fail-safe.

I can also put more money into the company pension and max the allowable percentage.

I've been setting aside £160 a month as 'savings' (on top of everything else I budget or save for) and can probably push that to £200 without any real problem.

And also the question of whether extra payments will put you into a more favourable LTV band.

Last time I actually did the calculations it worked out that overpaying my mortgage wasn't the best method as there were some investments returning more. Obviously if interest rates increase that will likely no longer be the case at some point.

Great point.

Did a second viewing and submitted an offer for a 1 bed in west dulwich yesterday.

The waiting. it hurts.

Link.

Woop woop! GL man

Big house for the cash.thats a big roof and will cost a few Bob to replace - is it in good nick ?

Full structural survey reveals roof slates all present but in poor condition, some evidence of water ingress , poor ventilation (throughout the house but in the loft spaces particularly) and dry rot affecting the rafters (no fungating mushrooms or anything but the wood crumbling away when picked at by hand)

Soo...

The roof pretty much needs replacing basically...

So that was a good shout!

Going to try negotiate down the price in view of that.

Question: Could I take out the same mortgage amount but pay a lower price to the vendor if they agree, and keep the now extra money to carry out the work straight away?

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One page from the survey demonstrating the dry rot

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We did this, but only £2.5k. Not sure if there's some kind of limit.

I think more than 5k and a new mortgage offer is required

I'd say a new roof and membrane under that back and front (assuming it's twice the surface area of what we can see in the picture) will cost at least 7/8 grand.

Gotcha

I'd be happy if it was £8000 all in to replace it, but yeah will have to see if the vendors will be happy to accept less, then get to work finding some quotes etc

Still excited to get cracking but having to replace the roof is not ideal

We had our initial offer of 330 rejected.
We found that a flat exactly the same 2 minutes walk away built by the same company at the same time, sold last month for 310, it just hadn't had as much work done as ours.

We upped to 335 and sent over the listing for this other flat saying we thought it was more than a fair price.

Theyve said 'we'll get back to you beginning of next week' so i take it theyre stalling us for this weekends viewings. When we viewed it for the second time we were told there was another 2nd viewing today (thursday) but we were the first to put in an offer.

As much as we love it and cant see anything comparable. 350 seems overpriced for a 1 bed in west dulwich no matter what works been done

How long has it been on for?

steady hands

was on for 380 last year, the seller didnt get a single second viewing or offer and they took it off 3 months later.

Put it back up at 350 march 20 so less than a month

when did they buy it? how much did they pay? is there a forward chain?

2008 for 212000. Shes already moved out into her husbands place. we're FTB so no chain at all.

The agent describe her as... 'very proud' (she moved out last year and agent said she had no interest in renting it out to people, that level of proud)