Owning your own home

Overpay by £200 and shorten the life of the mortgage?

This is a great idea.

Or save it separately until it's sizeable to take a significant chunk out of the remaining balance.

I stole the idea from Dammit and it is what I hope to be able to do next August/Sept. Touch wood.

I own a 2 bed ground floor maisonette with an 8m x 4m garden. Bought 6 months ago. A 2 bed, first floor flat with similar sq m, access to only a shared garden has gone on the market across the road from me for 12.5% more than my gaff cost me. I hope this is a good sign.

Given current interest rates (much less than your mortgage rate!!) you should pay it off on a monthly basis as the interest calculated on the mortgage is monthly. Waiting means you're paying interest on the amount you've not taken off the mortgage whilst not gaining any valuable interest by having it in savings.

The only benefit to having it in savings would be as a safety net should you not have any other savings available for emergencies. That way, should you have an emergency, the savings would mitigate likely short term loan or credit card interest rates which are higher than that on the principle of your mortgage.

Or save it separately until it's sizeable to take a significant chunk out of the remaining balance.

You're unlikely to be able to make more in interest saving it separately than you would save by paying off the mortgage in those small chunks.

I overpay regularly (as I have an interest only mortgage but treat it like a repayment mortgage) but we also build up a little pot of savings to cover random expenses (holidays, sprucing up the flat, etc) and when the savings pot gets over a certain amount then a further big chunk goes towards the mortgage. On track to pay off mortgage about 5 years early, which would be nice.

Thanks all, noted.

I paid mine off in 17 years.

It's tiny and it isn't worth nearly as much as some of the palaces that people have bought throughout this thread, but it's made way for another millstone.

For the same term? Nice.

You probably get preemptive extra $$ for the WN4LYF Picturehouse (coming soon).

Are they the ones that normally have a cafe serving stone baked organic sourdough coffee on a slate board and use the word artisan a lot?

You bet. Artisinal small batch, hand-popped heirloom corn. etc.

come at me, house of pic-tures!

(they've been banging on about that for nearly 3 years now, even the guy who hands out protest flyers at norwood fist has given up bothering)

Estate agent is telling me the seller is going to re-remarket in a week unless we exchange. Which would be fine if they would have sent the paperwork regarding planning/the conversion of the flat. But they haven't...

Also my solicitor has just gone on holiday.

Raging.

Are they trying to force your hand without paper work in an attempt to hide something?

Potentially yes. My solicitors has now written to the council planning department to see if we can get an answer from them.

I'm not buying it without the information. The prospect that we've wasted 6 months and £1.8k doesn't feel great though.

This might be quicker with some leg work from you.

Most authorities keep all planning documents freely accessible on line. If the question is whether it's been built to the planning you can usually download the plans and compare to what's been built. If it's whether it's signed off you can check that too.

What do you need to know and what council is it?

Definitely this!

On a mortgage that is currently around £1000-1200 a month, £200 overpayment could mean years off the length of the mortgage.

Lewisham

I've tried looking at the plans but it's all quite complicated. Multiple applications with some approved and some denied. The seller is also saying that they only renovated the flat but evidence so far seems to suggest they converted it (and there's no planning that I can find for that)

PM me the address, I'll take a look at the planning records over the weekend.

Moog. We had something similar happen to us. The grahnd reveal was major works bill (ex.la) of 10k/ unknown. We walked. We had to move out of our house and find a new one, all before Xmas.
Lewisham ex la properties, Im in one now, got their major works bills last year. Our seller paid it from the sale of the house, so we paid it really. Unfortunately, its still not finalised and looks to have increased.
Just another thing to consider. Besides planning etc.

amazing, thanks so much. PM sent

I'm trying to find the furniture someone posted. Sideboards quite modern, three ish months ago..

Untothislast...

It actually pops up fairly regularly on eBay.

"Office" has now been painted and the flooring had gone down. Just waiting for the electrical connections and cat6 to be run tomorrow..

Put in the sofa and table in today. Shit picture from the house: