Mortgage Joy
I don't tend to get excited about money issues once I'm out of the office - not that I find myself getting tumescent at work you understand - but we had a letter today that made me feel a certain fiscal pride.
It was from our mortgage company and was the statement to 31st January. Our outstanding mortgage is now less than one and a half times my salary. It feels great, I can't explain why but actually getting it down below the borrowing criteria that existed when we took out the mortgage twenty-two years ago seems like something to celebrate. When I read about mortgages being given for 5 times joint salary, 110% of the purchase price and now for 99 years, I'm grateful I was born when I was - or at least we climbed onto the property ladder when we did.
Janis and I started off with nothing back in 1985, actually we started off with a debt, we had to borrow the £1,500 deposit on the flat that was to become our home after our marriage in May 1985.
As I have mentioned before my Dad had money problems and one day, in August 1984, whilst Mum and Dad were on holiday in Majorca my brother arrived home to find a bailiff at the door telling us we had two hours to get our belongings out. My brother was staying in digs in Portsmouth at the time and only came home for weekends so it wasn't too much hassle for him in terms of property, for me I didn't have anywhere to go. Fortunately Janis's Mum said I could stay at their house in the small box room they had spare, seven months later I moved into our flat, a month after that we got married and Janis moved in. The flat cost £15,000 which was the limit we could afford on 1.5 x my salary plus 1 x Janis's salary.
We stayed there for just over two years before moving to our current house which we bought two weeks before the property market went stupid in August 1987. The value of our house is now daft compared to what we paid for it back in 1987 but the reality is that if we wanted to move up another rung in the ladder we'd have to take out another mortgage for probably half the value of our house - with less than 3 years remaining on our current mortgage and given the circumstances behind how we got here to begin with I think I can resist the temptation of taking out another mortgage.
2 comments:
A lot of familiarity here, Paul. We married in July 1983 and had to borrow £1000 for our deposit. Recently a couple of endowments have matured from that time and were paying off huge chunks of the mortgage. This sounds great until you remember three little words... ... university tuition fees! Still, it is a great feeling to have less debt.
Yes Shy, those three little words. Would you believe that the mortgage is actually paid off a week before Nathalie is 16. Not much time for celebration is there?
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