# mortgage advice please



## S63 (Jan 5, 2007)

I have a variable rate mortgage with Halifax and with the ever decreasing monthly payments I am pondering whether to increase my payments monthly or put in a lump sum if that's possible. I also have an endowment policy which has underperformed for some time and wonder if this is more important to correct.

I don't intend to see this mortgage through to it's maturity (another 10 years to go) as I hope to sell and move out of London before then, even with the demise in property prices I have some healthy equity (at the present about £150k).

Can any of you financial gurus offer some advice on my best action?


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## richjohnhughes (Sep 24, 2007)

question is - if you are looking to sell up, why would you want to pour more money into the house, if you have soo much equity already? 

also, the current state of the money markets, i wouldnt even think about putting any more money in to an endowment.


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## S63 (Jan 5, 2007)

richjohnhughes said:


> question is - if you are looking to sell up, why would you want to pour more money into the house, if you have soo much equity already?
> 
> also, the current state of the money markets, i wouldnt even think about putting any more money in to an endowment.


selling up is a hope but not a certainty and definitley not within the next 5 years and yes I had thought the same about the endowment but not being too savvy on all things financial wasn't sure.


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## Buck (Jan 16, 2008)

~S500

In my personal view, if you can afford to I would pay as much as you are able to per month since the interest rates are so low, more of your money is actually paying off the mortgage rather than paying interest (if you can do this via a lump sum as well then even better but watch out for conditions within your mortgage i.e. we can only pay off upto 10% of the outstanding balance of ours each month)

Also, if you pay via lump sum, tell the Halifax that you want to use this to reduce the term of the mortgage rather than the monthly payment

We moved last year and in consultation with our IFA we cashed in our endowment as whichever way we looked at it, it just wasn't going to be worthwhile keeping it. We used the value to put into the house and then made sure we'd got the hole it left covered as part of the repayment mortgage

Regardless of the value of property today or tomorrow, your ambition has to be to pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible so that you are in a strong position should you decide to up sticks in the next few years - it will pay you more to have it reducing your mortgage rather than sat in a bank at the moment anyways!

Hope the above makes sense?

Adrian


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