A momentous day today, and we have paid off our mortgage.
Yeah, we have finally paid off our mortgage. The last payment of £566.11 went out of our bank account today, bringing a permanent end to our monthly housing debt, because that's what it is.
We’re heading out for a meal this weekend to celebrate, nothing too extravagant because that's not really us.
But I have to admit that, for me, the milestone feels surprisingly flat; Debs is over the moon, but for whatever reason I just can’t seem to get that excited about it. Maybe it’s simply an anti-climax after thinking about it for so long.
It has been a long road. Like most families, we’ve had our financial ups and downs along the way. We had to speak to our mortgage provider on several occasions over the years and, without naming names to protect the guilty, they often acted far more like a debt collection agency than the warm, supportive institution their literature paints them to be. But we survived them, kept chipping away and eventually made it through.
Adding a little extra to the monthly payment whenever we could certainly helped. At some point I might sit down and work out how much time and interest those overpayments actually shaved off the total term. I suspect it’ll be quite satisfying to see what those little extra payments added up to over the years.
I had wanted to mark the occasion by sending off a cheque for our final payment with a small rant, or perhaps a large "FUCK YOU!" written on it. I decided against it though. Well, if I’m being perfectly honest, I started asking AI what I could do, and how should I word my insults, ChatGPT suggested it probably wasn’t a particularly clever idea, and perhaps we quietly go out for a meal to celebrate instead, make it about us, not the mortgage company.
Right now, I’m still not entirely sure whether I wish I’d ignored that advice and not to send a cheque with my thoughts of them on the back!
So that’s it. A fairly major life milestone reached, one monthly payment gone forever, and yet somehow it all feels much quieter than I expected.
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