Before my first video call on Wednesday morning, while the kettle was still ticking as it cooled, I opened the mortgage app to look at one number. It said £165,150. I typed it into the house tab, closed the app and felt the small flat calm of someone who has checked a thing and found it where she left it.
Strictly, it's seventeen months and a day since we got the keys, not eighteen. Payroll people are not supposed to round up, but eighteen looks better in a title, and the fix has been running since completion day, 31 January last year. It stays at 4.84% until the end of February 2030, a figure I now know the way I know my own phone number.
What I check once a year
In early February the lender sends an annual statement. I read it at the kitchen table with a pencil, which must be the least dramatic financial ritual in Sheffield. This year's said we owed a little over £166,000, against the £168,750 we borrowed. That is about £2,400 off in the first year, which looks small next to £889 a month. Most of every early payment is interest. I knew that in theory, and it still landed in my stomach.
The pencil goes down the same four things each time:
- The rate and the date the fix ends, to make sure both still say what I remember.
- The remaining term, which on this year's statement was 29 years, a number that makes me want to lie down.
- The overpayment allowance: 10% of the balance each year with no charge, which at our balance is a little over £16,000.
- The page of our mortgage offer about early repayment charges. Ours is a percentage of the balance that gets smaller with each year of the fix. I know where the page lives, and that is as far as I take it.
The £100 a month
We started overpaying in June, and it was the last thing to get a line in the spreadsheet, not the first. The emergency fund came first, then the boiler pot and the house fund, then the life insurance in April and the kitchen fund in May. What was left after all that, once I'd squinted at it for a week, was £100.
That is £1,200 a year against an allowance of more than £16,000, so no charge. The lender's online calculator says that, if the rate never changed, £100 a month takes about five years off the term and something near £30,000 off the interest. The rate will change in 2030, so I treat that as a direction rather than a promise. We ticked the box that keeps the payment the same and shortens the term, because the other option lowers the monthly payment and I know exactly where the difference would go. If I did it again I'd start at the first anniversary in February, not June. Whether overpaying beats putting the same £100 into a savings account depends on what accounts pay that year, and that is a question for a mortgage adviser, not for a woman with a pencil.
What I don't check
I don't look at rate news every week. In March a colleague told me rates had dipped, and I looked for about twenty minutes before I realised it was information with nowhere to go. Leaving our fix early would mean an early repayment charge, and I would rather not find out how big by accident. Watching a number I can't act on is just a way of feeling bad on purpose. The same goes for the online guesses at what the house might be worth, which swing by thousands depending on the day. We aren't selling, so they can swing without me.
What I do instead is one calendar entry. It's dated 31 August 2029, six months before the fix ends, and it says "ring the broker". As far as I can tell from the lender's website, you can lock in a new rate around then. The broker who found the original deal was paid by the lender, so it cost us nothing last time, and I will find out in 2029 whether the broker remembers us.
The July payment left the joint account at 8.02, while I was still looking at the app. £889, plus the £100 as its own line. I closed the app and put the kettle on again.
