Interest only mortgage – Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?

Monevator has a good post about using an interest-only mortgage as an investment tool. You have to live somewhere, and if you have the discipline then it’s a great way to build up an investment portfolio over the term of the mortgage which will pay off the capital.

Hey, where did I hear that before? Ah yes, as a late-twenties starry-eyed young pup in the market for his first mortgage. Abbey National’s estate agents at the time, Cornerstone, sold me a mortgage. I went in wanting a repayment mortgage, like my Mum and Dad used to have. Lovely LAUTRO saleswoman, Sue she was called, gorgeous green eyes…

“You can do better than that. with an endowment you just pay the interest, but look at this Friends Provident with profits fund. Look at these lovely growth figures. At the end of your 25 years you’ll have twice as much in the endowment as you’ll need to pay off the capital”

Sucker. I was had. These were the years of Gordon Gekko, Greed is Good. Beware pretty saleswomen promising the earth. I was single, so the one benefit of an endowment, the life insurance part, was worthless to me or anyone I cared about. But 100% profit in 25 years, well, that had me. That’s the takeaway message I got, I am sure somewhere in the fine print there was the usual past history is no guarantee yadda yadda. But I was lost to the green eyes and the promise of lots of moolah. I hope it was the moolah that swung it rather than the eyes…

A few years later, the house underwater on the mortgage, Friends Provident demutualised and I got seven grand. Which, having gotten wiser, I paid down to the capital. On the principle that there were now nasty shareholders rather than cuddly mutuals so I would be ripped off and enjoy poorer with profits performance, so I better at least use it to reduce my interest payments.

Then the letters came saying “sorry old chap, but we were a tad overoptimistic in our predictions it seems. You, mate, will be lucky to get half towards your capital, so you better raise the amount you’re putting into our rotten with profits fund to catch up. Ta-ra”. Or words to that effect. I saw red and wrote the MD of Friends Provident a stinking letter telling him their salesperson had promised me a guaranteed return. He, or rather some lowly grunt on his behalf, wrote back after a while saying “no we didn’t, but you can moan to us, then the Ombudsman if you like”

So it was that after moving I ended up with an interest only flexible mortgage from those nice people at Birmingham Midshires. Nobody wanted to sell me a repayment mortgage in those heady days of the dotcom boom.Every year I’d pay off a lump I’d saved to reduce the capital.

Some lengthy time later, Friends Provident settled with me to put me back in the position I would have been had if I’d taken a repayment mortgage, which was sixteen big ones they’d lost me in ten years. I paid this towards the capital of the new house. No foreign holidays, kitchen refits or cars were involved here 🙂 Having screwed up royally in the dotcom boom I learned, do not churn, sit on your hands, and continued to pay down the mortgage. From 2003 I changed tack, and started investing in a dead boring Legal & General tracker fund, using some of the money I’d otherwise be putting into the mortgage capital repayments. That did help me steal a march on the mortgage, and it 2006 I reduced the mortgage to the minimum BM would allow me to have. This was a flexible mortgage, so I could ring them up, and they would transfer to me any amount from 10k up to my overpayment into my bank account by BACS.

People often advocate an offset mortgage, where your savings with an institution are offset against your mortgage, so if you have a mortgage of 100k and savings of 50k you only pay interest on 50k. That sounds great, except in the credit crunch. Because the small print says they can forcibly use your savings to pay down some of the mortgage. So the general rule is never hold your stash of cash with the same organisation or banking group that holds your mortgage. This happened to someone I know, which screwed them royally.

I liked the disconnect of the flexible mortgage. Although I used shares ISAs to save my capital (effectively doing myself what Friends Provident had so miserably failed to do on my behalf) I never tackled this with the intent and savvy that Monevator proposes. But I can vouch that it works, I paid my mortgage down with about 10 years left to run. And paid the mortgage company  less than a tenner a month while I mulled over whether I wanted to discharge it. Monevator would make a good case that I shouldn’t have, I could have invested in 2008 and made a mint, and indeed could have had 11 years more use of this cash, currently at rock-bottom rates. But I don’t have his edge and ambition, and in the end I wanted my house to be truly mine.