Mortgage Pay-off

With our current situation of starting off on the mortgage trail, one other thing that’s coming back to the forefront (for me, anyway) is the entire aim/aspiration to pay off that mortgage as quickly as possible. So it was interesting last night to see the return of the BBC’s “Pay off your mortgage in two years” programme.

The project is now at an end, and the first one last night – now titled “Did they pay off their mortgage in two years?” – was a good start. As it turned out, the couple had just about achieved their target (although to complete it, René Carayol (the presenter/mentor of the programme) had to buy one of their HotPod stoves) which was impressive. It’ll be interesting to see over the next few weeks how many of the other families involved in the project were successful.

Personally, I found it quite inspiring, and could (to a degree) identify with the couple in the programme, who had a lifestyle that was pretty relaxed and laid-back in general, and seeing how they came through in the end. I always find I can identify far more with that lifestyle than with the entire rat-race oriented people you so often see in this type of programme,(Relocation, Relocation drives me potty with the entire ‘Tarquin and Suzanne have worked in London, but now want to sell their townhouse and get a country getaway as well as a city crashpad’ crap, which appeals to me about as much as being repeatedly booted in the balls) I also love the fact that their main source of the income that paid off the mortgage was those HotPod stoves that they’d designed and made themselves.

The programme is definitely designed more for the ‘self-starter’ type of person, rather than the ‘quick-fix’, and I just find the entire thing fascinating. It’s certainly part of my own goals over the next few years – I acknowledge that I can’t just get a mortgage and then start paying it off immediately at well over the odds, but I can still aim to get it done as soon as possible, even if that in the end takes five or ten years, instead of the god-awful thirty that is likely to be the term of the loan.

I don’t know, maybe I’m unrealistic – but seeing programmes like the one last night make me realise that at least I’m not the only unrealistic or unreasonable person out there, and also that just because most people do choose to pay off their mortgages etc. over the allotted time, it doesn’t mean everyone does.

For now, that’s enough to keep me going at looking towards what I’m doing and what I want to do, while keeping that final goal/ aim/ aspiration in mind.