Accountant / Mortgage advice

sg2 wrote:

an "endowment insurance" mortgage but the final payment seems for the full purchase price not for the 75% loan.

That is how an endowment loan works: You pay interest only on the loan, and do not at all decrease the principle. Instead, your "payments" go into an investment fund that is suppose to provide a return that should, when the loan comes due, have enough to pay off the existing 75% principle all at once (and in "ideal" conditions even make more so you could also have a nice "profit" from the endowment). So, yes, you are still liable for that full remaining amount of 75%. That is paid from the income generated in the endowment. If you think the final payment is for 100% of the loan then something is amiss, and may be due to the current, and unfavorable, currency exchange rate if the loan is in Swiss Francs.

But (yes there is a "but"), one problem is, for over a decade, endowment loans have not been a good way to take a loan as the investment side has done very poorly. No reputable bank should offer one of these loans today. In fact, if you got a new loan just 5 years ago (rather than say acquiring the loan from the prior owner) I, for one, think you got very bad advise from your banker.

klsallee wrote:

But (yes there is a "but"), one problem is, for over a decade, endowment loans have not been a good way to take a loan as the investment side has done very poorly. ...

You're not wrong about it being a poor investment.

I know of someone with an endowment policy (this is an insurance policy which provides life cover and an investment which supposedly repays a mortgage at term) and the past 7 years of monthly payments have been wiped out by the the poor economic conditions. In other words, the policy valuation is lower than it was 7 years ago.

With endowment mortgages lasting 25 years, when the policy is 15 years old and it's going nowhere, one faces the dilemma of carrying on (possibly throwing good money after bad), cashing it in (and losing any potential gain) or selling it on at a discount.

On the last point, I have heard there is a market in insurance policies within a few years of term where if you take over the payments, you can make a reasonable gain by the time the policy comes to term.