A solution to our housing problems > live mortgage free

You don't have to live with a mortgage - according to a new series from Channel Four:
How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny - On Demand - All 4

Although the Telegraph was not impressed:

How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny failed to show us the tough side to shoestring living - review

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Gerard O'Donovan 19 APRIL 2017 • 9:00PM

Apart from a snap election, one sure sign economic optimism is taking hold is when property shows begin to proliferate in the prime-time schedules. Now the queen of TV property developers, Sarah Beeny, whose Channel 4 series Property Ladder went the way of Lehman Brothers and the hopes of countless homebuyers during the last credit crunch, is making a comeback. How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny (Channel 4) is aimed at those who dream of “an alternative to a lifetime of mounting debt and high monthly repayments”. That’ll be most of us, then.

Beeny set off to find those who have bucked the system by building homes on unwanted brownfield sites or buying properties that were unmortgageable to begin with. One Walthamstow couple had been living so frugally that they paid off their £235,000 mortgage in nine years. The problem was that Beeny’s unalloyed devotion to the notion of financial freedom meant the hard-headed practicalities, and especially the downsides, were often downplayed.

In the case of one young woman who converted a rust-bucket barge into a minuscule home on a shoestring budget – the glaring question of how she had, in practice, transformed the interior from utterly uninhabitable to well equipped and comfortably chic on a supposed budget of just £1,000 was, incredibly, never properly explored. Nor was the desirability of a home that, by law, one has to move every two weeks and condemns you to solitary nights in a one-bed floating target tied up along towpaths in the middle of nowhere, ever touched upon.

This was a show that had plenty of charm and optimism. And, having got through one vicious downturn, it’s not that it’s wrong to go back to peddling property fantasies. (People have to dream, especially when it’s all they can afford to do.) It’s just that almost all these stories could have been more interesting, and useful, had the enormous effort involved been presented more realistically.

How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny failed to show us the tough side to shoestring living - review

The Standard is a less damning:
How to Live Mortgage Free: Sarah Beeny meets unconventional home-owners in Channel 4 series | London Evening Standard

And there are several very clever ideas and pointers, as the Sun and Mail reveal:
Couple saved £180k by paying off their mortgage in just nine years… and here’s how you can too - Sund
Woman is mortgage-free at 27 after buying £20k plot | Daily Mail Online
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