From: google@stimulus.freeserve.co.uk (Martin Abbott)
Newsgroups: uk.finance
Subject: Re: Offsetting an ISA against a mortgage?
Date: 13 Sep 2004 03:54:38 -0700

" If your aim is to pay the mortgage off, you have to sacrifice your
> savings anyway, whether they're in ISAs or in taxed accounts.  The
> thing about offsets is that they're mechanisms which basically let
> you pay part of the mortgage off temporarily and let you get the
> money out again, which you apparently don't want."

Thanks for your reply.....in actual fact I think that *is*, or at
least could be what I want to so...

My original post was a bit poorly worded, and my use of the phrase
"paying off the mortgage" is misleading because I don't think that my
goal is as clear cut as that.  Essentially the thing that I'm trying
to achieve is making the best use of myself and my partner's savings
in order to minimise what we pay as interest as we despatch what's
left of our mortgage.

As I see it I have two options:

Firstly to completely cash in a bunch of ISAs and pay off a chunk of
the balance, which will mean that our mortgage will disappear sooner,
and amount that we've paid in interest will be less in the long-run. 
The downside being that we'll have killed off those ISAs.

The other option, and this is really what I want to know if is
possible or not, is to consolidate our mortgage together with our
ISAs, keeping them as ISAs in an offset account, to cancel out the
interest payments that we're making on the mortgage. making a similar
sort of saving on interest payments to the first option, while
retaining the ISAs for the future.

Thanks,

Martin