Cheery's country living adventure

Ooh, lovely people! :hello: so pleased you all dropped in

I think a lot of people have escape to the country dreams :j I'm actually not sure I ever did - as much as I love *going* to the countryside for a day out, and looking at it :rotfl: I think I was always reluctant to make myself so very reliant on a car... I did live on a boat for a while but only had a bike then - but then I did only work a couple of miles away :rotfl:

I also lived not too far from here actually when I worked for the YHA many years ago, but that was live in accommodation so there was literally no commute at all :rotfl:

Still. The first place we viewed was about 5 miles from work and we thought it was too far :rotfl: :rotfl: second was 8 miles away, gosh we loved that house - 8 bedrooms, two staircases, ludicrously giant games room etc and it went for £220k as it was a repossession :eek: sadly we witnessed a shady drugs deal outside the cafe round the corner and that plus the 'extensive commute' put us off :eek:

Looked for about 2 years in the end as we did our old house up :eek: explored all kinds of areas to the north, south and east of the city, ignoring the west because it's a national park and we'd never be able to afford a detatched house in the national park...

Time went on, and my wages went up :rotfl: and eventually we found somewhere we loved, had our offer accepted, sold ours, our buyer sold theirs - and we changed our minds They'd not even taken it off the market so we didn't feel too bad

After a rejected offer on another place, this one turned up. We'd not spotted it as it was £50k over the top of our budget :eek: but by that point we had an offer on our old house for £15k more than the asking price (and £45k more than the first estate agent valued it before we started decorating :eek: ) so we expanded our range a little bit...

Of course, this was the most expensive and furthest away and ludicrous one we saw :rotfl: we fell for it immediately, suspected we'd never get it but had our second offer accepted at £25k under asking price.

And here we are, still feeling slightly shell shocked and LOVING country living, even with all the snow and mud

Anyway, waffling on I'm off work now til 9th April and i can't tell you how excited I am to have time to potter about :j Sister is arriving tomorrow and I already have a list of jobs :rotfl:

Just made our first mortgage overpayment :j :j :j :j Just under a month after moving in

£130.44

(just putting that in big numbers so I'll find it later )

Made up of council tax refund from old house, a bit from secret survey site, and the little rewards we get for our current account :j :j

HOWEVER, apparently overpayments under £1000 make NO difference to the mortgage interest until the annual review date in Feb... they're just set aside until that point, presumably to raise interest for the building society :mad: I thought the whole point was to drop the interest on the mortgage?

I've done this one, but now can't decide whether it's better to just save them up myself and pay them in one lump sum before the review date... Of course the danger with that is that there's a risk we might spend it on something else... :eek:

Any advice from seasoned overpayers? Is it better to save it up til we've got £1000? Of course, it's highly likely that that might not even happen once in a year :rotfl: