I really really want to be........mortgage free!

Does anyone know of a good app ipad monitoring everyday spending.

Today I brought 5 packs of Tesco value chocolate at 30p each and melted it into silicon moulds = 3 Christmas presents.

I'm giving all adults hampers for Xmas to save money so I'd better get going on this.

I'm estimating this will save me about 150-200 pounds this christmas.

Got bzzagent invite for luxury shower gel so that's handy.

Just been on compare the market for buildings and contents and I can definitely get this down. Need to check my current policy to see if it's easy to leave. Any other good comparison sites to check or any other tips for me.

I estimated it at getting our hair cut every 2 -3 months. 3 of us. Mine costs at least £30 as its very thick and is at last an hour. The boys are £10 each approx so I estimated £20 per month. Is that a lot? Should I shop around more?

Okay a bit about us.....

There's me (40) my bf (49) and son (6) we have 2 dogs and did have 3 chicken but they died of a mystery illness earlier in the year and we've been too sad to replace them. we work together and for ourselves. We've been doing this for 10 years and our income is pretty consistant.

We haven't been the best savers throughout our lives , we did a world trip 11 years ago that took our whole savings and we had to restart saving. I have been looking through it and we have 8k in total. Don't have much at all in terms of pensions sorted certainly not enough to live a decent retirement. Plan is to get mortgage free then invest in a btl or a commercial building.

We moved 18 months ago into our current house. Previous house we brought and did up. Ended up with a 130k deposit for current house. Has paid off a bit and have about £140 k now on a mortgage. Current house is very old needs doing up too and although it's structurally okay and livable in just about everything needs doing. It's a lovely big house and in a lovely area and it's the only way could afford to live here was to do it up.

We have just finished sons bedroom which has ended up costing about £2000 but of this we treated him to a new bed and furniture £700 and we had to have the heating flushed out as the rad in his room wasn't working so that was an extra £300. So I can estimate £1000 per bedroom room that includes getting someone in to skim it, replace the radiator and a wool carpet fitted. We don't plan to actually do much more for the next 6 months in the house so there should be some money for OP.

I overpay a little every month, as a minimum I always round down to the nearest £10 even if I can't do any more than that. Most months I OP by 50-100. I want to double this to start off with. I'm sure I can do this with cost cutting.

I'm recording all our everyday expenditure in a free app I downloaded which is going to be really useful. I will at some point put the rest of my bills in but for now I'm recording everyday spending as I'm sure we can get this down and I'm going through my bills one by one to see if I can reduce each one by shopping around,

I'd appreciate any support, hints and tips :-)