The Road to Financial Security

Not exactly MSN day today - new kitchen bin bought as old one was cracked and I had to fill my car up with petrol. In fact quite expensive weekend - had to pay for son's school blazer dry cleaning and buy him new pe uniform yesterday as well. Ho hum.

Although it may sound counter intuitive to aiming to be mortgage free part of our plan to stay in our current house is to spend some money improving it so there are lots of decisions to be made. We will be parallel overpaying the mortgage though -we are just using a capital sum we have on our house rather than as part of the moving house costs.

Looking forward to tomorrow's call with the C&G to make some progress on getting this mortgage sorted out - after that I will be able to post some figures as the last actual mort balance I have is from May (c £120k outstanding).

Now I need to go and tackle the housework which is long overdue - pretty much every room is in disarray not to mention oh wearing Christmas socks today

Missu - thanks for responding, while I love the anonymity of this forum it's nice to be read and get feedback!

Yes only a week ago we were all set to move house at beginning of September - our buyers pulled out last Monday morning. We were pretty sucker punched but after a couple of days started thinking maybe these things happened for a reason.

We were inexperienced buyers and had really stretched ourselves with the new house & associated mortgage which was only fixed for 2 years. All that coupled with the fact that my company isn't doing too well and seems to be running a continuous redundancy program made us think staying here was maybe the best option for right now.

Loose plan is to aim to move when our son finishes school and we aren't tied to the rather expensive town we currently live in (we are in South East!). That gives us 6 years to make serious in roads into the mortgage!

Well what a day, feel exhausted and it's only Monday !

The Good
Well goodish I think - we have ordered some new windows and a new front door for our house. Of course the quote was more than I expected but it's long overdue (existing ones were oldish when we moved in 15 yrs ago) and I'm trying take the positive view that it's good to invest in our house!

The Bad
Found out today we still have to pay the mort broker her fee despite our decision not to move, I was sure she told me on our initial phone call it was only chargeable if the house move completed. Embarrassingly stupid of me but am determined to learn the lesson of checking ts&cs more carefully in future. To be honest the amount of work she did on our behalf I was feeling quite guilty about her getting no payment - still hurts though!

Well C&G didn't ring about the mortgage - call was due between 1 and 5 - of course we were both on the phone (working) a fair chunk of that but you can't not take phone calls for 4 hours! DH will chase up tomorrow - why are these things never simple!

The Ugly
I sold 2 items on eb@y - am a very novice seller having only started last month which all went swimmingly. Today though upon printing out the postage labels I ended up paying £3 more in total for postage than has been charged to the buyers based on the amounts calculated by eb@y. I think I need to read up more about it as it's likely me having done something wrong but £3 when you've only sold the items for £15 total is quite a % of the money made - not good!

I am also fixated on a cash back amount (grand total of £.82) I'm due on a shopping site, but due to having screw up and managing to inadvertently create 2 accounts on their site I can't access the money (I somehow have 2 email addresses which both reach me). DH has offered several times to pay me the £0.82 just to shut me up but I am a woman possessed and have emailed the shopping site and the money holding site.

This MSN lark can be quite time consuming huh!