Easylife73’s looong journey to…well…hopefully an easy life!

Oops, it would appear I fell off the MFW diary wagon for quite a while!

I have however still been trying to chip away at the mortgage. Since I started I've overpaid by £400.28 saving £308.50 in interest, which isn't a huge amount but it's better than nothing. We haven't done the work on the house yet, but are hoping to be able to get to it this year...the mortgage company wouldn't let us borrow as much as we needed but due to a small inheritance on it's way we think we'll be able to scrape together enough.

The savings we'd put by were unfortunately eaten up when part of the air conditioning system went on the car while we were on holiday in France, and the garage refused to give the car back until we had it fixed. And we've been veeeerrry bad at managing our food budget this year, as I left DH in charge (always a mistake!)

The second job at Christmas didn't go too badly, so there is also a little extra money there which will hopefully go towards the work on the kitchen/conservatory.

I've spent this weekend playing with my lovely spreadsheets and have formulated a new plan! Hopefully we'll be able to pay off all three mortgages a few years early, but obviously I need to keep better control of the budgets this year!

This falling off the wagon has really got to stop!

Accidentally bought two sofas on Fleabay to go in the kitchen/conservatory adaptation we haven't actually started yet...also forgot to check the measurements before bidding so they might be slightly too large and definitely won't fit in the car even with all the seats taken out. So altogether it will come to £200 to pay for them and van hire to go and collect them. Big oops, although they do look very nice.

This will have to come out of the inheritance too, as it is technically for the renovation works.

On a slightly better note I had a free lunch at work today and have enough pasta left over from tonight's dinner for lunch tomorrow, thus saving myself the cost of two tins of soup.

I have also joined the MFW 2014 challenge with a paltry target of £750...even that may be a struggle if I keep spending like I have been

Blimey, just realised it's been a whole year nearly since I posted to my diary! New Year's resolution no 1 will therefore be to post more regularly...

OPing has continued throughout the year, and once I make the final one tomorrow I will have hit my £750 target for the MFW 2014 challenge, which I'm really pleased about.

In the past year there have been a few changes...

We now have three mortgages, the building society did agree to lend us the full £30k we needed in the end, as after getting the house revalued we were able to access lower interest rates, which was great. As a result we now have a lovely new open plan kitchen/dining area, and no longer have a leaky conservatory. It was definitely the right decision, as we now use the space daily whereas before it was dead space that never got used.

Both DSs are now at secondary school, which makes life a lot easier, and DH has finally had a payrise, after a three year pay freeze, which has sent us a bit dizzy to be honest! I haven't done the second job this year, as my main job has gone a bit crazy, so for my own sanity I had to give it up.

The inheritance eventually got spent on a new car, as we finally realised that the old one was costing us a small fortune in repairs. We went for one with a transferable warranty, so hopefully we shouldn't be spending too much on repairs. However, it has taken until this month for DH to actually sell the old car so not as big a saving as I'd hoped.:mad:

We still haven't got to Paris (will we ever?!)

Plans for this year are to decorate the kids rooms and replace the upstairs carpets - my parents have very kindly given us some money to do this, so hopefully the costs to us will be minimal.

Also need to sort the garden out, although we don't really have a clue what we are doing, so that should be interesting! The idea is we don't have a holiday this year and spend the money on the garden instead, but we'll see...I do love my holidays.

Total mortgage as of today is £137,811.83. If I do nothing other than the normal repayments it would reduce to £132,976 by the end of 2015 (assuming my spreadhseet is accurate), so my aim is to get it down to below £130,000 if possible by this time next year.

Okay, last post was supposed to be the final OP of the year, but have just made another teeny tiny OP of £5.17 which was a withdrawal from paypal and a little bit of cashback. I'm counting it towards next year's totals for the 2015 MFW thread target though!

After reading another MFW diary on here I've listed some items for sale on our local facebook pages and ebay, and have a few more things I want to list, but need to speak to DH first to make sure he's happy for me to sell them. Assuming he is, I'll try to get those listed this afternoon as well.

Am feeling quite motivated at the moment, but also frustrated, as I know our balance will never reduce at the rate of some people's, and would like to be doing so much better than we are.

Thanks greent...you're right that if we cleared the third mortgage it would be a massive psychological lift, that's exactly the way I've been thinking about it. Once I start playing with my spreadsheet, and see the effect of using the regular payment on mortgage 3 transferred to 2 (once 3 is cleared) you realise how it will then snowball, so clearing the third one is key to that.

Two of my ebay items have watchers, one at 99p and the other at £15, so hopefully some of it will sell...doesn't end until Sunday though. Need to bump the things on the facebook pages, if they don't get any interest I'll put them on ebay as well. The trouble with our local pages though is that they're so busy and popular things tend to get lost very quickly.

I'm getting a teeny tiny pay rise in January :j, which I worked out last night should be £13 a month net (told you it was tiny!)...this added to the previous tiny rises I've had means I can regularly OP a whole £25 a month + £5 from a monthly bank account incentive. It's not a lot, but every little helps. If I could just get DH to stop spending so much at Sainsburys we could increase that figure a lot. My weekly budget for food & household stuff is £100, but there are only four of us, and I know that if we try harder we can do it for £80, which would free up another £100 or so a month. But DH does love Sainsburys......