starting the overpayment journey

hi all, have been lurking for a few weeks and been really inspired by what goes on in this forum.

i am not really pushing to be MF as quickly as the rest of you, since i only took out my mortgage last year, but would like to finish it within 20 years rather than the 25 year term.

a little about me, i'm single male in my first house, almost 31, took out 90k mortgage on a property (2 bed house) i bought for (on the paperwork at least) 135000 in september 2010 after having flat-shared for 8 years and been driven slightly mad by the experience. as you can see for first time buyer it was quite a good LTV ratio so i am on lifetime tracker of 1.99+base with unlimited overpayments allowed.

like some of you i have got a real buzz out of dripping little amounts of OPs into the mortgage, as i can see it appear in the account immediately and have already seen the monthly interest payments drop by 2 or 3 pounds since i started.

as of today my mortgage balance is 87358. i am aiming for 85000 by new year and 84000 or less by april 2012. i reckon i can overpay anything between 800 and 1000 each year without affecting my savings.

i have good savings in ISAs etc which i am using as backup for the day when/if i get made redundant or the interest rates start to rise. whilst my job is private sector (software) i work for a huge global multinational which keeps getting bigger, and i can see the day when they make a massive cull and i'm out to lunch. at the same time, to be honest, that would be a good incentive to move on to something else, so as long as i have the backstop of my savings for a while to spend looking / travelling and hopefully a bit of a payoff to leave (i have been in my job for 6+ years now) i shouldn't take it too badly.

whilst it has been quite an expensive time since september buying things for the house etc i'm hoping the worst is behind me. the trouble is i've got a bit of a bug for a new hobby - scuba diving - which is probably the worst thing for money saving at the same time. over the next six months i'm planning to spend almost 1000 on buying kit for that, but they should be mostly one-off starter purchases. i dont intend to keep renewing my kit often, just buy good stuff to begin with and make it last.

really my biggest outgoings are my car payment around 215 a month, and what i spend on holidays (demand 1 ski holiday each winter, usually all in for about 700, although don't spend anything that way really in the summer up to now). i could give the car back in October 2013 and pay off the rest in savings, but i love the car and spend a good hour in it each day driving to work and back and visiting far flung friends around the country at weekends. so i reckon the car , the diving and the ski holidays are the only major outgoings. i don't really spend a lot on drinking or going out or clothes or on my mobile so not really typical young-persons-vices and i've got a good pension pot accruing (although nothing like public-sector-final-salary of course!)

i also want to plan a big holiday to australia some time in 2012, although the flight will be free because i've been religiously saving tesco airmiles for the past 6 years and i've got over the magic 10,000 target now. both for visiting family, work colleagues, exploring sydney and melbourne and getting in some diving on the barrier reef. i don't plan on going for very expensive accomodation but i may get a hire car whilst there as i fancy getting around. hopefully i'll be able to amass at least 3 consecutive weeks of holiday time from my work for that. the number of days is no problem (we can buy extra days as a flexible benefit) but operationally we are not always allowed long consecutive periods. i think my manager may be lenient in that respect since i lost my dad to cancer this year and she has been very sympathetic to my situation up till now, plus in over 6 years i've only missed 1 day due to sickness (and that was when work sent me to egypt and i got a bug from the food) so we are on quite good terms.

i think that since i dont have any children etc i should be able to control my spending and overpay quite aggressively. the idea of being MF by aged 49 or earlier really appeals to me, and i think its important to get on with making as much progress as possible in the next year or so while the BoE rate is so low. plus i hope to dip under the 60% LTV quite quickly and look for even lower tracker rates as soon as i can.

i've started using onepoll, but i find as soon as i answer the question of "how many children do you have" they tend to block me out of the rest of many of the surveys so its' taking ages to amass any sort of balance on there. is the trick to lie to make money faster ? i thought about mystery shopping but the tax implications are way too complicated for me to grasp. i am in my nature quite a hoarder of loyalty programmes though (nectar, tesco clubcard + clubcard credit card, Odeon, Shell V-Power club, Lufthansa Miles&More + credit card for that, American Airlines AAdvantage, Delta Skymiles, subway card). i don't really fly a whole lot but occasionally my work send me off to trainings in the US so I try to work the flights and hotel stays into one or other of my points collections ! sadly they also demand we pay all the expenses on a company credit card, so we can't make any points bonuses from the expense itself (i suspect the company is getting a hefty discount from the card supplier but they dont choose to pass it down to us lowly workers!)...

one good thing is that i get discount gym membership through my work, and i try to go there often and obviously shower there as much as possible, which has so far kept my water and gas consumption quite low in comparison to a lot of peoples. i saw someone saying the other day that they will only charge their mobile at work, which was amusing to read if slightly extreme !!

i've enjoyed following your journeys so far, even though most people on here seem to have families and be slightly more advanced in the process than me, but i hope to have good news to report every so often ! keep the money-saving tips coming.




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