Hi everyone! Long time lurker on these forums! I have previously posted in my wifes diary, and whilst our OP’s have continued we have been a bit slack there. Our plan has changed a fair amount since she first posted so I have decided to kick off this new diary to chronicle the (hopefully) final 20 months of our mortgage.

A little bit about us. I am 29 and the wife 27. We both have decent jobs and we have no kids (we want to pay off the mortgage first). We got married in January this year and in true MSE fashion we kept it bang on budget. We bought our 3 bed detached house for 200k in October 2011 with a 150k mortgage and have since overpaid it down to approx 86k.

The plan…We have a 5 year fixed mortgage at 3.99% with Santander which currently limits us to 10% overpayment a year. We have already made the 10% for this year, so we currently are saving for next year’s 10% and then for a big overpayment in October 2016 when the mortgage drops onto a SVR and we can do unlimited. After this lump sum, we should be down to about 20k and then it’s just as much monthly as we can do until its gone (April 2017 is the target). Im a nerd for a good spreadsheet and have it all planned out month by month.

Other than our salaries, we have a few different things that we do to boost the overpayment coffers which I call our side hussle. We rent out our spare bedroom on a short term basis on Airbnb, we have solar panels on the roof which provide a small quarterly income, and I run a technology youtube channel which brings in a few quid each month from adverts and affiliate sales. I plan on posting monthly updates on the amounts these generate.

That’s it for now as I have rambled on a bit! If you see MissWillow on here, that’s the wife!