Ajmoney's mortgage reduction diary

ajmoney

Another update while I am looking at my spreadsheets.

£42346.89 Mortgage
£21788.11 Savings

£20558.78 Total left on mortgage minus savings.

Unfortunately this will change in a few weeks when I have to take money from my ISA to pay my share of the wedding.

I was doig some early reading into offset mortgages the other day as I have only ever had a tracker mortgage. I have just realised that the concept is what I have been doing for months, highlighted above!

ajmoney

I came up with a new idea today and am getting quite excited. Over the next couple of months I should be getting a couple of private instrumental pupils and if only teach them through term time I think it should add up to an extra £2000 a year which if I add to the OPs means I will definately be able to OP the full amount each month. Any extra I am going to put away and save to the amount needed to pay my car off early even if I don't actually do it or even settle the mortgage with a lump sum.

I looked at a couple of properties online, we have always planned to go up to £200,000 but there are some interesting ones for much ess. I am well aware that when we come to moving the property market is likely to be moving in a different way but I am wondering whether we might be able to buy a new property so long as it is a cheaper value and still keep this one and possibly rent it. We have a £42k(ish) mortgage on the house and with maximum OPs it will be paid off in 5 years. We keep changing our mind with when to move but I doubt we will move much before then so we may own this house before we buy anyway, so it will give us a lot of options.

I realise this post is a lot of rambling but it is quite exciting to know that there are possibilities that I never thought existed. I am looking forward to discussing this with OH after the wedding and really securing our future!

ajmoney

Ok so I was too excited to wait until after the weding to put my suggestion to OH so brought the conversation up this morning. He has asked if I want him to go halves on the OPs with me after the wedding that means there is an extra £140 I can stash for maybe a lump sum payment near the end. OPs won't be starting until August but effectively we could be mortgage free in 5 years instead of just under 19...that sounds impressive :j
It looks more likely we will keep this house on as by the time we come to move we should have quite a low mortgage on it and we can probably afford it, even without a tenant. We may not need it as a deposit on a house either as OH was mentioning earlier about money coming from his dad's will so it could be an interesting time soon. Will be making an appointment to see the mortgage advisor when we return from our honeymoon just to find out where we stand and what we can afford in terms of one or two properties just in case we find anything. It also means we won't HAVE to sell our house before we can look to buy.

ajmoney

It looks like the wedding isn't going to cost us as much as we thought. We started with a budget of over £13k but it is under 10k now and I have still overbudgetted on some of the stuff that we have to pay next month At the moment it isn't going to cost us any more than we have already saved in our wedding fund.

ajmoney

My car insurance expires on Sunday so I really need to sort this. I have already found a deal, I just want to double check it tomorrow and then I will go ahead with it. For the first time ever I have investigated Quidco after reading about it on here. It is actually a better search tool than some of the ones I usually use. I can save more money from this search and that is before I include the cashback.

A question with Quidco, do you have to have a certain amount there before you can use it?

ajmoney

OH went and put us on a mailing list for one of the estate agents in town today, we weren't planning on looking at anything until after the wedding. We are going to try and get some mortgage advice to see what is affordable, maybe before the wedding and it is something we can discuss over the honeymoon. We are not in a rush to move which is good as we have a couple of bits to do on the house and garden and then we can wait until we find the right house.

ajmoney

We have an appointment for mortgage advice in 3 weeks and tonight we went driving around the different housing areas, very exciting.

Wedding prep or lack of it is stressing me out a lot at the moment.

ajmoney

We have an appointment with a mortgage advisor in 3 weeks and have been looking around to see what and where we fancy when we move. We have found a lovely new development with a house that we quite like from the outside, we are going to another develpoment to see the showhome tomorrow. We could be in by August :eek: OH is very excited but I am being far to realistic for my own good. It will be interesting to see if we can afford it, hoping to get a quicker mortgage appointment now. I may start in the kitchen tonight as there are only a couple of shelves/cupboards to declutter. We may as well start now just in case it ends up happening this soon.

ajmoney

I have already looked to see how OPs would work on a new house. Just trying to think of things that I need to cost to check we can afford.

ajmoney

We spent the weekend looking around the showhomes at all our local new build sites. Very tempted by 2, 1st is a great house but in the wrong location as OHs ex wife lives at the other end of the village. The 2nd is a great location and we talked through all the rooms in great detail and made it work for us but too much and weren't sure it would be big enough. As a result of the weekend though one of their mortgage advisors has rung this evening and let us know where we stand with our figures. It will be interesting to compare her results with our bank in a few weeks. So long as the house isn't at the top of our budget we are planning to keep my house and rent it. The mortgage is very small and we could easily rent it and fund that with some OPs on it too. OH is spending all his time looking at properties at the mo but I am happy to wait until the wedding and honeymoon are out of the way. It could be an exciting time coming up though