Mortgage Free by 01/01/11...so goes the plan

[Deleted User]

Hey Billy
keep us posted on how it is going...man I cant WAIT to say I only have 26 days to go till being MF....hmmm...probably a good few years away yet!
love the idea of an MSE grand design...I love that show they build so many lovely pretty things! (and some very odd looking ones!) mrtyo would like to live in a castle one day (such a boy!) so perhaps you can keep me posted on how its going and I will use that as an incentive to get us MF :rotfl:

ps. as Ive been inspired by this thread I have asked for a jigsaw for xmas! (thought I would be more likely to get that than "can I have £127000 to pay off my mortgage pls" )

wynnvegas

Morning All,

25 days to go today and all remains perfectly on course. My £178.86 arrived from quidco today so that paid for the bathroom tiles we got at the weekend. Unfortunately, we've still got the flashy mosaic tiles to get and they're coming in at about £500 - it will be nice when that's a straightforward and relatively worry-free transaction! Hedged my bets and left the autumn sale in the expectant hope of a January sale - surely a no brainer but if it ends up costing us an extra £500 then I'll be less than impressed with myself.

Bought the birthday presents for the remainder of the year yesterday so we're clear now until mid-January when it's my big brother's 30th - I'm thinking of sending him over to Germany for a crack at the Nurburgring but I mentioned it as a potential option for his stag weekend and he thinks he'd kill himself there so I may need to think again! Also finished the Christmas shopping other than the (now counted) 42 big boxes of chocolates we need to get for the many and varied family households. Currently planning halloween activities as I've every intention of running round said houses on the 31st, scaring all the kids with my Freddy Kreuger costume and then doling out sweeties as something of consolatory therapy!

Our joiner is coming round on Thursday with the kitchen sketches and the final quote for the bathroom - hoping for it being under £8500 (including the new boiler, all parts and all fitting) to keep the planned budgets right! Have to take the car in this morning for an oil change - it's this type of thing that makes having the company car a lot better as there's no nasty bill (not for me, anyway!) at the end of any work being done.

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Morning Taxi / TYO,

I'll need to re-name it as it's likely to be less than money-saving-esque when we get round to it. With our intended total budget of £400-450k for land and the build from start to finish plus all the bits in the house, and with it being the only house we intend living in for the rest of our lives (other than the intended holiday home in America at some point) we'll not be cutting too many costs - not that it'll stop us from grabbing all the deals we can. My trouble at the moment with the grand designs is the hippy notion of being carbon-neutral and spending a whack of money being environmentally friendly. I'm afraid our house will have environmental impact pretty much near the bottom of our list of considerations. Although it's a few years away, we're both particularly excited about the idea of it and, with the architect playing about with sketches in the next few months, that will get us properly motivated to kick on in a big way. Thankfully M isn't intent on a castle but she is 100% insistent on the house having a turret somewhere on it.

TYO - do you have a fancy for which one you're going to get? I think you've missed an "if you don't ask..." trick there - you never know who's got £127k spare and stashed away!

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Morning Folks,

Good news again as things continue to look up. Our joiner came round last night with the kitchen sketches (which weren't quite as flashy as we'd initially imagined but still give the idea) so we're now busy gearing up for that now that the bathroom planning has been finalised. I think I might get one of the big lot to pop in and draw out the bathroom in the next few weeks to give us an idea of where to place the mosaic tiles. Including the biggest boiler available, the quote comes to £4,700 which is the boiler, all the fittings, all the trades and the removal and installation of the bathroom suite as well as the knocking down and rebuilding of the bathroom wall to fit the bath in. That, alongside a maximum non sale price of £2,800 for the bathroom suite gives us £7,500 which leaves us either the ability to do it a wee bit quicker, additional flexibility for when we do the kitchen or a couple of extra thousand dollars for Vegas in the summer! Guess what's winning at the moment...

Speaking of which, it is very interesting to see Crown Currency going bust and leaving 13,000 poor souls in the lurch. Seen someone lost £90,000 which must be a real heartbreaker. I've always been dubious about the company (particularly as they were very keen to have you pay with clearly unprotected funding options) but, having told myself not to go with the daft nagging doubts, I was definitely going to have a go with them for our 2011 spending money which, had it been at the wrong time, could have cost us £4-5,000. Quite relieved doesn't begin to cover it!

Cheers,

Billy

Froggy-G

wynnvegas wrote: »

Morning Folks,

Good news again as things continue to look up. Our joiner came round last night with the kitchen sketches (which weren't quite as flashy as we'd initially imagined but still give the idea) so we're now busy gearing up for that now that the bathroom planning has been finalised. I think I might get one of the big lot to pop in and draw out the bathroom in the next few weeks to give us an idea of where to place the mosaic tiles. Including the biggest boiler available, the quote comes to £4,700 which is the boiler, all the fittings, all the trades and the removal and installation of the bathroom suite as well as the knocking down and rebuilding of the bathroom wall to fit the bath in. That, alongside a maximum non sale price of £2,800 for the bathroom suite gives us £7,500 which leaves us either the ability to do it a wee bit quicker, additional flexibility for when we do the kitchen or a couple of extra thousand dollars for Vegas in the summer! Guess what's winning at the moment...

Speaking of which, it is very interesting to see Crown Currency going bust and leaving 13,000 poor souls in the lurch. Seen someone lost £90,000 which must be a real heartbreaker. I've always been dubious about the company (particularly as they were very keen to have you pay with clearly unprotected funding options) but, having told myself not to go with the daft nagging doubts, I was definitely going to have a go with them for our 2011 spending money which, had it been at the wrong time, could have cost us £4-5,000. Quite relieved doesn't begin to cover it!

Cheers,

Billy

Hi Billy :j

Glad all is coming around as you wished for..

ONLY 565 HOURS TILL YOU ARE MORTGAGE FREE!! WOOHOO!!:D

OH & I are planning to re-do our bathroom early next year.. Any tips or advice you can give us?

Cheers

Froggy G :rotfl:

wynnvegas

Hi Froggy - I've taken your measurement to a whole new level - tomorrow (or possibly at some point tonight, we'll break through the 2 million second marker!! I'm mad enough without people like you encouraging it!

The best advice I can give (aside from not measuring things in Billy's - the joiner wasn't at all impressed by my esimated measurement of the required space in the spare room after the wall being moved further into it being "a Billy and a bit") is to have a look round the showrooms well in advance and firm up exactly what you fancy and then crack into them at sale time - this strategy may yet prove daft as I'm banking on the existence of a January sale at Buyrite. Don't waste too much time on catalogues as, if you're anything like us, you'll change your mind on everything once you see it in person. Get a couple of companies round to do a few quotes and certainly get the big ones round initially to give you some drawings of what the room will look like once done. I'll hopefully be here in about 6 months recommending a 12-jet jacuzzi bath to you as well!!

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Morning Folks,

Today's tale will be the good, the somewhat scary and the relatively frustrating!!

On the good front, the money is going very well this month. With expenses due in tomorrow and council tax due out (our final bill before being mortgage free as M's breakdown cover came out yesterday) we'll still have over £1,000 in the bank which has no call on it. The jigsaw is going marvellously well and life as we know it is going swimmingly. We've just won a massive deal at work which will keep me properly busy and dotting all over the place in the next wee while so that's something to look forward to. Have my annual review at work tomorrow so hoping to squeeze a few more holidays out of the boss! Fingers crossed on that one but I'll wait to see what's being offered before I drop in that request.

The frustrating part was last night. Having trekked the 20 miles into Edinburgh to go and see some daft wummin' film (Life as we know it or something similar), we were turned away as it was a first come first served thing and we had cut the timing too fine. Turned out to be a bit of a waste of time but no real harm done!

The scary stuff is the template budget I worked out last night. Between paying the mortgage off at the end of the month and maybe the end of summer 2012, we've got the following to account / save for:

December 2010 - Vegas 2011 Flights - £3,000
April 2011 - Boiler / Bathroom Project - £7,500
June 2011 - Vegas 2011 Hotels - £1,500
July 2011 - Vegas 2011 Spending Money - £2,000
July 2011 - Kitchen Project - £6,000
October 2011 - Floors / Doors / Painting Project - £3,000
December 2011 - Vegas / Hawaii 2012 Flights - £5,000
April 2012 - M's Audi A3 - £12,000
June 2012 - Vegas / Hawaii Hotels - £2,500
July 2012 - Vegas / Hawaii Spending Money - £3,500

This will be the outline of the next signature once the mortgage countdown ends! Some of these are estimates and the holidays take account of the fact that we're taking a couple of extra people on each of the holidays and paying for their flights and hotels but £46,000 is a big bill for the next wee while. Quite the depressive thought that we'll be saving pretty hard for all of these things but good that we can a) manage it! and b) do it at our own pace and let timescales slip without incurring any interest or other costs.

Cheers,

Billy

taxi73

Wow ..thats some saving to be done but like you say you can afford it.
Am looking forward to the day you pay the mortgage off....do you plan on celebrating it?

gallygirl

taxi73 wrote: »

Wow ..thats some saving to be done but like you say you can afford it.
Am looking forward to the day you pay the mortgage off....do you plan on celebrating it?

I just worked out that I am away for the weekend when it is paid off so I will miss Billy's party . Taxi - make sure you take lots of incriminating photos _party__party__party__party__party_

wynnvegas

Hi Taxi,

It's a scary thought but I'm happy enough that we'll see and do a lot for our money. The bad thing is that we're going to be 18 months down the line before we start our 5 year saving plan for the house which means we'll be moving into the new house a lot nearer 2020 than I had hoped!

Bizarrely, the answer to that at the moment is no! Other than sitting down in the office that morning, making the requisite phone call and subsequent transfer, there's nothing at all planned for the 29th. It seems daft not to mark the day somehow so I'll need to plan something between now and then. It's M's birthday next Wednesday so we'll be out then, weekends are always pretty full of visiting, dinners, parties etc and we're kicking off our tour of taking friends and family out as our little treat to help us celebrate from the 30th onwards. We've also got a little 3-day trip planned for the middle of this month down to London where I am planning on getting one of the dinner and show deals to Wicked as I SOA blocked Wicked in NY on that basis that it was on in London. I was swithering between two restaurants for her birthday so I think I'll pick whatever one we don't go to on Wednesday and use that for the 29th.

Cheers,

Billy