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

wynnvegas

luke789 wrote: »

nice billy i think you could do it in 16 months is that between you? what kind of salary are you on right now if u dnt mind me asking. good luck

Hi Luke,

No bother. I'm on £38k (just managing to avoid that higher rate taxation!) and M is on £35k.

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Morning All,

54 days to go and the only thing of note to report is that I received our annual mortgage statement through yesterday from HSBC. It kindly informed me that our mortgage free date is now 01/10/13 at £823.06pm which isn't a big deal as we all know that's rubbish. They did tell me that the mortgage balance at their end is £5,000.19 though which is no good whatsoever! This was slightly tempered by the confirmation that paying it all off will cost nothing extra other than the mortgage amount but I'm still going to pop in next month to find out if I can get the exact balance on the 29th of October and knock it off then or if I do indeed need to wait the 54 days to 01/11/10.

Forgot about my expenses this month so there's now enough in the bank to stick both our credit cards to £100 in credit and leave the £1,000 buffer in the bank which is great news. We also have two of the three family members who we've had to give out loans to starting work on Monday which should see us get a happy wee boost at the start of October as we'd more or less written them off from our plans. Everything remains on course to such an extent that we've been away picking out bathroom suites for installation in April (maybe February at a real push).

For the beginning of November, we'll also reinstate our family shopping run. We're fortunate enough to have all the major and minor supermarkets within 15 minutes of where we live and those that aren't are within 5 minutes of where I work so I collate all the best offers from the lot of them on a Monday luncthime. M calls round to get the orders on a Wednesday evening from the various participants and I use Friday lunchtime to grab all the stuff. The majority of the time, we've taken the money from people when we've done this with the proviso that when the mortgage is gone, this will be our weekly gift to the four or five people we know struggle a wee bit with money and we can add in a massive Farmfoods milk and bread round for everyone just for the hell of it. M only has 15 in her family so that's straightforward as it's 4 households but my family extends to over 110 so we need to be a bit more selective on that front - as big as the car boot is, there's still a limit!

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

cha97michelle wrote: »

It is the 1st time i have spotted your diary, and it is lovely to hear the background. I think my hubbie too would kind of like some of the techy stuff. He quite fancies an ereader. I will surprise him with one i think at some stage.

The positive side though is you have waited till they are tested and also a little cheaper?

Well done on getting to where you are so quickly.

Hi Michelle,

I've stopped myself going too close to any of it as yet to avoid the temptation. Part of my trouble is the pace of change (sounding old) as they're already talking about i-phone 5 and i-pad 2 so spending the money now or waiting a few more months becomes a bit of a debate. I think for the £35 or so quid a month, we'll pick up a couple of i-phones in October / November as a wee treat although I did have a quick look at the App Store on i-tunes so we may need to remortgage at some point once all those 99p's add up!

I did see a thing yesterday about the top ten telly models of the future. We've managed to miss out on HD (still don't really see a massive difference - sounding older) and I'm not all that fussed for 3D but internet telly sounds like a proper winner and a load of models are due to be introduced for 2011.

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Morning All,

Quick update today - sold my first ever thing. Not managed to crack the eBay lark as yet but I sold a purse that had been hanging around for about a year and which M had no intention of ever using. It may only have been £4 but it's better that the purse gets used, I get money and we clear a wee bit of space! Just got all these Armani t-shirts to get shot of and we'll be laughing!

Cheers,

Billy

Iris_Blue

There's a first time for everything. Well done on your ebay sale. It all helps.

You'll soon get the bug!

wynnvegas

Iris_Blue wrote: »

There's a first time for everything. Well done on your ebay sale. It all helps.

You'll soon get the bug!

Thanks Iris,

It was a HUKD FO:LK forum sale but it all went smoothly. Everything that isn't taken from that thread will go to eBay after the weekend.

Cheers,

Billy

Secret_Saving_Squirrel

Hello,

Your shopping round sounds like a really kind thing to do. I am sure your families really appreciate it. Not long until you are truly MF!

Squirrel

RosieTiger

Billy, I have made comments about how well thought through you are on a few occasions, but neer actually spotted your own diary and read it through.
Having just done so, I have to say your "novels" are more than worth the read :T
It sounds like you both have had a farly hard journey, but considering what you done for others, it seems very appropriate that you will soon reach the end of the road so celebrating with some new gadgets or toys for yourselves will be more than justified.

Maybe with your plans for all that family shopping continuing you'll need a new goal and your wife may want to make that an A6 rather than an A3 :rotfl:

Can't wait to see you add your name to the role of honour.

The RT's

wynnvegas

Morning All,

Squirrel, thanks for the comment. It's something my dad used to do for my Nan and I've always been a wee bit inspired by it and for the sake of a few pounds every week or so, it's very rewarding. Most of my family don't drive and a lot are SAHMs so anything that we can do to lighten the load even a wee bit is well worth having a go at.

RT, thanks for finding me! You'll note that the diary went to ruin for a good few months as I got more and more into the two mortgage free threads run by FB and Cake. I can't say that we've suffered that much as with growing up with not a lot, you never really had any real idea that you were missing out on anything! That being said, we've made the conscious decision to ensure that anything my nieces and nephew fancy doing that could potentially prove a financial hardship on my brothers doesn't fall down. We're looking at music lessons at the moment for them but the eldest is only 4 in January so there's no desperate rush. Thankfully, it's a smallish car that she's after so an A6 seems unlikely but if she gets over that barrier, there may be no stopping her!

On the family shopping front (and somewhat inspired by Poppyoscar who has kept her diary going), I've decided to make a weekly visit to my diary after November to pop in all the shopping offers that we're looking at. It should just be a straightforward copy and paste but there's no use me keeping the goodies to myself!

Anyhoo, we're at a maximum of 50 days to go (although tentatively 46 or 47!) and FB has published his latest spreadhseet update so it's been a good start. I'll get to the promised cautionary overpayment by cheque tale tomorrow but I'm sheepishly admitting falling off the wagon a wee bit over the weekend. After a thorough hounding at darts and snooker in the last couple of weeks, I've decided that the fault cannot possibly lie with me, my lack of skill or lack of practice so it must be the olde fashioned equipment I use (yes, yes - bad workman and all that...) so, knowing that I've got a small inheritance coming shortly, having received a couple of small loans back from family members and with the bank looking somewhat healthier than usual, I decided to hell with it and ordered myself a set of the fancy Phil Taylor darts (although as a good MSE did use the discount code reserved for students - sshhh) which with flights, stems, spares, a fancy carry case and the darts themselves came to a surprising £76 - gone are the days of the harrows £2.99 specials! Whilst I was on a roll, I decided that I'd go for the Ronnie O'Sullivan snooker cue that has been on special offer this last week. A three piece cue, new case and a few incidental bits and bobs saw me set back another £95 but I'm promising myself that that's it between now and the end of October / start of November.

Now if I don't start hitting 9-darters and century breaks, there's very little to blame but myself. I haven't fully thought this through....

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Morning Folks,

49 days to go and everything remains on track despite my splurging on what was less than humourously termed "fat bloke sports kit" yesterday. It's a shame no-one takes the dedication (necking pints inbetween legs isn't easy, you know) required to play pub games as seriously as they should.

Anyhoo, onto the only major blip on our overpayment journey. We had moved from Northern Rock to HBOS somewhere in 2006 and had decided that we had enough money about us to kick off some overpayments. HBOS kindly allowed us a 10% (somewhere about £9,200) overpayment so we scrimped and saved for a good few months until we had the money. HBOS then less thank kindly made it all kinds of difficult to give them the money as our bank accounts were still with Lloyds TSB and RBOS respectively with the overpayment resting (in a non Father Ted way) in my account.

We were told that debit cards payments over the phone weren't doable despite my believeing this to be more feasible than overpaying with the credit card to get a bumper load of airmiles and that even wandering into the bank with a bag of cash wasn't a goer. The only way they would accept overpayments to the mortgage (no doubt to discourage people from such a heinous act) was by cheque to their central mortgage admin place in Leeds or somewhere equally dull.

Somewhat begrudgingly (proper begrudging came later down the line!), I stuck a cheque in the post (moaning that between cheques and faxes, it was like being back in the 80s) and looked forward to my letter from HBOS telling me a decent sized chunk had been removed from the mortgage. Having heard nothing back within a week and still having the money in my account, I again damned their antiquated eyes and gave the call centre a ring. Naturally, the call centre didn't talk much to the admin place so they surmised it must be going through "channels" - a more mundane swap for "we haven't a clue what's going on", I can't think of.

A few days later, £4,800 came out of my Lloyds TSB account. I decided, with my Hardy Boys-esque suspicion, that this seemed somewhat odd - surely they either take all the £9,200 or none of it? I phoned HBOS who again said they had no record of it being processed but their channels meant that it sometimes took a few days to get from the bank account to the mortgage and I should call back in a wee bit. I phoned Lloyds TSB who cheerily informed me that the cheque had been cashed and was due to clear - just not to HBOS - to a Mr James River who had deposited the cheque that I had written in the Liverpool Lloyds TSB. Despite my now somewhat more fulsome knowledge of English geography, my concern for my cheque not making it to Leeds and ending up in the infinitely worse Liverpool was overshadowed more than a wee bit by the overwhelming notion that something had gone horribly awry.

I was instructed to now phone my local branch of Lloyds TSB to see what they had to add to the mix. The very nice (but dim) woman I spoke to was aghast and promised to get the manager straight on the case. I came home to a voicemail that night and, thinking that the banks could hurry things up when they wanted, gave the manager a ring back the next morning. After a wee bit of stooges-esque confusion around who phoned whom first and what the call was about, we realised that a) she had no idea that I'd phoned before and b) she was calling to tell me about a dodgy cheque that was cashed in Manchester. Confusion reigned for quite some time until she helpfully pointed out that if I had only sent one cheque for £9,200, it seemed odd that two had been cashed for £4,800 and £4,400.

To cut a long story, well, longish, between Lloyds TSB, HBOS and the local polis, the decision was made (not before I had to have a shouting match with the Lloyds TSB call centre about what was and was not my signature) that the cheque had been nabbed (apparently easy to spot when sent to the mortgage overpayment building in Leeds), cloned and then cashed twice to keep it under a magic £5,000 figure when an extra layer of security (presumably checking the signature) comes into play. It took 10 weeks and a fight with Lloyds TSB and eventually the financial ombudsman (and a strongly worded tome to the Lloyds TSB CEO) to get my money back but they did give me a few hundred quid in way of an apology after me going on about daily interest building up on my mortgage. HBOS (either realising their stupid system caused the whole furore in the first place or as a result of my ranting down the phone) also backdated my payment to the day the cheque was sent so that the interest was no worse than it should have been had everything gone smoothly.

Needless to say, my loyalty to both waned just a touch and I decided I'd shift the mortgage and the bank account to a single bank to make future overpayments easier. As it was, when we moved it to HSBC, we were in a position to pay off another chunk (now miraculously accepted by debit card) and, with the much loved HSBC overpayment happy mortgage we have now, all online transfer overpayments come off the balance immediately. Thankfully, this was the biggest and most annoying hurdle that we've had to overcome and the rest has pretty much been plain sailing.

Cheers,

Billy