The ultimate challenge!! 29 August 2009 at 9:22AM in Mortgage-free wannabe 4 replies 835 views

shangaijimmy

Bit of background! Got a £160K mortgage and having chipped away for a year (since interest rates started to fall - approx 3K), and this has spurred us on to look at it properly and make the commitment and take the ultimate challenge!!

My partner heads back to work soon after maternity leave and with our incomes boosted again we're gonna try and live as if she was still on maternity pay.

After much reading on this forum about all tips and advice our overall aim is to MF by the time our son finishes school.

Now for the first advice question:
We have a oneaccount and have 8k stoozed into a pot to boost our balance. My query is when i ring to sort a credit card how much is it reasonable to ask for as a credit limit? How many/much is it possible to have (i appreciate it's not so easy at the moment)?

Other than that here goes...keep you posted...

dimbo61

Stoozing is getting much more difficult with the 2.5/3% fees on 0% credit cards and that fact that all the card companies can now check how many cards you have!
Just keep overpaying and build up a savings pot to pay for big items such as holidays and cars.
Good Luck

Jonbvn

What's your mortgage interest rate? If it is very low (like ours) it may be better to save than overpay.

setmefree2

shangaijimmy

OK then here goes. After an over-enthusiastic start i've managed to get the OH addicted too!

In week we've managed £26 from food shop, £40 from our petrol budget, £8 from mobile phone and £20 from weekly miscellaneous spend - all underspends from our budgets and overpayments made.

If we only managed 1/2 of this over the month, alongside our regular overpayment of £300 this would give us a £500 montly overpayment.

I'm astonished!!

And this with our regular savings pots (offset of course) for Christmas, Holiday, Wedding, Son, Car Maintenance taken out.