Baby steps to being mortgage free

Baby_steps_2

Wow,

What an amazing sunny day, tho unfortunatly it has meant I have done nothing productive but have spent a lovely relaxing day outside.:p

So, the current position my current mortgage is £162,871.91 and is due to be paid off in 28/04/43, when I will be 59. Wow seeing that written down is so scary:eek:

So far the overpayments are a grand total of £100, although that will save me £539 in interst. How motivating is that!!

Another £100 to go in April. Extra income so far, £110 from quidco, nearly got enough for £15 in amazon vouchers on toluna and about £3 from valued opinions. So when that all comes in a bit extra for the overpayment pot.

So as I have been promising below my budgets - feel free to provide any advice.

Mortgage - 1009 (including £100 extra payment)
Council tax - 140
Gas & elec - 79 (reducing to £60 when switch to npower)
Building and contents - 20
Water - 28
BT - 16
Sky -37
Bank fee - 13
Sofa - 50
Food - 250
General - 50 (house bits as needed)
Credit cards - 450

So joint account expenditure - £2142
Into Joint account - £2143

Personal

Income - £2035
Expenditure
Joint ac - 1200
Cats - 20
Phone - 35
Meals - 50
Petrol - 50
Cash - 240
Saving - 50
Credit card - 250
Misc - 100 (hair cuts, presents, clothes)

Total out - £2000, so £35 to spare (close I know!!)

Points to note, I have no car expenses for my car (except petrol) This is because its a company car and they cover insurance maintenance etc. I also have a very good work pension scheme and that payment is deucted before I recieve my pay as well as my student loan payment deducted. So the £2035 is my net income after all this.

My plan is to try and reduce my weekly expenditure currently £60 per week, spend on the odd lunch, drinks with friends cinema trips etc to £50. This will mean a saving of £40 per month. If I can do this i can add it to my savings. As i want to build up my emergency fund.

The credit cards (both my personal card and our joint card) should be paid off in July. This will give me an extra £750 a month to play with and I can use this to overpay the mortgage by more than I'm doing now and build up the savings.

The OH and I contribute to the Joint account and then anything else left is our own. I contribute more as earn more, and I wanted to start overpaying so am helping out towards this at the mo). The OH also has some CC debts he is currently trying to pay these off, I know he is finding this hard so I may end up helping when our joint card is dealt with, but as he is rubbish with money and spends so much I'm wondering if I should or not as they are his debts.

Well sorry for the really long post I just wanted to put it all out there and see if anyone had any advice.

pammyj74

Wow your income is great.
Is your grocery budget of £250 just for the two of you? My family of 4 budget is only half that!

Definitely pay off the CCs first before OPing. Is the sofa on 0%, if not then try and pay that off too if that is higher rate than the mortgage.

Also the misc payments, could that be reduced? Maybe only buy clothes once every two or three months?

Do you NEED to buy things or are they a WANT item.
Think before you buy something new how much interest you would save if you OP'd the money instead.

The cash budget of £240, what does that pay for? is that lunches at work etc. This could be halved also.

Obviously you are used to just spending as and when you want but if you want to be MF as soon as possible there is definitely some money shaving you need to do on things you dont really need.
My monthly income is £1500ish and through frugal spending I usually have about £200 left over.

I dont spend much money on things I want unless I have earned it extra.

Good luck with your MF journey.

Baby_steps_2

Your right Pammy I do really need to think do I NEED it or just WANT it!!

The misc payment gets grouped together and then used to pay for DIY and improvements to be made to the house.

The sofa is on 0% so no rush to pay this off, it made sense to take it out on 0% as the interest cost is built into the cost of the sofa so may as well take advantage!!

I will try and cut the grocery bill but the OH eats like a horse, this does also cover cleaning products and most toiletries.

I will have a think and come back with the bet place to cut the budgets!! :eek:

pammyj74

Is the misc used up every month?
Whats the cash budget for? Thats £7.75 a day, do you always spend this?
Maybe think about getting a spare cash jar and putting anything under £1 in it each day.
I have a £1/50p jar, £2 tube and odds jar. It will soon mount up and oyu dont miss it.

Grocery things I do to bulk out food is grate carrots or put lentils in things like mince. I shop at aldi for potatoes as they are the cheapest usually, buy things in bulk when they are on a great offer, things like that really.
I'm lucky with the toiletries as I bought a load last year when tescos had theire great coupons and points promotion. I had hundreds of the stuff and even did about 4 carboots to sell them on. I have a few boxes left now which I am using for myself and should last me another year at least lol

SmlSave

Hi babysteps

My grocery bill is almost the same as yours and there's only two of us I budget £200 a month and keep trying to get it down. Some months are definitely easier than others! All our drink and cleaning stuff is included in this too.

Do you take lunch to work? If not I think this would help to cut down on your cash spending My budget is £120 a month and it dissappears sooo quickly! More often than not on stuff that I can't remember. Today I forgot my egg sandwich (although somehow I remebered my cereal) so I might get a pastry today.

Do you have a cineworld near you? If so their film card a good investment as if you see two films a month you've made it back, We go everyweek and get our friends free tickets with Orange Wednesday.

Perhaps it could be worth ringing Sky to see if you can reduce your payments? If you have no special packages you might be able to get it down to £26 a month? Or maybe you could invest in Freesat?

Hope you are well

Baby_steps_2

Smlsave, unfortunatly the sky bill is not up for debate with the OH. It is his one treat as he doesn't drink, smoke or go out much. Sky and food are his to treats. The package is so expensive as we pay extra for ESPN America which is the main channel he watches. It does also cover the Internet and we will move our phone ti sky when our Bt contract ends, unfortunatlywe are stuck in a rolling contract with them at the minute.

No cineworld near us unfortunatly, only a vue and it cost a small fortune to go so tend not to bother unless it's big action film and have joined love film instead so watch movies at home.

I will try with the good bill, I'm not sure why but sometimes we even struggle to stay in this big budget!! This does cover drink, most toiletries (except ny make up) and cleaning products. But will try and keep a better track in exactly what we are spending and get this down.

Joining thi site has made me realise how wasteful I am with my money. I could even tell u were that £240 goes. I have got myself a spending diary to work it out. I mostly take my own lunch to work so it doesn't go on that. I have a sneaky suspicion it's alcohol. Tend to go to the pub alot with friends an th odd glass of wine at £5 soon adds up or taking a bottle to friends.

Here's hoping my spending diary will enlighten me!!:p I really want to cut back so I can build up some savings so if anything happens I'm prepared.

Nearly pay do so can pay another chunk off the cc's and my £100 overpayment. How sad am I that this is now what I look forward to doing with my pay cheque!!

setmefree2

Spending diaries are great. I have been keeping one for 7 years! I think it helps you see where you are wasting money and you can't kid yourself about anything either. It's all there in black and white.:D

uzubairu

setmefree2 wrote: »

Spending diaries are great. I have been keeping one for 7 years! I think it helps you see where you are wasting money and you can't kid yourself about anything either. It's all there in black and white.:D

I have to agree too.

I've recently been using an iPhone/iPod Touch App called CashTrails and I have found it very useful in tracking my spends and controlling unnecessary spending.
http://cashtrails.com/

I used the free version first, but it was so good that I paid £2.99 for the full version and it was money well spent.

pammyj74

Baby_steps wrote: »

Here's hoping my spending diary will enlighten me!!:p I really want to cut back so I can build up some savings so if anything happens I'm prepared.

Nearly pay do so can pay another chunk off the cc's and my £100 overpayment. How sad am I that this is now what I look forward to doing with my pay cheque!!

It is exactly like that, you cant wait for the money to go into your bank so you can transfer to the mortgage account. You then start checking your bank online every day to see if some unexpected money would miraculously be put in, you calculate it over and over again to see if there is any more money you can squeeze out. Every thing you spend relates to MPs lol
It is very addictive but in a good way!

Baby_steps_2

uzubairu wrote: »

I have to agree too.

I've recently been using an iPhone/iPod Touch App

How did you know my i-phone is my little treat!! I also got an i-phone app called spending. As I always have my phone on me and its so easy to use, I have been finidng it easy to keel (well for the last five days anyway!!).

Well the good news is it was payday on Friday :T, so my have made the following payments;

- £100 overpayment on the mortgage.
- £50 towads my xmas savings.
- £400 off the joint card
- £450 off my personal credit card.

The extra £200 on my personal card was because I got some work expenses back so have paid this off.

The payment to the joint card was a little lower than the budgeted £450. This is because the laptop looked like it was going to die, and looking at the hard disk drive space we noticed this is very full. So rather than buying a new laptop I have bought an external hard drive for this one. it was 1tb so am currently in the process of shifting everything over to it. We also bought some new plants for the garden as its the perfect time for planting this seemed like a necessary expense. i have also bought myself a water butt, so although this has cost me money now I'm hoping in the long run it will pay for itself by reducing my water usage.

These extra expenses mean that I have had to reduce the food budget to £200 to still let me pay off the £450. Luckily have a fairly full frezzer so just plan on eating my way through this for the month.

I have updated my sig to show these payments. Its so good to see the last bit of debt go down and know for the first time ever i'm saving for xmas and paying a bit extra off the mortgage. this site has really made me focus.:A

Hope all are well.