My First Step into the scary world of MFW

greent

BUt it's going the right way!! Well done - I'm making lots of little OPs at the moment - but they are adding up nicely over the last 4 months It's so easy to absorb the £20 sale here and there, rather than OP it - but when put together they make a lump that you'd notice going out of your account

foxblade

Oh my gosh, clearing_out_my_pockets! You are just like me! In our current account we have one of those 3 tiered thingy....main account...reserve and savings. I also OP the mortgage and have a savings account with the coop which I can't see online...well I can't stand not having round numbers! If I have say 152.50 in the current, I move that to the coop so I can't see it and am left with 150.00...strange how minds work, but it means it does add up over time! Good Luck!

clearing_out_my_pockets

Would be even better if our mortgage balance was as low as yours...

Seriously though I hate having odd numbers in my banck accounts. Any of them. My credit card is a round figure, as are my savings and current account. It kills me that I can see the pennies on the mortgage statement. I knew OH must be 'the one' when I noticed he does the same thing as me!

clearing_out_my_pockets

I'm a little shellshocked. OH said to me last week that he feels like I'm keeping him in the dark over mortgage and savings. We have separate banking facilities at the moment (due to change soonish) so he can't see the mortgage account on his internet banking and he knows that I have been overpaying. He also knows I have been saving each month towards the wedding. But his main gripe is that he doesn't know how MUCH.

So now I need to think of a way of keeping him up to date with balances and savings projections without making myself sound like a financial advisor. I do have a spreadsheet with boxes that I colour in when certain targets or overpayment levels are reached... Perhaps I print one of those out and stick it on the fridge (hide it away when we have visitors, obviously!).

katsu

what about a regular sit down and review - when he is logging in to check his banking you then log in and show him the OPs and savings?

DH and I have regular chats and I log in and say - come look and help me work it out!

clearing_out_my_pockets

That would be the ideal solution, but (there's always a but!) most of the time he is completely disinterested. If I say to him "we have £8,000 set aside for the wedding" he'll say "if we're on budget I don't need to know". He also says that as long as we're meeting the mortgage payments each month, he doesn't need to know what overpayments we're making. But every now and then he asks (when I don't have my spreadsheet to hand) how much we've paid in deposits, or something like that and gets annoyed when I can't tell him. Not because I won't, but because I actually don't know the exact number off the top of my head and I don't like guessing!

SmlSave

My DH is much the same clearing *rolls eyes*

Not interested most the time, doesn't save anything but is happy to give my any money he has over £200 on payday for me to deal with it - and then he wants to know details and gets all shocked that we haven't saved/op'ed that much!

Ohhhhh rant over

Something I keep meaning to do is set up a Google spreedsheet which he can logg into when he's being interested.

clearing_out_my_pockets

Seeing as I'm trying to keep on top of this, I should 'report' that this month's OP is £96.57 taking our total since we took the mortgage out a rather miserly £782.98. But to put that into perspective, it's a touch over 11% over and above our normal payments. I suppose it's only to be expected that progress is only small now, as the first few years of the mortgage are normally mainly interest with hardly any capital paid off.

Put in simple terms...

- So far we have paid off 1.7% of the capital that we borrowed
- Interest has reduced from £19.93 per day to £19.69 per day
- We have already reduced the term by 4 months :T
- If we continue to pay the 'scheduled' overpayments we'll be mortgage free 13 years and 8 months early; just shy of my 44th birthday :beer:

clearing_out_my_pockets

Oh dear. Two months since I updated... But pleased to say that I've not fallen off the MFW bandwagon. So far we've overpaid by £994.38, which doesn't seem much but as our standard mortgage payments this year have totalled £8,500.90, it's not bad at all actually! It's 12% after all!

We're determined to do this without depriving ourselves and without stretching ourselves. This is the first time OH & I have lived together and I think that if we cut back too much we're going to end up resenting each other. As it is most of our conversations at home are about money!

clearing_out_my_pockets

So... here's our SOA.

My earnings £1,906
OH earnings £1,297
Total income £3,203

Essential Spends

Mortgage - £815
Building & contents - £17
Life / CI - £76
Union membership - £13
Train tickets - £370
Council Tax - £140
Gas / electric - £80 (soon changing to £34 as we're in credit)
Water - £21
TV / phone / broadband - £31
Mobile (me) - £30
Mobile (OH) - £35
TV licence - £12

Total - £1,640

Other spends

Mortgage OP - £85
Lovefilm - £15
Car Insurance - £20
Car Tax - £10
Car Maintenance - £20
Petrol - £35
Emergency - £50
Wedding - £140
Honeymoon - £185
Service Charge - £4
Food / entertainment - £400
Christmas - £55
Washing machine cover - £23

Total - £1,042

Total excess - £521 - £260 each

This excess is to include any decorating items we do in the house, personal spends, clothes, haircuts, etc. So there is room to tighten our belts, but we don't want to IYSWIM. We're happy to have a buffer there for if / when interest rates go up.