Pavlovs_dog starting as she means to go on...

aliasojo

pavlovs_dog wrote: »

As payday and direct debits here all happen on the 28th, means I can really start playing about with my budgeting spreadsheet too. Who'd have thought being an MSEr could turn you into such a geek?!

I love my excel spread sheet. I've got coloured squares and everything. Some kind peeps on here told me how to make my 'in credit' squares green and the 'bad ones' red. The only time I ever have red ones is if I pay too much to things and don't really leave us enough to live on.

I'm such a sad git that I check it every morning. As if it's going to have any changes on it since the day before. :rotfl: I have no patience so I set up all my bills and d/d's to get paid on the 1st of every month.

We've still got some 0% debt to clear before we can consider going 'home' so I stare at those figures every day in the hope some other brain wave will occur and will mean I magically find another couple of grand every month. :rotfl:

I wish you many overpayments in 2012. :beer::D

CathT

I was looking forward to OP my council tax money but had such an expensive month I don't think it's spare anymore! Well done on the low grocery spends.

pavlovs_dog

alias - colours? there's posh! With a bit of help from Google I figured out how to make data from my outgoings sheet appear on my front page so I could run a summary section. Felt dead clever! Will eventually get around to adding graphs and doing something clever with the mortgage page. Still trying to figure out what I want/need.

Cath - boo for expensive months Always feels worse somehow when you'd planned what you were going to do with the free money.

just taken a gamble on a £10 deal for a local express car servicing and MOT place through KGB. £10 for an MOT (which is due in April), instead of the usual £35-40. As they are not a garage, there is no option for them to try and sell you repairs you don't need, so hopefully that will go smoothly when the time comes. Should get about 75p in quidco cashback too.

Frugaldom

Nice work with the £10 MOT!

pavlovs_dog

hello MSE'rs

sorry for neglecting you all again. life is so manically busy at the mo (writing this post is procrastination from the marking I ought to be doing )

had some new data to play around with so thought I'd share some numbers...

mortgage statement finally arrived, showing a £1800 OP for 2011. We paid £5404.15 in interest, which averages £14.81 a day (currently it is £14.40, so it is heading in the right direction however slowly). We repaid £4925.49 off of the balance, 36.5% of which was thanks to our OPs. The depressing part is that of our £711 a month mortgage payment, only about £260 actually reduces the capital, the rest is simply servicing the interest :eek:)

Grateful for help recommended a fab spreadsheet from thismuchIknow, which will calculate the affect of one off or regular OPs. According to this, we have currently shaved 7 months off of the 25 year term with our OPs. It takes £3400 to shave a year off of the term, meaning at our current ability to OP it will be July (ish) before we hit that milestone. To hit my main milestone of being MF by my 40th birthday, we need to OP £300/month, which is about double what I envisage being able to comfortably OP each month this year.

I swing from despondent at the magnitude of the task ahead to cooking up masterplans of how I can boost income, make savings etc.

only £1314 needed to cross the 1-year-saved barrier....

aliasojo

pavlovs_dog wrote: »

To hit my main milestone of being MF by my 40th birthday, we need to OP £300/month, which is about double what I envisage being able to comfortably OP each month this year.

I swing from despondent at the magnitude of the task ahead to cooking up masterplans of how I can boost income, make savings etc.

You're doing well, keep positive. :T

I know what you mean about 'swinging', I looked at my spreadsheet this morning and got really fed up that the debt total wasn't going down as quickly as I'd hoped and that we'd still be like this when we're pensioners............then I looked at the eldest...and the dog and idly wondered if I could a) sell them, b) press them into paid service of some kind. :rotfl:

Frugaldom

Stay focused, Pavlov's. If people like me can do it on less than mininimum wage, you'll manage it no problem. If you start to feel any little slips or hiccups, you can always introduce a couple of new challengs. I'll be doing my '£1 per person per day for all meals' grocry challenge for as long as it takes to renovate this place. I reckon we could spend another two full years of income, which could take rather a long time when I look at it that way. But it's home!

shala_moo

Hi Pavlovs_dog, just wanted to say hi as i've just finished reading your diary.

It's great that you're already overpaying in your first year!

Good luck with growing some veggies, this is our first yr with a decent garden so i'm very excited at growing lots of veg.. whether it's edible or not is a different matter. :rotfl:

Frugaldom - came across your £1 per person meal budget earlier, amazing.. i loved the 9p porridge idea - OH has the ready packs everyday @ 3x times the cost I am always quite shocked at how much meals cost if you figure it out..

pavlovs_dog

Hi all,

long time no post - life is what happens when you're[STRIKE] drowning in marking[/STRIKE] making other plans I guess. Will do a proper update post later on but just had a bit of a mortgage revelation that I'd like to share.

As I've posted before, when taking those first OPing steps the journey can seem very, VERY long, especially when spare money to chuck at the mortgage is limited. When we bought our house in August 2010 our mortgage was a couple coppers short of £132k. Today, almost two years later the balance stands at £123,825.25, meaning we've paid a little over £8100 off of the capital. Now when you stop and think that over £700 has left our bank account every month for the past two years, it's quite a depressing figure. But when you do the sums, 41% of what we've repaid is our humble OPs. Without that small monthly commitment, the figures would be much worse, and the road ahead that much longer.

Seeing figures like that has really reassured me that the extra money we chuck at the mortgage each month IS worth it because it IS making a difference, however small, however slowly.

Southernman

I completely understand that feeling. I've been paying (including overpayments) my mortgage for 13 months and it's only dropped by £3800. I dread to think where i would be at if i made 0 overpayments!

MSE has made me overpayment obsessed though!