SeriouslySeekingtoSave strongly strides straight into slaying her mortgage!

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

My love for games never dies

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Hmm, I received an email from LoveFilms saying that they were increasing my at home limit from 1 to 2. I wonder if that is a reward or if they have had a new pricing plan and that I can now drop my monthly package cost down to a cheaper rate? Worth checking I think as I don't really get through the 1 I have at home regulary enough (playing lots of games :rotfl:) so a cheaper deal is better than more films for the same cost.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Ah they have ugraded their base package to 2 at home, unlimited for £10 a month. That is a really good deal I have to say, much better than the 'Family' package of 5 at home, 10 total a month for £17.50 a month. But I guess it's for a different market, one who might want less films, but more being able to be a home and would watch them more than once. I'm just using it to chomp through my 1001 list (more like 1,300 actually with all of the additions ;-)). At the moment I've hit the 'Ben Hur' bump - 6 hrs of non game playing time... Maybe I'll get through it this weekend...

Peonie

Hi S,
How's the mortgage going?
Peonie.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Well it’s been a while. Actually it’s been more like an ice age. However things have been moving on the MFW front even if I haven’t beenposting here. Admittedly they haven’tbeen moving as fast as they could have been and if I’d been a little moreconsistent in my Ops and a lot more disciplined in my eating food atwork and for takeaway dinners I’d be quite a bit further down the path than Iam now. But I have plans and schemes onthe horizon to reign that in.



Still, leaving all of that self-flagellation to one side I’mnot ashamed to look in the mirror and come back on here and own up to my progress.



Come September I will have been in my little place for 3years (and I STILL get a happy smile on my face when I think that it’smine). My original mortgage was for£100,000 (such a lovely round number) which consisted of one tracker mortgageof 2.5% above BoE rate for £75,000 and one fixed for two years at 3% and thenHSBCs standard variable at £25,000 (although I’m sure you can all do the maths…). Originally I only paid off my Tracker becauseI wasn’t able to transfer money from my bank to my Fixed over the Internet,however once the fixed term came to an end I was able to make easy internettransfers and I was more concerned with that portion because the rate went up abovethe 3% Tracker. I had stopped paying OPson my Tracker quite a few months before this happened as I intended to build upa pot to make a lump sum payment off as soon as I could. Unfortunately that never quite happened, Ican’t remember why exactly, I’m sure I had my reasons. Well reasons other than ‘I was a slack lazycow’ which is my usual reason for most failures of this nature. It actually wasn’t until I came back from aholiday in Thailand a few weeks ago that I actually got around to it. I meet a friend from NZ there (midway point)and we got around to talking about mortgages (as you do!) and it kickstarted meinto doing it when I got home.



So my £25,000 was showing at £23,061 (due to standardrepayments) and after a few payments over a couple of days fell right down to £9999.99 :j(I first took it down to £10,000 and had to had a payment of £0.01 to move itunder the £10k mark!). That was a lovelyfeeling . I’ll stay concentrating on that one until it’sgone and then focus on getting rid of my Tracker (which is down to £57929.81). My Variable is now actually £9989.99 as Ijust paid a further £10 off of it due to a new little incentive I’ve gotrunning.



Soo, to condense all of that in one sentence: I’ve been a bit slack but not too bad and I’mback on the straightish and narrowish to bring it down even further although Ido have one rather large change to my life which might make it bit trickier. I’ll explain more in another post as this oneis already a bit of a monster and if you look at the first two posts of mine atthe start of my diary you’ll see that I do have a slight tendency to written diarrhoea…

Speak to you all later! I’ve been catchingup on peoples diaries over the last week. It feels good to be back

Peonie

Yay, it's good to have you back. It's been so long I thought you were gone forever. And I like your long posts; keep em coming.

Well done, on your major overpayment.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Peonie wrote: »

Yay, it's good to have you back. It's been so long I thought you were gone forever.
.

It's good to be back and hopefully I won't be taking such a long hiatus again. It doesn't help my saving goals for one thing! Staying on here is good for the motivation as well as the ideas. It is a huge time hog though - I've been spending a lot of time reading peoples diaries. Lots of familiar 'faces' and lots of new ones as well.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

The biggest change in my life is the shortly to arrive addition to my household. I can't include his actual photo but met Dante (previously known as 'Tweet') the 9 month old Westie that I've just purchased off a family who were moving to new home which wouldn't allow them to keep him. £500 he cost which isn't very money saving but sooo adorable...



He is obviously going to be a bit of money burner (I've already gone on Amazon and purchased a whole lot of toys and things) but I'm totally dog mad and I think he'll enrich my life so much.

As I'm away at work for large chunks of the day I'm going to arrange a dog walker for him. Daily to start out and we'll see how it goes. Not so much for the exercise but more for the company so he's not home alone for 8+ hours a day 5 days a week. They charge approx £10 here so it's an expense that will add up. I might be able to arrange it for cheaper with a neighbour but it for now that's what I'll be paying.

My first few walks will be £8 and the lady can't come Friday so hopefully Dante won't go mad. The people I'm buying him off say that he's fine with being left but I'd still prefer to not leave him for longer than 5 hours at a stretch without some company to break up the day.

To somewhat compensate for this I have quit my gym subscription (£70 monthly) and I am also wanting to spend less money on wasted food bills ie buying breakfast/lunch/takeaway dinner (I know, I know - you've heard this one before...). Every day that I manage to avoid doing it fairly much pays for Dante's walking costs. As an added incentive, everyday that I manage to do this I am also making a £5 OP on my mortgage. I've been doing this since Monday and so far it's been £15 off

I'm not going to be expecting to be able to stick religiously to it but if I only slip up one day out of the five that will be a big help! It will also mean that my mortgage will have a steady trickle of OPs along with the oh so satisfying big lump payments!

I am also restarting my monthly spending diary (come the new month) which I will post here. I imagine that I will actually be spending a fair bit for the first little while as I am (finally) getting some proper furniture for the house. Just in time for the dog to destroy it :rotfl:

Oh I've also gotten a new job which I don't think I've posted here? Not nearly as exciting as the new addition to the family but still a step up and a new challenge.

I've got a little bit more to say to round off my catch up but I'll leave it here for now.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Ok so one further update before I’ll consider myself ‘all caught up’. As I said in my last post Ihave a new job. My last one was beginning to really go down the tubes – for one we were taken over by the Italian M*fia and simply haemorrhaged staff. I had a bit of nightmare getting out actually, my contract had a ‘you shall not work for a competitor, or client for a year’ clause. Completely unenforceable in the UK because I’m just not important enough but as we had been taken over by the M*fia no company really wanted to tangle with them. The place I am working at now had had a clash with them in the past where they had threatened to switch off their entire back end system which would have collapsed the company. Seriously bad news.

They didn’t want me to go and were using this as a big threatening stick to try to bring me in line. In my interview with our new CEO he slid into the conversation whether I would be prepared to work out another 3 months and then leave. But I stuck to my guns and was fully prepared to take them to court for loss of earnings and eventually they let me go. My ‘case’ apparently needed to be approved bythe owner of the whole company and it was a long holiday in Italy at the timeso it was kinda nerve wracking sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

My new job doesn’t pay anymore but it does have an end of year bonus which I have already benefited by (and as I hadn’t been there for the requisite 6 months at bonus time they didn’t actually need to pay me anything) to the tune of a couple of thousand. They called it a token, I thought it was a sign of appreciating their staff. I’m also getting proper training and as it’s a big global company there is a lot of room to grow. All in all I think it’s been a big improvement.

Other than that my life has almost been ‘on hold’ for a year. After the huge mess with my flat I really lost a lot of the enthusiasm which I’d had for my brand new home and although I was still happy to be living alone, it led to me not bothering to sort out alot of things I had on my to do list. I fairly much stayed in a ‘camping’ frame of mind rather than getting my place how I want it. That seems to have worn off now and my zest and zip is back! Besides I need to get everything in order for the pooch to trash

I was actually looking for places to walk said poochy and found a great area just a couple of zones away from me and on the edge of the London zone. I thought it looked marvellous and went ‘oh I wonder how much houses are in this area?’… Well, one check on Right Move later and I found a peach of a place. Two bedrooms but with a further room at the end of the garden. Much larger than my place and ‘only’ listed for £245,000. When I worked out how much of my mortgage I’ve paid off and taking into account my increased flat value (the guy above me had just sold his place and it isn’t as nice as mine and doesn’t have a garden) I worked out that I had a good chunk if I wanted to remortgage. Currently it’s not really worth remortgaging for my place especially as I plan to have it paid off in the next 4 years. So looking at everything my mortgage would rise by about £300 a month which wasn’t toooo bad…

Hah, I’m so bad! In the end though I talked sternly to myself and shelved the plan for now :A. However I haven’t discounted it entirely. If I’m correct the value of my current place will continue to rise probably at a faster pace than the surrounding areas due to Cross Rail and if I keep paying it off quickly then in a couple of years I might even be able to remortgage while keeping the place I have now, renting it, and (possibly) getting a flatmate to help with the mortgage in wherever I move to. Hmmm, schemes and dreams for now. But one thing is for sure – the more equity I have in my place, the more options I have.

Still it does make me chuckle sometimes. People on the DFW board are working like troopers to get rid of their debt, often with a goal to getting a mortgage. Then they move to the MFW boards and work to madly pay that off. And some of us try to pay off one mortgage only to pick up another even bigger one and start right back at about square -50 (as opposed to square one, because our debt is now bigger than when we started). Honestly! :rotfl:

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

On a side note - do you guys know that the word M a f i a is considered a bad word here? Hah! Classic