Our MF way of life starts today.

babybakey

Hi everyone
Well after a good talk with my husband last night were going to see just how quick we can give this mortgage paid off. im goign to ring the bank today and get the payment upped as we pay by standing order were going to shorten the term to start with and see how we go we have things which need doing round the house. one being the kitchen floor so i can get another inspection from the environmental health round again to inspect me and do a certificate this time. that way i open up more earning potential for me as once i have a certificate i can start farmers markets.

i will start using this as our diary thread if i do this maybe i will actually stick to it ,. im very flighty and change my interests like the wind so sticking to something will help i think.
I worked it out last night if we could over pay by £400 a month we could reduce the 27yrs left to just 11 !!!!! OMG i am so up for that ! plu si was talking to a good friend of mine who works in banking in london last night he seems to have been led to belive the interest rates will take the next 10yrs to even get up to 3% again. so weve said we will have to make the most of this and work our bums off we could get rid of the mortgage whilst the rates are low. we were paying 6.5% up until the fixed rate ended in July 2010 .

ive challenged hubby to start saving money already and were pinning all reciepts to the firdge now to see where the money goes which helps as im not likely to want a reciept saying " shelly was greedy today and ate £10 worth of junk and chocolate" so it will hopefully help me loose weight too
Im going to start getting strict on the kids with food , no sweets every day , no saying they dont like cereal to get a new box they can finish the first and no wasting food. i can probably save over £100 a month on food if im clever . we currently spend around £600 a month for the 5 of us. what with takeaways , eating out and food shopping , the takeaways are going as are the eating out weve been lazy for far too long now.

im planning on kitting the kids out at the car bootsale this year then as they grow selling each lot to buy the next. im getting a pile of stuff ready to ebay as i type . im determined to make the money we need every month.

I make cakes for a living so im going to start doing a monthly promo of some sort to get the sales , plus im on the PTA's favourite list for doing their fetes and events so i usually earn around £80 a time then profit which is fab.
ive got a wedding fair to do next weekend and im planning on a huge offer to try and get the bookings coming in . if i could get 3 weddings booked a month or 2 and a celebration cake or two ill hit the £400 easily.

im scrapping the idea of sending our 2yr old to preschool early in september he can wait until his free sessions in Jan which will save us £36 a week . i already have the baby at home so its no trouble.

were cancelling sky , i got a good offer on their broadband yesterday but im going to cancel the TV as were going to invest in a freesat+ HD box so its free all the time then , £200 to start with will save us the £16.50 we pay for TV each month. we only watch usual channels plus about 3 others anyway. ill miss living but ill have to start downloading them instead .

im trying to think of other things we could activly do each moneth but i cant think. anyone got anything they do every month? im going to start putting all the money left in the accounts the day before pay day into the isa we keep saying we will but never do then it wittles away each month.

we do have a £2500 over draft which we pay £1 a day on whilst in it , we brought a car and it was a deathtrap so were waiting to get the cash back from the courts for that and then have said we will wait before getting a new one and stick the cash on the over draft so were not paying 365 a year to have it. just use it when we need a car. which we do really if im to try and earn more.

i dont have much more free time with the business and the kids but if anyone can think of anything else i can do to save id appriciate it.

Shelly

Day one on our mortgage free challenge , would love to do it in 11yrs but will be happy to just get it shorter by 10yrs .

babybakey

ooh forgot to say ive also decided to stop using the ironing lady which saves me £28 a fortnight and hubbys stopped having his magazines for his games thingy which saves £10 a month :-)

rlc22

Hi Shelly,

It sounds like you've made a good start at thinking about how you can cut back. I decided yesterday that I want to be part of the MFW brigade, but I'm still in the process of deciding what I can go without (sadly I don't think we could get rid of Sky in our house, so good on you there!).

Do you use Quidco or other cashback sites for your online shopping? I find that the money I get from that adds up quite nicely along the way and I'm planning on putting all that "extra" money into my OP pot.

Also, I've been doing Onepoll surveys (there are lots of other companies out there too). It takes a while to build up the cash as you only get around 10p a time, but every little helps as they say!

Good luck with your overpaying - I lose interest in things quickly too so I can definitely sympathise with you there.

Rach x

LilacPixie

mmwwwahahahahahahahahahahaha

Another victim to join our addictive little club

Good Luck Shell.. Just remember every little count, look after the pennies and the pound look after themselves.

alex_p

Good luck!

babybakey

rlc22 wrote: »

Hi Shelly,

It sounds like you've made a good start at thinking about how you can cut back. I decided yesterday that I want to be part of the MFW brigade, but I'm still in the process of deciding what I can go without (sadly I don't think we could get rid of Sky in our house, so good on you there!).

Do you use Quidco or other cashback sites for your online shopping? I find that the money I get from that adds up quite nicely along the way and I'm planning on putting all that "extra" money into my OP pot.

Also, I've been doing Onepoll surveys (there are lots of other companies out there too). It takes a while to build up the cash as you only get around 10p a time, but every little helps as they say!

Good luck with your overpaying - I lose interest in things quickly too so I can definitely sympathise with you there.

Rach x

I did try a few surveys but i dont get much downtime to do them so i doubt ill do them often.. I am registered with quidco but i find it confusing ive had friends say you need to delete something on your PC so you get the money or it doesnt recognise youve gone through quidco ??? is that true ?

do you watch all your sky channels? as the freesat boxes are ace the + bit is like sky plus so you get to record the tv its got all the hd channels for free and they have more than freeview i think. ive saved the links for watching living stuff online and when ive figured it out how to do it on the new T we can do the internet through it and download those programmes to the big tv. :T the box is only £189 in currys at the moemnt so well worth it.

babybakey

LilacPixie wrote: »

mmwwwahahahahahahahahahahaha

Another victim to join our addictive little club

Good Luck Shell.. Just remember every little count, look after the pennies and the pound look after themselves.

:D well you all seemed so lovely i thought it must be a good idea. my husband did say last night i seem a little addicted already i was typing in loads of different ammounts to the overpayment calculator even to the point where i shreiked when i discovered that i didnt need to pay the £500 a mth extra to get 10yrs like id found i could just pay £400 and it does it in 11yrs so £100 less gets you just one year shorter from it and will be easier to achieve. its funny how some ammounts effect the term loads and others not much , if you have a good play its really cool seeing it change

i think the deciding thing was when i typed in paying off £400 extra a mth and you look down at the ammounts per year left to pay and when the OP list ends you look next to it at where youll be if you left your payments and we'd still have half our original ammount left to pay over £50k !!!!! even then my hubbys eyes lit up. im goign to start giving him examples in playstation games lol its what he will understand. " look Dave we will save enough to fund over 30k PS3 games !!!! " haha :rotfl:

rlc22

babybakey wrote: »

I did try a few surveys but i dont get much downtime to do them so i doubt ill do them often.. I am registered with quidco but i find it confusing ive had friends say you need to delete something on your PC so you get the money or it doesnt recognise youve gone through quidco ??? is that true ?

The advice they've given you is to clear your cookies before clicking through from Quidco. I don't tend to do this, although I do make sure that the Quidco link is the last one that I click on before spending my money. I have pretty much everything track...

babybakey wrote: »

do you watch all your sky channels? as the freesat boxes are ace the + bit is like sky plus so you get to record the tv its got all the hd channels for free and they have more than freeview i think. ive saved the links for watching living stuff online and when ive figured it out how to do it on the new T we can do the internet through it and download those programmes to the big tv. :T the box is only £189 in currys at the moemnt so well worth it.

I don't watch a huge amount of TV but DH does and typically it's the channels that are on Sky. I'll look at the Freesat thing though and put the proposal to him...

Unfortunately I can't get Virgin media where I am or I'd switch to that as I get a really good deal through my work. Oh well, will give me more incentive to pay off some of my mortgage so I can more house then!

black_taxi_2

babybakey---just a quick point

great you have made a plan to be MF

but maybe you can ask to shorten term by £200 a month---and o/p by £200 a month

there our times when unexpected bills or difficult months--annual bills

doing it this way you can still pay £400 a month but if one month your struggling you can withhold o/p for that month.

if you have done it already its ok---you seem to be good at budgeting

SmlSave

Welcome to MFW Shelly

babybakey

black_taxi wrote: »

babybakey---just a quick point

great you have made a plan to be MF

but maybe you can ask to shorten term by £200 a month---and o/p by £200 a month

there our times when unexpected bills or difficult months--annual bills

doing it this way you can still pay £400 a month but if one month your struggling you can withhold o/p for that month.

if you have done it already its ok---you seem to be good at budgeting

hiya , yes thats what we'd thought of doing as we wanted to safeguard against the interest rate rises too. were going to shorten the mortgage to add £200 on and the rest will go in the isa and then we will either transfer over or shorten the term after the year so it uses the cash. whichever is cheaper for us.