Mouche’s adventures with her first mortgage (while coping with her first baby)

cha97michelle

Thought I would pop in and say hi and welcome to the boards. Interesting to see a challenge right from the start, especially when you are pregnant as babies do have a habit of disrupting the best laid plans.

I look forward to reading more, and I hope you get sorted with the landlord. Perhaps tell him where you stand legally with having keys and a contract. He might think twice if he thinks you are going to chuck the other people out.

mouche

*Isca* that's a very generous maternity package - makes me wish I'd changed jobs while I had the chance - due to being taken over and suddenly growing from a tiny to a big company, things have been less than ideal at work for a long time now and I wish I'd had the courage to jump ship sooner. I feel a bit trapped now as I guess it's unlikely a new job after maternity leave will give me the flexibility I can probably get here. Still only a month to go before maternity leave starts and who knows what will have happened in a year! I could have won the lottery by then

*michelle*, how nice to have you read my diary - you're MSE royalty! It looks like the landlord won't be returning our excess rent or the deposit - he's completely unreachable. I think the stress of it is too much for me as everything is making me very anxious during pregnancy so I've decided to leave it to my husband (the best laid plans....)

mouche

Hullo…not really much of an update to give on the OP front as I have made none.

Bad news this week
· Looks like our landlord is trying not to return our deposit and we will have to take him to small claims court to get it back.
· Valuation office has sent round a questionnaire regarding the extensions to the house we've bought - looks like the council tax band will be going up - another £20 per month to find.
· A freelance job I have been doing for months now (was supposed to take two weeks but the employer has taken ages to respond to queries – plus I was off sick for 2 months) has come back with comments requiring a level of detail I don’t have easily available. Given that I don’t have internet access at home and also I am starting maternity soon, I really do not need this level of stress. I have offered to refund their 50% payment as they are not satisfied so if they would prefer that, I will have to find £140 to return. L I have it in my ‘Me’ savings so it won’t have to come out of anything important but still…
· Spent £12 out of my personal spends - £10 on passport photos for us for new passports. Come to think of it, that isn’t a personal spend – I should claim it from the household fund!
· £2 went into a collection for a colleague who’s leaving. With 6 people leaving in 1 month, I’ve been really stingy but I would have given more for this guy if I’d had any more cash in my pocket. He’s a nice person and we’ll all miss him (and envy him – he’s moving on to a silly money job!).

Good news this week
· Bought some aftershave and EDT for OH who has been uncomplainingly doing without aftershave for weeks because I wouldn’t let him buy the latest Hugo Boss. I got them off cheapsmells so only paid £23 for CK Obsession, which he likes and £8.20 for one I thought he might like based on recommendations based on things he likes. I’m hoping it becomes his new fave coz it’s cheap!
· Got Quidco cashback tracking for them too so when that comes in (£2.02), it will get split into my pots and the OP will be made – 50p woohoo! J
· Quidco also says I will get £4.20 shortly from my purchase of a Dell battery in July so just waiting for that to hit my account.
· A total of £133.92 tracked on Quidco at the moment, which may increase as one of them tracked at 0.00 for CarpetRight. We’re thinking of getting the carpet in the master bedroom replaced as it is really ratty so we booked a home visit through Quicdco – apparently if we buy anything as a result of that, we will get £15 + 5% cashback. I’ll believe it when I see it!
· Need to buy a video camera for OHs birthday as well. It’s really less for him and more for me to take videos of baby to show him (he’ll take leave for the first month but we won’t be back in the UK till the 3rd so he’ll miss that stage). Any suggestions for a good basic handycam – I doubt we’ll be doing anything too fancy with it. Something I can use to watch on TV as well as transfer on laptop would be best.
· My tummy is now getting to the stage where it feels very stretched. Was tempted to buy some stretch mark cream but I don’t actually care if I get them (not a bikini bod even before I got pregnant!) so am being frugal and using the hoard of moisturizers that I have collected over the years. I love buying creams and lotions – I just never use them! Got OH to rub it in for me – he was complaining to his unborn child about the things mummy makes him do! J
· Going on a mini break – really wanted one with OH as I won’t see him for months once I’m back in India and I doubt we’ll get a break for just the two of us for years after baby is born. But since OH works for a hotel, we dug out his anniversary letter, which gives us free B&B for a weekend + 50% of all food and drink. So should be a relatively cheap break. Must see if I can find any other vouchers for attractions in Cambridge.

Right, have managed to jabber on endlessly despite having no real news so will finish for now!

mouche

Got the final gas and elec bill on the rental house and we only owe about £6 so that's a relief! Now waiting for the first bills on the new house to come through - we've changed providers but apparently it will take them another 3-5 weeks to set it up. Our water bills are about £11 per month higher in this house and I know the gas and elec will be as well. Plus council tax rebanding looms. Oh well, we knew it was a much bigger house when we bought it so we'll just have to grin and bear it. Wish we'd had a little time to get used to the new bills before maternity leave though - oh well. Just 4 weeks to go!

mouche

Mini break to Cambridge was lovely - wish we could have just stayed there and not had to come back! Wasn't the cheapest of trips as we went a bit mad on the eating out and buying random stuff front, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been and it's the last time OH and I are going to have a grown up holiday together for a long time. We love travelling and though we're looking forward to baby's arrival, I guess we both realised on this trip how much we're going to miss each other while I'm in India and how much we're going to miss our life together just the two of us.

On the OPing front - don't laugh at me but I've just overpaid another £1.40 . Quidco paid me £4.20, which I promptly split into 3 pots and overpaid 1/3rd to the mortgage. I know it's a bit silly but I have no penaities associated with it so why not? It makes me feel good!

On the funny side, OH has always been a more thoughtless spender than me. Last weekend he had to go into work unexpectedly on Sunday and I asked him to park the car at the station as the bus home is very infrequent on Sundays and he wasn't due home till past 11pm. When he got to the statio, he bought a car park ticket before realising the station was closed and that he'd have to get a train from a different station in the borough. He went to the other station, parked and then - he took great pleasure in telling me - carefully checked if the car park ticket on the other cars was any different from the one he already had. Apparently the station name was not on the ticket - only the borough name so he used the old one instead of buying a new one. He saved £1 Looks like all my nagging about every little helping is getting through!

Courgette

Every little helps! (I once walked into my bank with a bag of pennies to OP the mortgage. It was actually really embarrasing :rotfl:)

gratefulforhelp_2

Welcome and congratulations!

Bet you won't stop at one baby!x

poorbutrich

mouche wrote: »

On the OPing front - don't laugh at me but I've just overpaid another £1.40 .

That's brilliant! Love it! I wish my mortgage provider would let me do this! I have to save up pots of £500!

Isca

I love being able to pay off small amounts and am able to do it really easily online so no embarrassing trips to the bank! Seriously though its amazing how quickly these add up. When we were saving for our wedding a few years ago I used to transfer the amounts I had saved on my grocery shopping from multi-buys and offers to my wedding savings account. Was amazed how that added up over time. I also used to transfer the odd pennies from my bank account to my savings account, to leave nice round numbers in my account every Friday. Again this was fairly painless saving but really added up over time.

mouche

Courgette, that must have been embarrassing! But what's a little embarrassment if it helps to get the total down. Note to self: count up coins in coin jars and deposit in bank asap!

grateful, thank you - I'm looking forward to baby's arrival though am 110% sure I only want one. Then again that's what my sister said when my nephew was born and then my niece came along 2 years later!

PBR, oooh saving up £500 at a time - I'd go mad! I need to be doing something everyday or I lose focus. Still, it must give you a lot of satisfaction to see an amount like that come off - it probably makes a difference to the end date as well - which pennies do not!

Isca, every time you post you give me a new idea so thank you very much! Must do the Friday transfers of odd bits of change. Don't know if I can do the same for groceries as our budget is quite tight (did I mention my OH is a chef - he's as super-focussed on meeting his food cost targets at work but can I get him to rein it in when grocery shopping...noooooooo.) I don't think we'd meet the budget without offers and things. Still, an idea worth looking at for sure.

On the MSE front, forgot to mention that £50 worth of M&S vouchers have turned up from Sky so they have been squirrelled away. Also, it was employee appreciation week at work recently and I was given 'points'. These have been the subject of some ridicule among colleagues as there have been no wage increases and no bonuses in 3 years despite us having quarterly bonuses written into our contracts. In an increasingly grim work atmosphere, points seemed pretty pointless (sorry!) So imagine my surprise when I went to see what I could spend my points on and realised I could get £55 worth of M&S or Boots vouchers! Will be ordering those soon.

Also went through Quidco today to sign up with RAC for breakdown cover - £29.99. AA wanted to charge us £85 so ya boo to them. RAC is also giving us £5 cashback. Quidco is also giving me about 40p cashback on a landline phone I ordered for my mum. Plus they gave me a voucher knocking the price down from £39.99 to £31.99. So a pretty good day. Now off home - OH is working late so will curl up with Downton Abbey and my cross stitch. Am attempting to finish it before we go to India so it can be framed and smuggled into OHs suitcase when he goes to visit his parents. (It's his birthday gift and he's spending his birthday with his mum and dad).

Oh and just remembered, did my sums all over again and it seems I have saved more than enough to cover my maternity leave :j. In fact if I can stick to my maternity budget, there might even be a small surplus at the end of the year. That's such a relief.