would love to be mortgage free!

Peonie

Great news on the renovation progress and the overtime. I hope the bike and mortgage get sorted soon.

coldcazzie

I really need to get back into the habit of posting here. Not posting here is meaning I'm completely losing touch with my pennies! Somebody kick me please!

Remortgage date is the 29th!!! :T :T :T :T taken bleeding long enough! Can't wait to be able to make little OPs here and there

Peonie

It's good to have you back.

coldcazzie

Thanks P

I wrote a reply and then had to go see to the sprogs and when I came back it'd logged me out! :mad:

I sold some ebay items, clothing and fish tank things, so I've £14 to put towards my savings total from this week and about £6 from last week. The boy has also grown out of a bunch of clothes so I'm in the process pf finding him bigger ones (which will come out of the clothing pot) and then the funds from selling his old ones will go in the saving pot too. I think I need to start myself a challenge, to keep me motivated. I need £360 asap to book onto this IPEN course. I already have £85, will add the ebay funds to that later. Will add to my sig later on today

coldcazzie

:dance::dance:Tomorrow is the day!! :dance::dance:

Peonie

Not long to go. :T

coldcazzie

I can't wait to make my first proper overpayment!! I plan to make one next week just because I can!

coldcazzie

Just got around to checking out our account with our energy supplier. Last month I forgot to supply a meter reading, so they estimated. Usually I wouldn't have an issue with this except they get our gas usage waaaaaaay out. We use between 150-180 units per month during the winter. They estimate at 700. Last month this resulted in a £200+ bill! This month I made sure to submit a reading, and it turns out we're only £7 in debit. Tsk tsk. They also kept trying to change our DD last year until I rang them and shouted at them. It is definitely working out cheaper with this company, but I wish they'd stop trying to fix what ain't broke! Anywho, I reckon that over the summer we will be able to drop the DD slightly, and still manage to have a bit of a credit by the time it gets around to next winter.

£17.59 added to my savings pot from eBay sales, plus £50 which was a gift from a client (the one who was rushed into hosp last year... she almost died but is almost back to normal now ) towards my total. It also turns out, having checked the savings account, that I had £95.04 in there, not the £85 I thought, so that's £10 closer to my total! Savings total currently stands at: £162.63/£400 :T

coldcazzie

Sigh. Next thing in the remortgage saga... turns out the bank are sending the cashback to us within 28 days of completion, not to the solicitors. And, even though they had plenty of time to send to money by BACS they waited until the last minute and charged £25 for the priveledge of sending it by CHAPS... so we still owe them nearly £300. So fed up of this never-ending catalogue of tiny annoyances!

I've moved some money around today to make sure I can cover that, plus our first mortgage payment, and the 0% cc which we paid for the first half of the bathroom with... and worked out I had some leftover savings, so I've popped them in my savings account towards my course... which brings my savings total to: £286.41/£400 :j :j

coldcazzie

Update time.

Remortgage is done. No entirely sure how I feel about it to be honest as the whole thing has been really stressful and a complete phaff. However, the whole process only cost us about £150, and we're on a lower monthly payment and we have the option of making little OPs wherever we want now, so I guess there are positives and negatives.

I'm also a bit unsure whether remortgaging this house was the most sensible thing to do or whether we should have sold up. Not sure if I mentioned but last year our next door neighbours were evicted and the landlord's brother (and family) moved in. They are horrible. Shouting, swearing, kids have no respect for the other families who live here, they've caused some issues with a neighbour over the road who has had to call the police out 4 times since last summer... but as it's a private let they police say there's nothing they can really do about it. I'm unsure... I'm going to research it. Anyway, they're not nice to live next door to. I don't want to live in a place where I'm uncomfortable opening my blinds, or sitting in my living room on a night and *not* having the TV or music on (can hear them swearing/shouting at the kids). It is stressing me out quite a lot, and it's all come to a head over the Easter break and I had a bit of a break down about it to the manwife and we started looking at other houses near where we used to live in the hope we could find something vaguely comparable and could look into possibly porting our mortgage. I've calmed down a bit now (think some of it was hormonal!) but am still very keen to leave here asap. How the heck we're going to sell the house with them living next door I really do not know. But I guess we will cross that bridge when we come to it...

Anyway, we are no longer saving up as much as we can for a kitchen/etc. We're now saving up as much as we can for a house move/home improvements in future homes/car. I've a FD regular saver and currently am only putting £100 pcm in it atm so thought that today I would come and do this SOA I've been saying I'm doing for the past 2 months, and also have a bit of a review of the finances. It's been a bit :eek: tbh...

Last month we overspent on: petrol, garden stuff, misc (that would be the car we hired because I got fed up with crappy public transport), and food (over £500?! !!!!!!?!), as well as spending £40 on books (ARRRGGHH, hate The Book People! Why do they have such awesome stuff?!) and also £200 on tiles and stuff for the bathroom, which still isn't finished. Our cc bill was a whopping £500 over our usual budget! :eek: :eek: we've had a bit of luck, in that manwife is being paid rather a lot of overtime this month, plus we didn't make a mortgage payment at the end of March due to our remortgaging, which means we can just about swallow that bills but that needs to not happen again.

Here's our current SOA:

His wage ~£1250 (unsure until next wage slip comes through with new tax allowance etc on)
CTC: £617.41
CB: £188.40
Total: £2037.23

Bills
Mortgage: £473.29
Council Tax: £98
Life Assurance: £28.69
Alarm: £27.49
Gas/Leccy: £100
Water: £41.20
TV License: £24.25
Sky TV: £21
Internet/Phone: £24
My Mobile: £21
His Mobile: £26
Homecare 100: £15.71
Cat Insurance: £5.98
Milkman: £37.80
Park Savings: £19.33
Mag Subscription: £2

CC purchases
Food: £400 budget
Pets: £60 budget
Petrol: £120
Home/DIY/Tools: £100
Stationary/Craft/etc: £10
Garden: £5
Toiletries/Pharmaceuticals/Cleaning: £15 max

Savings
Regular Saver: £100
Bike Expenses: £40
Clothing/Shoes: £40
Gifts: £40

Other
Swimming Lessons: £97 every 10 weeks which works out as about £40 a month
Cash: £120-130 pcm (covers: bus fares, snacks at work for him, home ed groups for the sprogs - gymnastics, forest school, basement group and construction club)

We're pretty much breaking even. Which is fine when we don't overspend on food/home stuff etc. Not so fine when we mess up. As you can see, we need to get things in check. I'm really missing posting here as being on here kind of keeps me grounded and focused, and accountable. But I'm finding it so hard to find the time so I need to try harder to find a few minutes each day to do this.