Sweetdaisy's aim to be mortgage-free

sweetdaisy

Received a long awaited diagnosis of a medical condition that DS2 was born with which causes swelling to his lower limbs. Hopefully now we will have some services in place for him.

It's not very MSE but today I booked a 5 day holiday at Haven caravan park for August . It was quite expensive as it is during the summer half-term and prices are scandelous :mad:, but as I am not keen on pulling DS1 out of school during term-time to go on holiday, it's our only option.

We last went on holiday in 2010 when DS1 was 2 years old, so really looking forward to a break as a family. DS1 is going to love it and as DS2 will be just over 1 years old and possibly toddling by then, he'll be into everything too.

On the MFW side of things:-
So far this month I have made an overpayment of £60 - which was money earned from surveys. Using my new spreadsheet I am on target to repay mortgage by June 2024. Really need to reduce this, but am getting there slowly and enjoying the feeling of reducing the amount of interest we are repaying to the bank .

CathT

Sorry to hear this but hopefully now you have a diagnosis you can manage it better. Compression stockings/bandaging are really effective. Have they discussed any medication (diuretics?)

Your Devon holiday sounds fab, we went last year and despite a week of rain fell in love with the place and will definitely be returning.

sweetdaisy

CathT wrote: »

Your Devon holiday sounds fab, we went last year and despite a week of rain fell in love with the place and will definitely be returning.

Hi Cath.

Diuretics are not an option as this can cause long term problems, but hopefully we can look into bandaging/compression.

Really looking forward to our holiday. So now have an incentive to lose a little more baby weight and tone up, however as my bikini days are well and truly over - it's now a one piece swimsuit :rotfl:.

Southernman

sweetdaisy wrote: »

On the MFW side of things:-
So far this month I have made an overpayment of £60 - which was money earned from surveys. Using my new spreadsheet I am on target to repay mortgage by June 2024. Really need to reduce this, but am getting there slowly and enjoying the feeling of reducing the amount of interest we are repaying to the bank .

Do you use a particular website?? I've been using surveynetwork but more often than not i'm not suitable for the surveys.

sweetdaisy

Southernman wrote: »

Do you use a particular website?? I've been using surveynetwork but more often than not i'm not suitable for the surveys.

I am a member of lots of survey sites, some I have been with for years. I don't have time to do all of them so do around 3-5 each day from different companies. For example, last night I had 35 emails offering surveys, but you will get screened out for a few. This means that I reach the payment thresholds at different times, so can cashout regularly.

I am also a member of surveynetwork, but have given up with them as I seem to get screened out a lot for their surveys.

These are the sites that I regularly use:
Global Test Market, Ipsos, Valued Opinions, Onepoll, YouGov, MySurvey, Crowdology, Mindmover, OpinionBar, Rewarded Opinions, NewVistaLive, Opinium Research, Vivatic, Toluna and Pinecone (got to get invited to join by them).

Think that's it from the top of my head! Hope this helps.

CathT

The Newvista surveys on TCB are pretty good aswell. They pay 70p a survey and pay out reliably.

sweetdaisy

CathT wrote: »

The Newvista surveys on TCB are pretty good aswell. They pay 70p a survey and pay out reliably.

I agree however, if you do them through 'Vivatic' they pay you £1 for doing the same ones! . Every penny helps . . .

sweetdaisy

Had an expensive last couple of days . Car was serviced and passed MOT on Saturday. The bad news is the garage (that our mechanic sent the car to for the MOT test) must have done something to the brake callipar which meant after driving the car on Sunday resulted in a red hot wheel/brakes and burning smell coming from the wheel! So had to have a new brake callipar and pads today, so total cost spent on car is £235 :mad:.

At add to that, today we were told in work that there is a deficit in our company pension, so we are having to pay an additional 4% contribution, even though we had a 4% contribution increase last year because of a deficit. My pension contributions are going to increase by £60 approx a month and will now be paying almost £300 a month for my pension.

I wish I understood pensions more, so that I could figure out what is best to do - but it's such a mindfield.

sweetdaisy

Renewed both mine and DH's Car Tax today for a year, so that set us back £150.

Received a letter from Natwest today regarding our offset mortgage. Our facility has been reduced, therefore our payments have reduced by £4 a month! As I have rounded up monthly mortgage payments to £700 a month, I am automatically overpaying by £57 a month and anything more is a bonus.

On the pension side of things, there is an option at work to come out of my Final Salary Pension (1/60th) and go onto a Defined Benefit pension scheme. I currently pay 8.9% pension and the company matches this, however with the Defined Benefit I have to state how much of a % I want to pay and the company will match up to 6%, so I am waiting for some calculations to be worked out for me, so that I can consider what is best to do.

sweetdaisy

So far this month I have made an overpayment of £127 on the mortgage . I am continuing to underspend by around £15-£20 a week from our food shop and half of any underspend is put into savings and the other half is overpaid on the mortgage. I use the same principle for money earned through surveys etc, so it's nice to see the savings balance increase and the mortgage balance decrease!

I am no longer keeping a Spending Diary for general day-to-day spends. I did this for 3 months and it was good to track where our money is being spent, but as I have changed our spending habits and now very rarely buy on impulse, the Spending Diary has served it's purpose .

Spent the day completing a job application for DH and updating his CV. Even though he is set to be made redundant in a few months and will get redundancy money, a local company is hiring so it's an opportunity not to be wasted. I would rather that he secures a job now than have redundancy money and not be able to find a job and then have to dip into savings to keep thing ticking over.