Edinburgher gets cracking!

edinburgher

Welcome To My Diary!

The last diary I kept on MSE was over in Debt Free Wannabe. Like so many of the posters over there, I genuinely didn't see a day when my debts would be paid off and I'd have a home to call my own. Thankfully, perseverance paid off and my wife and I have recently concluded missives for a beautiful big two bedroom flat in an area of Glasgow that's near to family and next to a good primary school.

We don't actually get the keys until the 16th of March, but I'm going to try for the earliest overpayment ever and have opened an instant access account today that will be used to stash the overpayments until they reach the minimum payment. I’m already obsessed with the overpayment calculator!

The Basics

£115,430

It looks a lot bigger in bold!

Basically this means £674 a month over 25 years (4.99% fixed for 2 years).

We had a 15% deposit and I’d hoped for slightly better, but there were a few incentives with the mortgage that make it slightly more competitive than the headline rate suggests (£250 cashback, no booking fee, free survey etc. etc.)

The mortgage is with Santander, who aren’t my favourite bank for a variety of reasons. That said, I live in hope and will try to give their mortgage arm the benefit of the doubt for now.

Overpayments

We’re allowed to overpay up to 10% of the outstanding balance each year and while I don’t see us finding a spare £11,000, there’s no harm in trying.

Santander are slightly pesky in that overpayments have to be made by cheque and for a minimum of £500.

The Plan

Every good diary needs a convoluted plan, right?

The following are the ways we hope to overpay the mortgage:

• Standard overpayment - £100/mth
• Spare Cash Lottery - I'll explain this in a later post (c. £75/mth)
• Cashback - We switch as and when required, shop around and always try to get cashback if it’s available for items that we’d buy regardless of whether of not it was offered (c. £16.67/mth)
• Zopa - £10/mth (will treat this a bit like an endowment and cash it out after 10 years or so)
• Halifax Reward - £5/mth (will try and talk my wife into switching as well so that we get two of these!)
• Credit union - £4/mth (will treat this as above – it’s a small regular payment with a typically reasonable return)
• Spare change – all 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p coins will be saved (c. £4.17/mth)
• Interest – all savings interest will be saved (c. £2.50/mth)
• 50% of any gambling wins. This makes my wife and I sound like crazy gambling addicts – we’re not – but do play the occasional game of bingo and win a tenner on the lottery maybe once a year (c. £2/mth)

Total = £219.34/mth? (9 years and 7 months off)

Target

I’ll update this as we progress, but our current target for MFD is:

September 2027

downsizer3

Welcome to the world of overpayment spreadsheets - so addictive!!!
Good luck in your quest and with the move!

jaysb

good luck - I've only become a MFW after 15 years of having a mortgage, but now plan to cut the remaining 10 years in half.

good to see you're making overpayments from the off - which will help when I suspect the rates will rise. All the best !

fishfins

Good luck! It sounds as if you've got it all worked out, and thanks for the info on santander overpayments, we are thinking of getting our new mortgage with them and I didn't know that!

linz

Good Luck Edinburgher - I love your strategy for making extra per month for not-a-lot :j

Jock_Tight

edinburgher wrote: »

Halifax Reward - £5/mth (will try and talk my wife into switching as well so that we get two of these!)

You dont need to switch to get the reward, just open the account and move £1000 in-out each month. My main current account is elsewhere, we have two reward accounts with Halifax (mine/joint) so pick up £10 a month for a couple of minutes of online banking

edinburgher

You dont need to switch to get the reward, just open the account and move £1000 in-out each month.

Thanks to everyone for the encouragement and thanks to Jock_Tight for clarifying this one. Does anyone know whether they let individuals have multiple accounts? I'd consider opening an extra one for myself *and* a joint acc, but I don't want to be thrown out of the door for taking the Mickey!

Updated my signature with some targets and figures, these are the things that make saving fun...

sweetdaisy

Spare Cash Lottery - I'm intrigued. Are you going to overpay with any lottery winnings? I am lucky to get one number on the lottery, nevermind any winnings :rotfl:.

Jock_Tight

edinburgher wrote: »

Does anyone know whether they let individuals have multiple accounts? I'd consider opening an extra one for myself *and* a joint acc, but I don't want to be thrown out of the door for taking the Mickey!

You can only have one in your name, one joint and one in the OH name......so 3 in total.

A while back you could have 3 in your own name but they changed the t&c's, probably cause so many on here were taking the Mickey

misscousinitt

Welcome aboard and good luck with your journey.

MCI

[Deleted User]

Overpayments can be done by BACs/online banking transfer but you need to phone and tell them you have have done it so they know what do with your money.... Bit of a pain but works well in practice.

All said I can't wait to leave Santander when my tie in ends as although CS is helpful the service is very very poor.

Example, going through the process for an additional £10k on the mort for solar pv last year I triple checked on the phone with them that there were no charges should I no longer require the additional borrowing as solar was in a flux then... Guess what... when I got the documentation through I would have been charged £499 had I not proceeded!!!

Example 2, increased payments to my mort to pay it off quicker and at the time again checked that I could put things back to the original term if required. Guess what, my request to go back to the original term was refused!!!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg...

Never ever had trouble with Standard Life when they did mortgages. The online service was brilliant. There is no online service for Santander mortgages in this online world!!!