Quest To Pay Off My 150K Mortgage in 3 Yrs!

silvercar

Don't usually pop onto this board but recognised your name from other boards.

I think you've done really well to get where you are and admire your decision to maintain a sensible work/ life balance rather than get obsessed with the £ £ £ signs.

Did you know that your limited company could make you redundant, enabling it to pay you upto £30k tax free as a redundancy payment.

Sympathies to you on the tax side, I know it really hurts paying your own money as tax. A year ago I got stung for a years tax and a first advance payment for the following year - really painful.

bigstevex

Did i read right that you'll be earning £4000 a week?? Whats you job, I want one!!

Dithering_Dad

bigstevex wrote: »

Did i read right that you'll be earning £4000 a week?? Whats you job, I want one!!

I don't normally earn that much money, I got it because my mate told me what they would pay (he's working there already) and how desperate they were (it was a disaster last year). The daily rate is £800, whereas my usual daily rate is anything from £450 to £600. I'm a freelance SAP HR and Payroll Consultant and it's still booming at the moment - though a lot of the jobs are in Europe, but that's fine because they usually want English speakers.

Here is a quick search on jobserve: http://www.jobserve.com/JobListing.aspx?shid=5B5C91BBEF0F18DB

There are 15 pages of (contract) jobs, but a lot of them will be duplicates of the same job but from different agencies.

I have found that the oil companies pay the most and the banks pay the least as far as contracts are concerned.

As Silver Car said above, it's so easy to 'chase the money' and stay contracting, but I only ever wanted to do it until I had made up the shortfall in my missus salary (she was a teacher and had to give up her job to take care of our disabled daughter). I wanted to pay off our mortgage so that we had a decent income off my salary without sacrificing our current standard of living.

With managing to get such a well paid permie job and having reduced our mortgage down by a third, we're now back into our comfort zone and so I'm able to give up contracting.

Dithering_Dad

Quick explanation...

I have been accused of bragging by certain forum members - I have given details of my contracts in this MFW blog and details of my pension pot (currently standing at £83k) on the Pensions board. To those people, I would say the following...

I didn't see you complaining back in Feb 2007 when I was a Debt Free Wannabe (DFW) and paying down debts of over £14k when we were struggling to adjust to a single income after my wife had to give up teaching to care for our daughter (I would challenge anyone to lose an income of £24k and not get knocked sideways). I put more financial details in my DFW blog than I ever have since, yet no one moaned. Strange how some people are happy as long as you are doin badly, yet are the first to complain if you start doing well.

I got out of that debt by working a massive amount of overtime (I was lucky because the company I worked for was putting in a new IT system and wanted it done ASAP) which sometimes meant putting in 14hr days. I also had a bar job at the weekends.

Once my debts were paid off, I decided to take a risk and go contracting - I couldn't keep doing that sort of overtime forever and decided our best option was to blitz the mortgage, reducing our outgoings down to a comfortable level.

I've been contracting for about 2 years now and have paid off £45k of mortgage debt in that time. I kept a blog in order to keep me motivated and because I thought other people might find it interesting. As I was sometimes making overpayments to the tune of £4k, I obviously had to let people know my income. If certain people have a problem with what I earn, how well I am doing and how happy I am to be getting my work/life balance back, then I would advise them not to read my blog.

Jonbvn

Dithering_Dad wrote: »

I have found that the oil companies pay the most....

I can verify this, having worked for one for the last 2.5 years on contract (although in a different job).

DD, I admire your ability to walk away from such a lucrative job. I know I couldn't do the same ATM. However, it is important for everyone to put life into perspective and realise it is not just about the money.

On a less serious note:
Q: What's the difference between contract and permie?........
A: 3 weeks!;)

Dithering_Dad

Jonbvn wrote: »

I can verify this, having worked for one for the last 2.5 years on contract (although in a different job).

DD, I admire your ability to walk away from such a lucrative job. I know I couldn't do the same ATM. However, it is important for everyone to put life into perspective and realise it is not just about the money.

On a less serious note:
Q: What's the difference between contract and permie?........
A: 3 weeks!;)

Thanks Jonbvn, though as we've never really seen the benefit of all that contract money (except in the reduction of our mortgage payments and some renovations to the house), we probably won't miss it

From Day 1 of contracting, I knew I would only do it as long as I had to and so we kept our lifestyle at the same level as the one we had pre-contracting (except for a couple of extra holidays) mainly to make sure that we paid as much off the mortgage as possible but also to make sure that we didn't get used to that sort of income.

I have to say, I can't wait to have a normal 'Joe job' again, where I do my 7.5 hrs and then go home and forget about it until I start work the next day. No more hotel rooms and studio apartments for me

setmefree2

Hey DD don't worry about it. Look back at the old Funky Gibbons thread. He had the same accusations flung at him...

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=87149&highlight=funky+gibbons

He was attacked - yet I find this thread inspirational.

Look at the 4th post by mean machine ""Overpay like me because I'm rolling in it, and you'll be able to do what I've done. Genius"


The same old arguments just keep popping up over and over again I suppose

Dithering_Dad

setmefree2 wrote: »

Hey DD don't worry about it. Look back at the old Funky Gibbons thread. He had the same accusations flung at him...

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=87149&highlight=funky+gibbons

He was attacked - yet I find this thread inspirational.

Look at the 4th post by mean machine ""Overpay like me because I'm rolling in it, and you'll be able to do what I've done. Genius"


The same old arguments just keep popping up over and over again I suppose

HI SMF2, I remember that comment - The FG thread was also an inspiration to me too. I recall that he was made redundant after he cleared his mortgage and it gave him and his family plenty of breathing space for him to get another job. To me, that's what being Mortgage Free is all about.

I know you frequent the HPC forum the same as me. There seems to be an awful lot of people in there who are content to sit back and moan about the income of others, when they're not moaning about asylum seekers, Buy To Let landlords and the thousand other things they gripe about. As I often say in there, if they put as much effort into improving their circumstances as they put into moaning they'd be millionaires by now. Still, it's much easier to sit around moaning and expecting things to be handed to you on a plate isn't it?

setmefree2

Given that they follow you around I don't want to say too much

However, I always think that if you are doing the best you can for your family, then you probably aren't going far wrong...

angelavdavis

Hi DD,

Just wanted to check in and add my support to you.

As you know, although our personal circumstances are very different, our solutions were similar. I also abandoned my permi job (which luckily I was starting to hate) in favour for a contract to treble my income in order to pay off initially MBA course debt then later overpay the mortgage. I would still be doing this had I not met my husband in the meantime and been fortunate enough to have his bachelor pad to sell to clear the mortgage completely.

I think you should ignore these short sighted individuals. You and I took a risk, and it is paying off. In my case, I have recently been laid off from my contract and I am not anticipating another coming along until the next financial year nears (market is picking up now). Had this happened 12 months ago, I would have been in a fix. Luckily, it worked out for me and having no mortgage payment means that OH and I can easily live on OH's salary alone.

A few years ago when I worked in Public Sector while doing my MBA, some of the other IT types really begrudged any contractors that came on board. When the whinging got too much, I would often pull them up about it "OK, what is stopping you doing it and earning all that money if you begrudge them so much?" The reality is that half of them couldn't have cut it freelance and the other half are too tied to their final salary pension schemes! Contracting wasn't an easy option for me - like yourself - I have worked on contracts that meant being away from home 4 nights a week or travelling (in one case) 12 hour round trip for a 1 hour meeting.

Like you, I have not lived it up, and still live the same type of lifestyle I did when I was a DFW with the occasional treat that I know we can afford now. No flash car in the driveway but the debt and mortgage are gone now!

I have found, through my personal situation, that it is only short-sighted jealousy that makes individuals react in this way.

I am a big believer in no risk no gain. Hold your head up high DD and know that at the end of it, it will all be worth it.