Onwards to freedom!

Karmacat

Sounds like progress for you, SSS, and nerdery isn't for everyone

Your reply about code panicked me and then I actually read it, and I was shocked that I actually understood it :j I've done the quoting and looking at the code etc on another tab, I'll work on it. I already tweaked my own spreadsheet listing savings and investments, so that each type is grouped together, its already easier to visualise and understand whats going on. More later.

Sorry you're back at work tho!

edinburgher

We've done spend tracking since February 2015, it provides a good degree of confidence that your assumptions are fairly close to the mark

SuperSecretSquirrel

We're sticking to the household spend tracking so far I decided to do a mid month sum up to save having to deal with it all in one lump at the end of the month. Quite interesting (and maybe slightly alarming) so far, but it has already become clear that we'll need a full year's worth of data to get the really useful stats out of it.

I must admit, it's a bit of a hassle breaking apart supermarket receipts into categorised spends. It would be much easier to have a "supermarket" budget category and simply key in each receipt total and be done with it - but I think we buy such varied items from the supermarkets that splitting out into groceries, cleaning/toiletries, gifts, household/garden, etc, is necessary. I think I'll be consciously arranging my items into categorised groups on the checkout conveyor to make life a little easier in future

Regards the mortgage, we have now dropped below £3 in daily interest (£2.91 to be exact)

And in other financial news, my fixed cash ISA matures in less than two weeks... I'm looking forward to an almighty money shuffle as a result

Soon after, my regular savers will start maturing, and I'll need to decide if it's worth opening new issues or not. I'd like to cut down the number of accounts I hold, but with rates dropping on current accounts, and traditional savings accounts offering abysmal rates, I think I might be forced into opening more regular savers

edinburgher

The rate is only 2.2%, but the new NS&I bond has now opened, that might be a home for £6k vs. regular savers?

I find that I record groceries/groceries (toiletries)/medicine/postage as individual categories, but they all come off the groceries line of the budget. Good to know, but probably doesn't matter unless you're trying to cut down.

SuperSecretSquirrel

Thanks ed. I had originally dismissed the idea of the NS&I bond, but the rate doesn't look all that bad now. Will mull it over.

I've decided to continue splitting out categories when spend tracking for now, but if it gets a bit too tedious I may decide to merge some of them together later on.

MFiT4 update #5 is here

SuperSecretSquirrel

Had some fun money-shuffling this morning... And it ain't over yet!

My fixed ISA doesn't mature until the 2nd May, not sure why as it's a 2 year fixed deal that started mid April... Anyway, buying premium bonds early in the month is the worst possible scenario as they need to be held for a full calendar month before they are entered into their first draw. Buying them today is the best possible option. Cue much scrabbling around and emptying of easy access accounts to buy bonds! I will pay all these interest paying accounts back on Tuesday when I get my hands on the ISA cash. Seemed the best course of action as I had no interest paying temporary homes for most of the ISA money for the month of May, so that chunk of cash would have been earning 0% if I hadn't done this.

The bonds are a temporary measure. I'm hoping that we'll see some wins before I cash them in to pay off the mortgage and stooze cards in 2018.

I've also paid £1,200 off my student loan. The outstanding loan is now down to triple figures I intend to switch from PAYE to DD repayments soon - this should see it fully paid off in about 12 months time, and with a bit of luck should mean I don't end up overpaying by much (if at all). Don't want to be in a positive SLC balance situation waiting for over a year for my refund and account closure (PAYE deductions still being taken all the while and near 0% interest paid on the refund).

People may think I'm bonkers overpaying a 1.25% debt, but it would cost me more in ERCs to OP the mortgage instead, we have no other debts, and the alternative of premium bonds has a lower average return of 1.15%. It kinda makes sense. There's the NS&I 2.2% on offer, but we can still go for this in addition to PB's and SLC OPs, so no missed opportunity there.

Regardless of logic, I absolutely love the feeling of a triple digit student loan. I am so happy that this debt will be gone in its entirety soon

Last day of April today. This means I should have our total spending figure for the month later today - after some planned purchases have been made. Should be around £2,300 all in, which is about right based on estimated annual spend of £28,800 - but not all months are created equal, so we'll have some truly useful figures at the end of March 2018

1st of May tomorrow, the net worth update won't be pretty as I think the S&S ISA and pensions have taken a fair beating. I figure it's only right after all the recent gains Looking forward to recording the numbers and adding more data points to my charts regardless.

Spent a little time reviewing the charts with OH last night... She thinks I'm mad charting this stuff, but she also liked seeing our financial world clearly illustrated, so I'll take that as a positive :rotfl:

SuperSecretSquirrel

In April we spent:
£1285.60 on bills (running our home and two cars)
£291.91 on weekly shops (food, cleaning products, toiletries, nappies, etc)
£720.37 on everything else (gifts, household, garden, takeaways, dining out, days out, clothes, dentist, medicines, etc)

The bills figure includes our £828.48pm accelerated mortgage repayment, and the everything else figure includes replacing our beyond repair washing machine which finally gave up the ghost!

It's a bit of a hassle recording the spends, but I think it's worth it to get our hands on the data

SuperSecretSquirrel

[SIZE=2][FONT=Courier New]               CURRENTVALUE       +/-MTH       +/-QTR
House Value:    [COLOR=Blue]£125,000.00[/COLOR]        £0.00        £0.00
Cash:            [COLOR=Blue]£43,149.89[/COLOR]   -£1,519.61   -£1,825.64
Pensions:        [COLOR=Blue]£66,839.43[/COLOR]      -£84.35    £4,315.59
Car Value:       [COLOR=Blue]£15,970.00[/COLOR]     -£195.00     -£755.00
S&S:             [COLOR=Blue]£17,094.66[/COLOR]      £790.27    £3,039.57
Mortgage:       [COLOR=DarkRed]-£20,167.44[/COLOR]      £740.10    £2,270.77
Due to HMRC:       [COLOR=DarkRed]-£535.90[/COLOR]      -£47.30     -£107.04
Student Loan:      [COLOR=DarkRed]-£725.03[/COLOR]    £1,270.51    £1,341.40
[B]Total:          £246,625.61      £954.62    £8,279.65[/B][/FONT][/SIZE]

82.2% of the way to 300k net worth (2020 challenge), 16.1% mortgage ltv, £39,541.21 beyond mortgage neutral in liquid assets, 14.7% financially independent.
__________________________________________________

Not the best month, but they can't all be!

I'm really pleased with my tiny student loan balance Net worth total crept up by nearly £1k, mortgage ltv down a bit, a tiny backwards step in MN+ value, and a tiny step forward in terms of financial independence. Not too bad

Looking at the quarterly comparison, we really have nothing to complain about!

SuperSecretSquirrel

As of today, our mortgage balance is below the 20k mark

£19,365.19 :j

Moneyfordreams

amazing... :T:T