Onwards to freedom!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Thanks for posting everyone, and a happy new year to you all!

2017 was another good year for us, the highlight of course being the addition of LO2 to the family :blushing: OH was on maternity leave for most of the year, but our finances appear to have held up quite nicely

Here's how things stand on the 1st January 2018:

[SIZE=2][FONT=Courier New]              CURRENTVALUE     +/-MTH      +/-QTR      +/-YOY
House Value:   [COLOR=Blue]£125,000.00[/COLOR]      £0.00       £0.00       £0.00
Pensions:       [COLOR=Blue]£78,458.66[/COLOR]  £1,994.89   £6,008.09  £17,134.61
Cash:           [COLOR=Blue]£39,576.36[/COLOR]   -£876.56  -£1,776.18  -£7,648.66
S&S:            [COLOR=Blue]£26,607.27[/COLOR]  £1,432.73   £4,067.75  £13,293.90
Car Value:      [COLOR=Blue]£14,715.00[/COLOR]   -£110.00    -£430.00   £5,815.00
Student Loan:     [COLOR=DarkRed]-£314.95[/COLOR]     £66.26     £198.84   £1,823.42
Due to HMRC:      [COLOR=DarkRed]-£513.23[/COLOR]    -£29.90     -£80.83    -£132.97
Mortgage:      [COLOR=DarkRed]-£14,140.28[/COLOR]    £764.15   £2,286.08  £11,522.44
[B]Total:         £269,388.83  £3,241.57  £10,273.75  £41,807.74[/B][/FONT][/SIZE]

89.8% of the way to 300k net worth (2020 challenge), 11.3% mortgage ltv, £51,530.12 beyond mortgage neutral in liquid assets, 18.0% financially independent.

SuperSecretSquirrel

The 10% OP allowance has been paid off the mortgage, and I'm now ready to withdraw a lump sum from PBs. It was a very nice surprise to find that I won £175 in the January draw! Pretty good start to the year! :cool:

Stooze stats as they stand - I've paid a total of £151.34 in money transfer fees, and £6.35 in interest, received £25.27 cashback, and won 10 x £25 prizes. 6 months into a 24 month experiment I'm £117.58 up.

In other news, I've started working on a new simplified personal finance spreadsheet. My existing one is an absolute beast, and it's actually quite slow to work with thanks to all the bloat. My simplified one is not quite finished, but the file size is a whopping great 50x smaller than the beast, and it's a dream to work with so far. I find it quite amusing that it's perfectly normal to mention this here! :rotfl:

edinburgher

Congratulations on your good fortune and 'the beast' made me laugh

The structure of my spreadsheet (the formulae, charts and tables) is actually pretty basic, but the amount of data in it does tend to lead to the odd spreadsheet collapse. Luckily I back up regularly. No regrets, there's nothing more illuminating (or terrifying) than collapsing down 3 years of data to look at trends :T

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hi ed, happy new year

I have quite a lot of stuff detailed at the day level at the moment, the new spreadsheet will only have monthly entries for historical data. Similarly, I have charts spanning a decade worth of data, when really I think an annual overview is all the main spreadsheet needs. I can always add little satellite/throwaway spreadsheets for specific analyses, instead of using the one monster to do everything

edinburgher

A decade? Ooh la la!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Our mortgage provider has failed to recalculate our repayments following the £1400 lump sum transfer well over a week ago. £828 has been direct debited this morning. Not that this is a problem - in fact I'm quite happy to have dropped below 10% LTV as a result, and another brick in the spreadsheet house can be coloured in a few days earlier than expected

Once it's fully paid off, I think I'll be cancelling the direct debit mandate. I wouldn't be surprised if they were to try taking more of our money after we've settled in full!

Betterthanever

Just catching up - that net worth update looks pretty darned good!


And hurrah for another brick being coloured in. I LOVE colouring in bricks. Again, only something that you can easily mention on MSE without crazy looks and people running for the hills!!!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Thanks Betterthanever Lots more colouring in to be done soon, and hopefully much smaller numbers in the red section of the February net worth update

I've realised that the mortgage provider's failure to reduce our monthly repayment amount should save us about £23 in ERCs - I guess that means the inevitable celebratory curry takeout will be on them then :beer:

NorthernMonkey1

Not sure If I've asked this before, but why do you keep such a high proportion of your savings as cash?

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hi NM, we've always been happy to hold cash provided we can at least match inflation - which we have managed so far. I am currently reducing our cash balance in favour of equities, but it's a slow process as I'm wary of making large lump sum S&S purchases, much prefer a slow monthly drip feed. Of course a good chunk of cash has been sat there waiting to be paid off the mortgage balance... Also, we quite like to have uncomplicated easy access cash on hand in case we might need some at short notice