Onwards to freedom!

tootoo

you're doing great sss!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Thanks tootoo

A very welcome payday contribution from OH yesterday, another £200 off the balance!

If we keep this up we should manage the mini target of 65k or less by year end

Yorkielass

Just had a quick read through your diary SSS and sounds amazing. I've just started overpaying but only by a small amount and can see us going down the increasing the monthly dd again quite quickly - this is going to get addictive!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hi Yorkielass, it does get addictive... Reading back over my diary (and it's not been going that long really, just one year!) a lot has changed. The plan has gone from overpaying a steady £250 extra by direct debit and letting the mortgage take care of itself, to slashing the term by a massive 13 years and aiming to overpay £499.99 every month from extra freelance work, with the optimistic dream of mortgage neutral in just a couple of years time! :eek:

Things are going to change again soon, this next couple of years is going to be a real rollercoaster for us, but I'm very much looking forward to the challenge

MFiT3 update for September 2013 - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=63108554&postcount=737

£68k outstanding (after tomorrow's extra OP, all thanks to my love of round numbers!)

edinburgher

£68k outstanding (after tomorrow's extra OP, all thanks to my love of round numbers!)

I think we all have that

Yorkielass

SuperSecretSquirrel wrote: »

Hi Yorkielass, it does get addictive... Reading back over my diary (and it's not been going that long really, just one year!) a lot has changed. The plan has gone from overpaying a steady £250 extra by direct debit and letting the mortgage take care of itself, to slashing the term by a massive 13 years and aiming to overpay £499.99 every month from extra freelance work, with the optimistic dream of mortgage neutral in just a couple of years time! :eek:

That's fantastic. We've just upped our direct debit again so we'll now be overpaying nearly £650 extra a month. On paper we should be able to do that without too many problems, time will tell. We've got 9 years left on our fixed rate and we'll be just under 40 then. The difference between the amount of mortgage we'd have left if we didn't overpay anything compared with how much we'll have left if we do overpay £650 a month is amazing, I love reading how everyone else is doing, keeps me motivated.

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hi edinburgher :wave: It's a great obsession to have, and I know from lurking on many MFW diaries that there's plenty of us on here

Yorkielass, you are off to an amazing start! Your post and diary has inspired me to look into the past years figures in more detail...

If we had just stuck to the standard repayments, in the year this diary has been going we would have paid the mortgage company £6,279.96. Provided this month goes to plan (a £499.99 op this week, and a further £350 at the end of the month) we'll have actually paid £19,225.44! That is a staggering amount of money, overpaid by £12,945.48 in one year! This is the first time I've actually added it all up, and I am very impressed

If we had just stuck to the standard repayments, at the end of this month our mortgage balance would have been £80,392.20. Thanks to OPs, it should actually end up being £67,326.79. That's £13,065.41 lower! I'm very happy to know we won't be paying interest on that extra £13,065.41 I'm especially happy considering the original term would still have nearly 22 years left to run, and at 5.29% that's a lot of interest to pay - £27,545.23 if my calculations are correct :eek: Take from that the overpaid amount (which would have earned next to nothing in a savings account), and it appears we are already £14,599.75 better off.

All this, after just one year!

tinkerbel

Wow SSS when you put the numbers like that it is even more impressive and inspiring!! Well done! I hope you can keep it up! Well done for getting interest below £10/day! How much do you have to pay off to bring it down to say 9.50?
Keep going and please keep sharing your story! I haven't got a mortgage as in just saving for a deposit but Looking at your interest figures I don't even want a mortgage! So expensive! Will haut try to get the biggest deposit possible then see where we are from there!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hi tinkerbel, it's nice to see that you are still reading along

The £9.50 daily interest aim (the newspaper holiday a day challenge lol):

• If from this point on we were back on the minimum £523.33 a month and made no OPs, it would take until 10th August 2014.
• Now we have reduced the term and our standard payment is £828.48, with no OPs it would take until 10th February 2014.
• My target for £9.50 thanks to reduced term AND OPs is 10th November 2013

Should take us less than two months, but without trying to pay down the mortgage ahead of original schedule it would be almost a year. Massive difference!

I doubt we'll be able to keep this pace up forever (I'll explain a bit more about why soon), but while the getting is good it makes sense to do as much as possible!

PS - I've been looking and you don't seem to have a diary of your own. It would be great to follow your progress saving your deposit etc. I tend to find good tips in all kinds of places, there's no need to be in the same situation as the posters (like you I used to browse this forum waaay before we had a mortgage) so I would definitely read along! In fact there are a few mortgage free wannabe wannabe diaries on here already, so you wouldn't be the only one

SuperSecretSquirrel

I've just OPd an extra £499.99 today, that takes September's total mortgage payments up to a massive £2072.64 :eek:

The reason why this pace won't continue forever... We're fortunate to both work full time, and I also do a fair amount of freelance work. In a few months time, we'll just have the one wage coming in, and I will choose not to spend my free time on freelance stuff, I'll have better things to spend my time on We're having a baby

Between spending on baby things (we're not planning on going mad), statutory maternity pay, no freelancing, etc, there's going to be nowhere near the amount of money sloshing around here as we're used to! I'm planning to keep up the OPs between now and baby arriving, get the mortgage as low as possible while the getting's good, then when our bundle of joy arrives ease right back, re-assess things a bit, wait until we settle into our new circumstances and find our new rhythm, and then start the OPs back again - no doubt at a much reduced level.

I'd still love to meet my MFiT3 target, but that was always going to be a challenge - even before we knew about bump! Realistically it's not going to happen, but we can still aim to pay it off as early as possible. Having reduced the term by 13 years, we're guaranteed to be mortgage free by the time I'm 38. I'm determined to smash that Age 32 was the extreme possibility, reality will sit somewhere in between...

We're both very much looking forward to hearing the "pitter patter of tiny little drains on our resources", that's going to be the #1 priority for us soon