Mr and Mrs P are going mortgage free...

MrsP1983

Mr P's monthly outgoings

Mortgage 615.67
Mortgage overpayment 123.12
Mobile 50
Life Insurance 32.16
Account fee 12.95
Fun 50
iPad 15

Per month 898.90

I am on at him to cancel his expensive account fee as we both initially took them out when unmarried in order to get the higher interest rate on regular savers, plus the included travel insurance. It also meant we got a deal on our mortgage rate so while I'd dearly love to cancel both of them once my regular saver has finished I think we have to keep one. Mr P hasn't had a regular saver for ages so his account fee is just a total waste of money :eek:

MrsP1983

Income

Mr P 1749.4
Mrs P 1122.94
CB 81.2


Total income 2953.54
Leftovers 138.15

I also do tutoring and make £78 a week from that, but I'm not including it in the official income list as it's never guaranteed.

Also, I was talking rubbish about having £15ish left at the end of the month, as you can see above it's actually £138.15 which is much better! It's there as leeway in case we've forgotten anything/mess up/have an unforeseen car disaster, and if it's still there at the end of the month it will go into the ISA.

MrsP1983

Last post of the day, honest! Just got an email from Music Magpie saying a cheque for £47.18 is winging its way to me :T That was for 80 DVDs and games!! I probably could have got more for them on eBay but I hate the whole packing and posting malarkey, plus this got rid of them all at once. Mr P suggested last night that we get rid of all our House DVDs too but I love Hugh Laurie so much...will I ever watch them again though?!

Anyway, the MM cheque will go straight into the ISA when it arrives :j

Beckyy

Hello!

Congratulations on starting your mortgage free journey! It's very addictive!

A few things that stood out to me that could maybe be cut down on would be:

Baby Activities £50 - Are these for clubs/groups, or is it just going out money that could be swaped for a few cheaper activities sometimes?

Cleaner/cleaning agency - £21.67/£60 - Are these both for your own house? Totally appreciate that paying a cleaner can be well worth it when you're working and have a family, but it seems quite expensive to me. Couldyou cut down the amount they come?

Toiletries - £25 - Could you buy in 'bulk' when on offer, or ask for nice ones as gifts? I asked for posh shampoo and conditioner for my last birthday and haven't had to buy any since. Has saved a fortune!

RAC £95pa - have you tried shopping around for it with other companies? Taking out policies with cashback etc.

Mini P clothes - £200pa - Could you ask for clothes as birthday/Christmas presents, or buy in advance in sales?

Mr.P's mobile - £50 - Could you switch to another tariff, if you're not locked in? They're forever changing and £50 is quite steep unless you're using it tons and really getting the benefit from it.

Best of luck, and keep us posted, it sounds like you're going to do really well

MrsPee

Hello from another Mrs Pee

MrsP1983

Wow, so many good ideas! Thanks so much

Beckyy wrote: »

Baby Activities £50 - Are these for clubs/groups, or is it just going out money that could be swaped for a few cheaper activities sometimes? In all honesty I rarely spend more than a tenner a month on this, I've just budgeted more for just in case moments. I meet up with my NCT group once a week and we usually meet at each other's houses, or sometimes in coffee shops, but because I'm working 4 days a week we've stopped going to mum and baby groups apart from that. So hopefully this will be an area of a large underspend each month!

Cleaner/cleaning agency - £21.67/£60 - Are these both for your own house? Totally appreciate that paying a cleaner can be well worth it when you're working and have a family, but it seems quite expensive to me. Couldyou cut down the amount they come? They are-I got her through an agency when we moved as we didn't know anyone to ask for recommendations, and now I can't stop paying the agency! It's irritating. She comes for 2 hours a week and I pay her £7.50 an hour, plus the agency fee which goes direct to them. She could come for just an hour instead but to be honest I don't think she'd be able to do enough in that time. Having a cleaner is a massive luxury, I know, but at the moment it's one I'm not giving up! Not very MSE

Toiletries - £25 - Could you buy in 'bulk' when on offer, or ask for nice ones as gifts? I asked for posh shampoo and conditioner for my last birthday and haven't had to buy any since. Has saved a fortune! Really good idea re presents-thank you! I have a bit of a Liz Earle addiction which I'm trying to wean myself off...:eek: I do buy in bulk when there are 3 for 2s on toothpaste and the like. Mr P thinks I'm a nutter!

RAC £95pa - have you tried shopping around for it with other companies? Taking out policies with cashback etc.Shockingly, this is my 'shopped around' figure as our premium renewal was actually about £180 and I phoned to leave them and join AA at £95 and they matched the price. I was pleased about it at the time but now I'm really annoyed I did this about a week before discovering Quidco :mad: Next time I'm definitely going down the cash back route!

Mini P clothes - £200pa - Could you ask for clothes as birthday/Christmas presents, or buy in advance in sales? Yes, good idea to both. At the moment she's fine and doesn't need a lot, plus a friend recently gave us a massive bag of hand me downs which is great, but I had to buy her first pair of shoes recently and it was over £20! So I figured I should budget fairly high and aim for an underspend.

Mr.P's mobile - £50 - Could you switch to another tariff, if you're not locked in? They're forever changing and £50 is quite steep unless you're using it tons and really getting the benefit from it. Don't I know it :mad: We're both on ridiculously expensive iPhone tariffs that were taken out in a world where we had no baby, no mortgage, no bills and no worries! And we're tied in for another year. Joy.

Best of luck, and keep us posted, it sounds like you're going to do really well

Thank you! I've spent this evening taking Mr P through the spreadsheet and getting him on board. He's adamant he doesn't want our 'lifestyle' to suffer so I'm trying to convince him that small changes will reap big rewards...

Hello Mrs Pee! :hello: Nice to know there are other pees/peas on this journey :beer:

gallygirl

Hello Mrs P and welcome :wave:.

To answer one of your questions - the speech bubble is when you want to quote more than one post in your reply (as I have done). Just click on the bubble and a tick will appear, then when you want to reply press the Reply button and they will magically appear .

MrsP1983 wrote: »

Just done a full week's shop at Aldi for the frankly astonishing price of...

£39.83!!

Mysupermarket tells me the same shop would have been...

£61.79 at Tesco (saving of £21.96)
£63.92 at Asda (saving of £24.09)
£68.76 at Sainsbury's (saving of £28.93)
£74.89 at Waitrose (saving of £35.06)

I am officially and forever an Aldi convert!

I love Aldi also - it's out of the way for me so I go around every 2-3 weeks and do a good stock up. Amazing the difference though :T.

MrsP1983 wrote: »

Some goals to hit before Christmas 2013:

1. OP max allowed of £1723.68

(Note to all the old-timers on here - note the exact amount quoted - none of this 'around £1,700' rubbish. This one's here for the long haul )

Look forward to following your progress .

MrsP1983

Thanks Gallygirl-that speech bubble thing was driving me crazy!

And yes, I'm definitely in it for the long haul! I've been poring over my (admittedly rather rudimentary) spreadsheet and worked out that even with the allowed overpayments, in the two years we're on a fixed rate we'll go from having 10% equity to a depressing 14.54%. In two years!! All the more reason to save like crazy at the same time so once the fix is up we're already used to it and can start ploughing money into the mortgage.

We'd like to save £17000 before April 2014, when the fix is up, and try as I might I can't make the spreadsheet tell me that we'll have more than £14000, so basically we need to find a way to earn another £3000. I've written to one of the exam boards as I've done examining in the past and it's fairly easy money-well, it's soul destroying, but with a fixed end point! In an ideal world I could make approximately £1000 each in January 2013, Summer 2013 and January 2014, so fingers crossed they're in need of examiners... £17000 is 6 months worth of after-tax combined salary, in case the worst happens and we both lose our jobs. Hopefully that's extremely unlikely, but just in case.

I'm also hoping to find some new tutees as I'm down to two and they're not very reliable. If they don't cancel any sessions I should be able to make £700 between now and Christmas that way, though after that it'll tail off again as one of them is doing her exam in January.

We had our first electricity bill on Friday and it was under £80 for 3.5 months, which I'm very happy with, though that did include a £40 discount which we only get once a year, and of course over the summer we were doing most of our drying outside. Hopefully it won't go up too much over the winter...if it was £120 every three months I'd be chuffed.

I've been reading through loads of the other diaries-Jock, Tilly, Lois, Dawn to name just a few. They're so inspiring! Mr P has taken to ask me what I'm reading on the iPad-'Are you reading money again?' Heh heh!

gallygirl

MrsP1983 wrote: »

We'd like to save £17000 before April 2014, when the fix is up, and try as I might I can't make the spreadsheet tell me that we'll have more than £14000

Oh, ignore that, mine used to do that all the time till I broke its' spirit :rotfl:. Same with the payoff date - mine says something ridiculous like 2021 - yeah, right . (well, I assume it still does, it's currently in hospital as it lives on a broken hard drive :eek:. )

MrsP1983

gallygirl wrote: »

Oh, ignore that, mine used to do that all the time till I broke its' spirit :rotfl:. Same with the payoff date - mine says something ridiculous like 2021 - yeah, right . (well, I assume it still does, it's currently in hospital as it lives on a broken hard drive :eek:. )

Oh no, I hope it gets better soon!

My 'spreadsheet' is very basic, made more so by being a rubbish version of office made for Apple, so you can put in a formula but then you can't drag it to other boxes for instance, which makes it very, very time consuming to do anything with :eek: So I haven't figured out a way to work out my end date without copy and pasting formulas thousands and thousands of times...:mad: