MFW Diary - Take 1!

Calfuray

edinburgher wrote: »

Today is rotten weather wise. Was meant to be going out jogging, but as I couldn't stand up straight in the wind, thought it best to pace the remaining 2,000 steps around the living room

That's some impressive commitment. Have you hear about Bounts? Survey type setup, instead of doing surveys to get points to get vouchers, you do exercise to get points. I have tracking app on phone for exercise and FitBit for steps and get points for it daily. Doesn't cost me anything, just have to remember and set it up daily.

On that note, £40 payment from 1P, £50 added to deposit fund. Now stands at £5,600.

Calfuray

Deposit fund now £7,600. Probably would be higher if I hadn't booked holidays... but it's a small one. Saving is seriously boring.

Hope all are well,
Cal

Calfuray

Ahem. Bit dusty in here

Can't quite believe how quickly time flies!

Very quick update; work is going great, was promoted at the start of the year, still enjoying it. Commuting by driving now, deposit fund took a hit to buy a reliable second-hand car, have built it back up. Commute is now roughly half, which is good, but still long.

Doing last wee odd jobs in the flat to get it ready for selling, hoping to have it up for sale in the next two weeks! Been reading the "Waiting for a buyer" thread to prepare.

Hope all are well? I see a lot of new faces, will have to catch-up when I get a chance.

Cal

SuperSecretSquirrel

Good to hear from you again Cal!

Fortune_Smiles

Yay Cal! We are (hopefully) coming to the end of our house move so I will join you for the ride.

Fortune x

Karmacat

Halving the commute is good! Congratulations on the promotion.

Calfuray

SuperSecretSquirrel wrote: »

Good to hear from you again Cal!

Thank you! Good to be back, will need to try and post regularly again and not let life get in the way.

Fortune_Smiles wrote: »

Yay Cal! We are (hopefully) coming to the end of our house move so I will join you for the ride.

Fortune x

Thanks Fortune! I was having a nosey on your diary and saw about the move, congrats! We're just doing the last piece of tidying/decluttering and then I've got to figure out this whole estate agent/solicitor debacle.

Karmacat wrote: »

Halving the commute is good! Congratulations on the promotion.

It is very good. And thank you! :beer:

Calfuray

Taking 5 minutes to type up a proper update post. I've read all of SSS's diary, and caught up with most recent happenings with Fortune and smallholdings, and been thinking.

________________________________________

So my last post before this month was April 2016. A *lot* has changed since then:

OH:

- I've been talking to the OH a lot about his job, and his level of happiness (or lack thereof). By June I'd been in my job for coming up a year, and we talked about stability. He supported me a lot throughout university, and I wanted to let him know that if he wanted to retrain, change career paths etc I was happy to help and support like he did. Thankfully that sank in, and he decided to change career paths, meaning a return to college.
- Of course, that would mean a reduced income. Even worse, his work were having none of it (as expected) and he's been put on a 0 hour contract. Thankfully he's not had a long stretch of nothing, but it's been between 20-40% of what he used to get for nearly a year now. He's doing a second year, and possibly a third, so that changes our short-term plan.

Job:

- As I mentioned above, I was promoted at work in January. That means I am now a higher rate tax payer, so I think I need to do some research about tax rates, salary sacrifice and all those things so I don't need to do a self-assessment. Am I right in saying you need to do a self-assessment for savings if those are only being taxed at basic? Like I said, stuff to learn!
- I do love my job, but I think I need to take a step back. I have a terrible habit of saying yes to everything, and simultaneously not trusting anyone to do a good job, but thinking what I'm doing is pish. (Don't even ask me how that oxymoron works). One week in particular, I was logged on until nearly midnight, and logging back on at the weekend. That was an emergency week, but I just need to be careful to not make that a habit.

Commute:

- Back in September, I cashed out some of my savings to buy a reliable second-hand car as I got a parking space at work. This means I now drive over 80 miles a day, and my commute is roughly 70 minutes each way. This is infinitely better than previously, where my commute was over 2 hours (each way!) on public transport. The amount of carriage reductions or delays or cancellations were ridiculous, and very frequent. I enjoy being in my car now, singing along, in charge of the temperature etc, and is a lot more relaxing. It's completely flexible hours at my work so I organise my commute to miss the bulk of traffic.
- Having said that, 70 minutes is still a lot. So;

Moving house:

- So the plan now, is to sell this flat, and move to somewhere that is central to OH's work, OH's college and my work. We would be renting, which it's crazy to say, I've never done. I went from family's house to a long period of homelessness/nomadity to then having a mortgage at 19, so amazingly I have no idea what to do! Similarly, I've not sold a house before.
- Selling the house means gutting the place, and I'm shocked at how much junk we've accumulated in the 8 years I've lived here.
- Moving house also means trying to reduce costs as much as possible, we bought for £65k, and upstairs (same layout, no idea of condition) sold for £55k a couple of years ago, so we're in no illusions about the desirability of our flat. The rest of the block is owned by landlords, so I'm hoping one of them will want to snap up another house for their portfolio, otherwise I predict a long time on the market for us.
- Thankfully with OPs (£160 a month default that we never stopped), our mortgage right now is hovering just over 41k, so we won't be making a loss by moving. We've already established our minimum price for selling taking into account the cost of estate agents, solicitors, Home Report, EPC cert, etc etc. Unfortunately we've had to spend a little on decorating, the hallways were concrete flooring and raw plaster walls :eek: Flooring, new skirting, glossed doorframes, fix and paint walls, new light in hallway, glossing 10 doors etc has cost us just under 2k, but we think this is a good investment for house going onto market. Apart from that, we are trying to do everything ourselves.

________________________________________

Finances:

- Reading SSS's diary, I've realised how woefully ignorant I've been in keeping up with finances recently, I couldn't come up with a net worth right now, not knowing a lot of the figures. Here are my best estimates: (Actually, just spent some time getting logged into everything except pension)

[SIZE=2][FONT=Courier New]               CURRENTVALUE       
House Value:     [COLOR=Blue]£55,000.00[/COLOR]       
Cash:            [COLOR=Blue]£12,000.00[/COLOR]     
Pensions:        [COLOR=Blue]?[/COLOR]      
Car Value:       [COLOR=Blue]£3,000.00[/COLOR]     
S&S:             [COLOR=Blue]£2,564.75[/COLOR]     
Mortgage:        [COLOR=DarkRed]-£41,685.79[/COLOR]        
Student Loan:    [COLOR=DarkRed]-£22,293.47[/COLOR]      
[B]Total:           £8,585.49[/B][/FONT][/SIZE]

Now, I know I'm a little bit higher with pension, but I'm happy I'm green at least. All I know about pension is that I pay 4%, employer pays 8%. On June 30th 2016 it was £3,222.79, I'm due a 2017 statement any day now. The values above also don't include anything for OH right now, but he has no debt except the mortgage which is listed here.

(Sidenote; very unimpressed with Student Loan Repayments, all I needed to reset my login details, including changing my email address, was name, DOB, place of birth and address. Social engineering here we come. Then, my temporary login details were sent in a plaintext email, to the new email address I'd just asked them to update! Hm.)

________________________________________

Progress:

Inspired by Fortune and SHS, need to keep myself accountable. Today I have:
- Got boiler repair man to look at leak. Turned out it was just a washer (:doh:), £60 callout charge, much better than my visions of condemned boilers.
- Second coat of primer on skirting. (After watching a few videos online, technique has much improved!)
- New pendant and lightshade in hallway installed.
- Paint splatters from decorators found and cleaned.
- Chased up bathroom people for that job - no reply
- Washed curtains. 1 of four curtains then disintegrated, and we were basically left with a row of tabs :eek: No idea what I did wrong. Went to shops, after a slight measurement debacle (didn't realise the quoted sizes were per curtain!) found some candidates, would mean buying curtain rings. When leaving, saw some end-of-aisle curtains with no price. Took them with us to price check, only £8 for the pair! So we spent around £16 instead of £12 for the rings and £50 for the curtains. Woo

Fortune_Smiles

Hi Cal.

I was worried about the condition of the fortunate house and the work needed to get it ready to market. However, when the Estate Agents saw it they said all was fine and just to keep things tidy.

I was also worried about how long we might take to sell as our attached next-door neighbours had been on and off the market for nearly three years before they sold. The Agents thought we would sell quickly though and we got an offer in four days in the end.

If I were to do this again I'd get someone in sooner to give a valuation and some marketing advice. At least then I'd have known the exact situation, whether good or bad, and could have taken action to sort things out rather than prolonging the worry.

Good luck with your plans

Fortune x

Calfuray

Fortune_Smiles wrote: »

Hi Cal.

I was worried about the condition of the fortunate house and the work needed to get it ready to market. However, when the Estate Agents saw it they said all was fine and just to keep things tidy.

I was also worried about how long we might take to sell as our attached next-door neighbours had been on and off the market for nearly three years before they sold. The Agents thought we would sell quickly though and we got an offer in four days in the end.

If I were to do this again I'd get someone in sooner to give a valuation and some marketing advice. At least then I'd have known the exact situation, whether good or bad, and could have taken action to sort things out rather than prolonging the worry.

Good luck with your plans

Fortune x

Thanks Fortune, you're most likely right. I've decided to treat it like the stock market - just get on with it and see what happens, stop trying to predict.

I'm going to upload some pictures below to show you the difference:

Before:

(This is not a full before, the floor used to be concrete too!)

<removed>

After:

<removed>

(I'll probably take these down in about 7 days when I get paranoid).

So, as you can see from pictures, I think it makes a huge difference. Still a lampshade and a radiator cover to go on and then I think it'll really come together

____________________________________________

Today was an absolute write-off. Got up, dressed, went to get tyre fixed. Tried to phone people to get bath panel replaced, no joy. Went to dentist, waited over an hour and a half to get seen. Normally I would have just rebooked but I'm in pain so I waited. Eventually got seen, recommended wisdom tooth extraction _pale_

By this point it was nearly 2pm, hadn't eaten or drank anything all day and I got one of my curl-into-a-ball-and-cry migraines. Can't really complain, haven't had one that bad in months, and my own fault for doing everything bad I know I shouldn't; lack of sleep, no food, no water, fumes from painting etc. Just woke up from nap about an hour ago

Glossed the skirting, hoping one coat will be enough after the primer, will reevaluate tomorrow in the daylight. Slightly more relaxed day planned tomorrow, few people for bathroom quotes, haircut and cinema. As much as I want to GO-GO-GO I think I need to wind down before I go back to work, otherwise I'll need another holiday to recover from this one!

Hope all had a good day, I'm off to be lazy.

Cal