Mortgage Free in Three Yrs

Karmacat

Made an overpayment of £500 today on my Nationwide mortgage.... not through any wonderful effort of mine, I'm afraid (my pot for overpayments is growing in dribs and drabs through surveys, mystery shopping and the like). My mum gave me £2,000 to help with work on my house. Still, its all money, and the total will go down. Will pm Tallgirl the new total (thank heavens I now have a new total to pm!).

Kaz2904

Well my mortgage free-ness has taken a bit of a bashing over the last couple of days. The car has cost me £125+ to get it through the blasted MOT. DH seems to be on a bit of a spree with his nights out etc and my menu planning has gone to pot.
Also for some reason my wages were very low yesterday. I don't know if they only paid me basic rate for my 2 weeks holiday although I understand we are supposed to get unsocial hours for all holiday as we only work unsocial hours.
The other alternative is that they have deducted a night shift from me because I did less hours than I should have but I did the other 10 hours in July and carried them forwards. Unfortunately the pay slips haven't arrived on the ward yet so I won't know until next week. I'm about £100 down though.
I still have a hen night to go on and to get flaming fancy dress for now (argh) and DH has to get fancy dress for his friends stag do. He's off out for a meal tonight and it's all mounting. I feel the savings are going to take a bit of a battering.
The trouble with having been on holiday is that we are in splurge mode and we need to snap out of it. Unless of course DH has decided that we are going to stop the mortgage overpayments.
I always find it's a lot of pressure having to run the finances. I'll drop in again soon with a horrifying update! TTFN, Kaz.

Moneygoes2money

Kaz2904 wrote: »

I have to say that with this current situation I am thankful that we are doing what we are doing.
We don't earn vast amounts of money but we use what we earn to its maximum advantage.
When we remortgaged from our Northern Rock mortgage after our first 2 years we actually borrowed more than we had the first time. We got stung by the "financial adviser" who got us our new mortgage. He charged us £3000 for his services despite me asking all the way along whether we would be charged and he just skirted the issue. He then put our new mortgage through before the old one had come out of its redemption period so we were charged for that too. I think myself lucky for this happening when it did because it focused me and DH into making sure we were fully informed about things and never to get stung like this again.
We do still make financial booboos but are better than before because I put in the time and effort to research things.
When we moved here in 2005 the interest rate fell quite a long way from the 5.29% that we have. We questioned whether we had made a good decision in taking a 5 year fixed rate and felt that we were still right because it enabled us to plan for the future.
With this challenge we will owe much less when we come to the end of our tie in. The interest rate will still affect us but it won't be the difference between being able to afford the repayments or not.
I agree with DD about the ISA allowance and DH and I will be opening up one each. Depending on the interest rates we may well stop our mortgage overpayments next year and just stick money in savings instead. The goal will always be to clear the mortgage but we need to do it in the cheapest way possible. I am currently looking at how much it would cost to stooze into savings accounts and whether it would be viable to do this.
Of course if we are able to get a good amount saved in savings and ISA then when we do come to remortgage we will probably look into getting an offset mortgage that allows your ISA to be offset. I'm still not sure about these though. I think it is probably better to get a well paying ISA and keep it separate and just work on having the savings offset against the mortgage.
I feel that this should work well for us because we have a loan from my mum and save every month to repay that. She doesn't want it repaid until we have all the money so we could use this to clear the mortgage without actually having to use it IYSWIM?
Interesting times though. I wonder if it will affect the housing market and make people question their financial habits? I fear not as the media have done a very good job of making this Northern Rocks fault. It's not because people are borrowing too much money and living beyond their means, it's because the banks are lending irresponsibly. Yet when they are now reviewing their lending habits that's wrong too!

Have you made a complaint against this adviser? If not, you should complain to the firm the adviser worked for, if you are not satisfied by their response, take it further to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Kaz2904

A long time in the past I'm afraid and I can't even remember who the company was.

Moneygoes2money

Kaz2904 wrote: »

A long time in the past I'm afraid and I can't even remember who the company was.

And was your complaint successful?

sallyb17

I'm feeling so enthused since being able to pay off my unsecured loan this week and finally becoming totally debt-free!

I've been working overtime in my second job (at a takeaway) and this month I should be earning an extra £1000 just from the second job! I'm going along to the bank tomorrow to put some of this cash into the mortgage. At the end of October, I also get a £1k bonus from work, so things are really looking up for my finances at the moment :j

Now debt-free, I've decided to open up a S&S ISA (£85 cashback through Quidco too!) and invest £50 a month into that, as well as upping my contributions to the cash ISA to £100 per month.

DickDastardly_2

Hi all and DD! A newbie here but this is the reason we joined as we are fed up with the albatross round my neck we laughingly refer to as a mortgage and want shot of it asap. So can we sign up for the Free in Three club/campaign?

Currently I am the main wage earner in my house as we have a young family. I am self-employed and wages vary from job to job. We run a One Account from Virgin and although maybe isn't the best, it has kept us out of dire straights at times and we think we will stick with it for the immediate future. We have no other debts other than being a tad 'behind plan' so far as repaying the mortgage goes.

So what we want to do is get back on-plan and then start taking chunks out of the remaining debt to be able to be mortgage free or very close to it in three years. Even vastly ahead of plan would be good!:D

Any advice welcome!

Current stats:

Mortgage debt on 01/04/07 £93,317
Mortgage debt on 23/09/07 £95,690

So as you can see it has been going the wrong way for a coupe of months!:eek: Currently about £6.5k behind where we should be...:o

First task is to claw that back (and we have done this before, so I know it is a case of discipline - the last attempt got it down to £92k which at that point was nearly £3k ahead of plan), then move forward with reduction of a spectacular nature to an eventual state of mortgage free or near enough.

lunasaver

Hi again

Thanks for the entitled to info, I do get my taxcredits which I think is why I survive!

Morgage people have sent me a statement which I should recieve in a couple of days, they wouldn't give it to me over the phone strangely enough.

I've set up a standing order for £400 per month,
an overpayment of £115.65!:eek:

See how it goes! I am arranging a half day college course trial which pays £50 cash (if any one else is interested in the London area, I'll post the details), got my morgage pig and a pile of things to ebay, have signed up to quidco, ciao and valued opinions, it's all quite hard work!

Got rid of loads of bigger baby bits through freecycle, I know I could've ebayed but someone needed it and it feels like good karma - and room for me to have a fresh start.

Not sure how to put my bits of financial info on? Do you just tag it on the bottom?

Awaiting current mortgage
May 05 mortgage 5.49% fixed for 2 yrs £43,943.08
3 yr goal get mortgage down to 35000( probably a bit ambitious)
get my daughter in bed by 7 asleep by half past (ditto!)
Well done to everyone giving it a go!

ls

ailuro2

Luna- go to the top of the page, and click on 'User CP' then go down the side and click on edit signature. You an then type in a little line or two about your goals/self/whatever you like...but don't make it too big, and don't include any website links either.:beer:

AnW'sMum

ailuro just reread your sig £7k in 5 months that is fantastic well done