A fresh start, a new outlook, onto MFW...

keza

hello everyone.

Some of you may remember me popping in earlier in the year. We were having trouble selling our house due to our neighbour from hell.

Well here we are, we saved up a whole new deposit after losing £20k in equity on our first home, and we have landed ourselves a great deal!

We now own a 3 bed house, just £13.5k more than our first house. We paid £195k and have a mortgage outstanding of £175.5k repayment at 2.5% (rate carried over from first mortgage).

We are now in the middle of the mountain of work that needs doing to turn this house into our home. We have central heating going in tomorrow then we can carry on with the decorating.

We plan to pay off as much of the refurb debt as poss but when our fixed rate on the extra £13.5k is up, we will lump what ever is left onto the mortgage as we are hoping to make some equity in our house once its finished.

So a little about us, we are 3, me, DH and DS (Moose - 2 in Feb). me and DH both work full time at present but I am dropping Fridays in the new year now we have settled from our previous nightmare.

I aspire to pay off little and often but we will see how things go. We have scrimped and scraped for some time now to get ourselves out of our previous situation so its time to enjoy ourselves a bit more, whilst still tackling the mortgage while its ticking over.

anyway, this is looking like an essay rater than a quick hello so I am going to sign off for now, but please feel free to say hello :wave:

sleepygirl126

hello and good luck!!:beer:

SmlSave

Congratulations on your new house

apple_muncher

Oooh, a new house! Congratulations!:T Hope you enjoy the process of making it into what you want, as well as paying it off!

keza

hi everyone! bit of a mixed bag here today!!

on a good note, i got promoted this morning and have received a 3k payrise yipee!

then 2 hrs klater they announce 47 redundancies!! :mad:

not sure what to think of it all at the moment and time will tell the outcome. If i am made redundant I suppose we will go back to tightening the belt and concentrate on my university degree...

Today is central heating day at the house which is causing a lot of noise. cant wait for it to be finished. the gas board have been today and filled in the holes from the new gas connection so we now look a bit more sightly again out front.

alwaystryyourbest

Just thought I would pop by, congratulations on your job..I'm sure your job would be safe as they have only just offered you a promotion.
Your morgage balance is nearly the same as mine, and I have just started a new diary as well so just wanted to wecome you..

keza

hi alwaystryyourbest - i just posted on your diary at the same time . thanks for the post. we can help each other along when motivation wears thin!

keza

Morning everyone. I was doing some number crunching last night and due to my pay review yesterday, I have found we can squeeze and average monthly overpayment of £300 off the mortgage. Which is fantastic news.

then I was looking at the debt we have incurred from doing the house up:

My barclaycard balance £3,074.00 (this was £4k which we had to borrow from DH dad to make up our loss in equity on the previous house. we paid him bk using a 0% deal from barclaycard.)

DH MBNA balance £12,480.00 - this is the biggy, where we have drawn down 12k at 0% for 15 months to do up the house, central heating, builders, stairs etc.

Joint Barclaycard balance £2,246.83 - this one is smaller expenses which dont necessarily have to be paid for with cash. this is also 0% on purchases for 12 months. this is for furnishings and wallpaper/paint etc.

so our debt at the moment is quite high but out house has the potential to be worth £245k which means we will have paid £195k for it, around £20k to do it up once kitchen and bathroom are purchased, meaning a gain of £30k equity (mostly the £20k we lost on the previous house).

after my number crunching, I think its better to throw the extra £300 a month at the debt, especially with my job being under threat for the next 10 months (its a long drawn out process which I think will result in us moving offices to London).

Hope everyone agrees. any pearls of wisdom most appreciated


p.s - we also have the ongoing court case to claim back our losses from the previous house/neighbour from hell. this amounts to £25k at present.

keza

today I have joined the virtual sealed pot challenge for another year and also the payment a day challenge which I used to clear my debt in 2009/2010. it was such a friendly supportive thread im looking forward to getting involved again.

today I have just rounded down some small change of £4.56 into my virtual sealed pot. still have some bills to come out of the bank account which I hope will leave a little bit to be thrown at the house

keza

court case now seems to be gearing up again. hope this doesnt drag on 5 more years!

On a brighter note we sold our electric storage heaters on 3bay at the weekend which were removed from the house before the central heating went in. they fetched a tidy sum of £310 so that got paid off the MBNA card on saturday.

Cant believe its monday again!