The next chapter!

Beckyy

It sounds like your doing the right thing, OPing the mortgage is nice but not a necessity and I've taken break from it when we've had a few expensive or difficult months. Fingers crossed your OH is on the mend soon!

Pearla*Merle

Hope your OH heals up soon, CC. Good luck with the trimming of expenses, more often than not there's always a way to find that little bit extra. Take care

Hurdler

Think you are absolutely planning in the right way. Hope things improve soon

chocoholic_chick

Thanks for the well wishes DH is back at work, but not sure how long for as he may need an op and then will need time off to recover, everythings still a bit up in the air at the moment. So next month hopefully won't be as bad as we thought with him going back to work, but it's still nice to have that buffer there if we need to. At least it's given me a bit of a wake up call and made me realise we really should have a pot of money as an emergency fund just in case. So I've opened up an account with first direct so I can get the savings account that has the 6% rate and I'm going to get a minimum of £2000 in there as an emergency fund as that would be enough to cover the shortfall to cover our bills for the best part of a year.

So I think the main priority at the moment will be getting the £2000 into savings, we have £1850 at the moment but owe £120 out of this. I have just renewed our car insurance policy and will be getting £60 cash back from that, plus £100 for opening the first direct account so once those get paid that'll go into savings to replace the money I'll have to take out so will only need £110 to get to my target of having £2000 in savings. Hopefully then I'll be able to focus on the mortgage again

chocoholic_chick

Well it's been a while since I've updated this!

Last years plans pretty much went out of the window, DH ended up being off for a while so we dropped to one salary ( plus SSP for him ) so just keeping our heads above the water was difficult at times and overpayments became impossible. Things settled down towards the end of the year though, we re-mortgaged to a better rate and reduced our repayment period by 2 years so we're still paying the same mortgage payment each month but knocked 2 years off the remaining term. Didn't manage any other mortgage repayments but did overpay 1 loan by just over £3300 ( admittedly most of these payments were made at the end of the year ) which cleared that loan, so thats £225 a month we're saving on that repayment. Just one more loan to clear but it is a hefty one with just under £10k owed

Still hoping to get a new house this year so have started building up our savings for the associated costs that go with that. So far we have £3350. Not entirely sure whether we're going to pay all the fees upfront or add some to the mortgage, ideally I'd like to pay everything but with stamp duty, selling fees etc I'm not sure whether we'll be able to, will have to wait and see I guess.

Also planning on overpaying the loan that's left, have budgeted £200 per month which if we manage would mean cutting 14 months off the repayment term and will make overpayments on the current mortgage as and when we can, but with the plans on buying a new house this is all liable to change. If we do manage to buy a new place this year our mortgage payments will increase substantially so realistically overpayments will be off the cards for a while.

So plans for the year?

Overpay the loan by £2400 Get the house in saleable condition Buy a new home! Overpay the mortgage as and when we can. Will put a goal of £2000 here just to have something to aim for

Obviously last year taught me things don't always go to plan, so while I have the intentions of doing my best to achieve these goals, I know that it's not always possible so won't beat myself up over it if it doesn't happen.

Good luck to anyone else setting themselves challenges for the year ahead

chocoholic_chick

Evening all

Well we'll be making the first mortgage overpayment this month, unexpectedly got a little bit of cash so once the cheque clears I'll be making a £500 payment towards the mortgage ( hopefully later this week :j ). Had a play around with our finances, trimmed our food budget a little, hoping by meal planning more and sticking to shopping at Lidl/Aldi I should be able to save around £40 a month which will go towards the mortgage as well. So hopefully that'll mean we can still manage the £200 loan overpayments each month as well as a regular mortgage overpayment of at least £300 per month too. Lets see how things go!

mrsninja

Hi, subscribed to your diary. :-) I have similar goals this year. My overpayments aren't as much as some but every penny counts and it is still cutting it down.

I am also doing the cook something new challenge. I've banned myself from buying anymore cooking magazines and I'm going to plough through the back issues of those and the numerous cook books that I have. That said I've been on a minced beef week till pay day. Spag bol, chilli and burritos so far!

Good luck with the diary.

chocoholic_chick

Thanks

Oh I did that last year ( or tried to ), I have a tonne of books and tend to just cook 1 or 2 things from each one, some I've not even made anything out of . I got a few new cook books for Christmas so have tried a few new recipes since then, it is nice trying something new each week, I tend to get in a bit of a rut and make the same things week in week out.

( I'm currently on day 3 of roast chicken meals as well so know the feeling! )

mrsninja

Minced beef week is over! :rotfl:

For my cook something new challenge I got my other half to pick a cook book off these shelf for me with the promise I would make him something from it. He picked a Nigel Slater one and I found a recipe for slow cooked sausages in beer in it, so that's one meal sorted this week.

chocoholic_chick

My new recipe for last week was coq au vin out of the hair dieters book, very nice it was too Haven't decided what this week's will be yet.

That sausage recipe sounds lovely, let me know how it turned out

So I have £500 sitting in my account ready to make an overpayment but can't find my mortgage account number which I need to quote when making it! Have emailed our mortgage broker to see if they have it, if not then it's hunt the paperwork out ( I will have it in the house somewhere )

Made a bit of a mistake this weekend with our weekly shopping. Thought I was being really good buying a paper to get the £5 off at Aldi voucher. Went shopping Sunday and thought I'd best make sure I spend enough to be able to use the voucher... spent over £50 Our fridge and both freezers are rammed now so really shouldn't need to buy much at all over the next few weeks, just top up shops. Plan for tonight is to do a meal plan ( I went shopping without one?! ) and use as much of the glut of food up in the house I can whilst spending a minimum amount. Any surplus funds from our food budget will go towards the mortgage so there's another incentive there for me to keep spends low.

Have had a fairly productive couple of weekends clearing out a load of clutter in the house ( it's amazing how much crap we have accumulated over the years! ). Determined not to end up with so much useless stuff again!