The next chapter!

chocoholic_chick

It's pay day :j

Have done my money shuffle and quite pleased with our progress this month

• A total of £900 overpaid on the mortgage :j
• Increased our savings by £869.79. Total now stands at £5296.30
• Meal planned and savvy shopped to reduce grocery spends, total for the month was £181.41 which is a saving of almost £80 on what we'd normally spend

I can't say we'll be able to do the same each month, I've used alot of our freezer stocks so will probably spend more on food this month. Will ring the mortgage company sometime over the next few days to get an update to the balance after the £750 payment sent today.

Luckyinlife

Thats amazing great job thats a big overpayment well done :]

Do you work out how much interest you save yourself each time you overpay or do you just try the get the balance down as much as you can

chocoholic_chick

Thanks! No I've not worked out the interest savings, not really sure how I'd do that in all honesty I just like seeing the balance outstanding go down

Going to sit and do a meal plan for the week soon, working round what we have in, it's a 4 week month for us so I'm going to aim for £40 a week. Need to top up toiletries though so might end up going a bit over this.

Have a lovely weekend all!

Just called to get latest balance of the mortgage, £87,656

chocoholic_chick

So my plan to spend £40 a week didn't work out, signed up with slimming world so had to come up with new meal plans, buy more fruit and veg, lower fat mince etc which all adds up. So I budgeted £180 but have spent £215.28 My April grocery challenge starts Friday and I won't need to get anything else before then thankfully, will hopefully do a bit better next month now I've got my head round this diet a bit, but think I'll have to increase my budget slightly to maybe £200 a month.

I'll be doing the main mortgage overpayment on Friday when DH get's paid, but have managed £200 so far. I'll also be topping up savings when DH get's paid, but because we've been careful again this month I've managed to put a little aside so our savings now stand at £5,420

chocoholic_chick

DH has been paid :T So this month:

- I have made total OP's on the mortgage of £870. The mortgage balance has now reduce from £87,656 to £86,362.88

- I have managed to put £755.61 into savings so our savings now stand at £6,052.65

Really pleased with how much we've managed in a short space of time. Since January we've managed to increase our savings by £2,702.65 and reduce our mortgage by £3,350.12. Just wish I'd been this dedicated 8 years ago when we first took on the mortgage!

Off to do a meal plan now for the week, have my £5 Aldi voucher which will come in handy if my spends over the last few weeks are anything to go by.

chocoholic_chick

So it's been almost a year since I last posted an update on here! I was debating starting a new thread but have decided to keep it all together so that even if I don't post that frequently, I have one thread that tracks my progress throughout the years until I hopefully get to the stage where we'll be mortgage free!

Despite really wanting to move last year it just didn't happen due to one reason or other but it's back on the cards for this year so fingers crossed that will happen which will mean substantially increasing our mortgage. We did manage to keep up with the overpayments last year and overpaid by a huge (for us) £6139 last year so beat the target of £6000 for the year we set :T Only managed to overpay our loans by £400 but determined to do better with that this year and hopefully clear the remaining loan to be debt free. We have managed to increase our savings to £10,330 as well, most of which is to cover fees for when we buy a new house but I'm also trying to build up a £6,000 buffer to have just in case anything ever goes wrong.

So upshot is the mortgage balance is now £76,680.97 just shy of £9,700 less than I last posted in March 2015 which I think is pretty good going!

This year the aim is to

- Overpay the mortgage by £4,000
- Completely clear the remaining £4,800 ish debt we have
- Increase our savings by £4,500

Pretty ambitious target but we all have to have something to aim for!

chocoholic_chick

So another year has gone by and there have been a lot of changes in the year or so since I last updated!

We finally managed to sell our house and have moved into our new home. It means our mortgage has shot up and we now owe £144,000. We managed to clear our debts last year so are now debt free, and have managed to build up a healthy savings pot too.

Over the years our priorities have changed, I was at times too focused on getting rid of debt and maybe missed out on enjoying life I suppose, so I'm now trying to get the right balance between overpaying our mortgage whilst still allowing us the freedom to live a little!

I've signed up to the 2017 MFW, I'v done that challenge a few times in the past and always found it helped keep me on track. Have managed our first OP of the year of £100 and should hopefully manage another small one before payday

chocoholic_chick

So this last week I've been lazy, I could make excuses up as to why I've not done anything, but fundamentally it boils down to the fact I just couldn't be bothered to do things! So I've decided to make a to do list, no chance I'm going to get it all done today so it's what I'd like to get done this week:-

• Clean Bathroom
• Hoover
• [STRIKE]Strip Beds[/STRIKE]
• [STRIKE]Do a load of washing[/STRIKE]
• [STRIKE]Hang washing out[/STRIKE]
• Tackle the mountain of ironing
• Finish decorating the spare bedroom
• [STRIKE]Do meal plan for next week[/STRIKE]
• [STRIKE]Go food shopping[/STRIKE]

Have already managed to tick a few off the list this morning, quick cuppa then I'm going to try and get the decorating finished (glossing... urghhh). Food shopping this morning was just over £25, will need a few bits I couldn't pick up in Lidl through the week, but that's less than I budgeted and looking at the pot of money I put aside for food each month there's still plenty there so I've taken £100 out to put towards a mortgage OP which I'll send this morning. Trying to think of long term and when I'd like to get this mortgage cleared by. We had to take the mortgage out over 20 years due to the extra funds we had to borrow, I'm hoping to knock at least 5 years off that. Time will tell!

chocoholic_chick

So we finished decorating the spare room but didn't really get any of the other things on the list done. I made a huge lasagne last night for dinner, so I don't have to cook tonight as we're just having leftovers which means I can start tackling the mountain of ironing (which is getting bigger... arghh!) I've purposely piled it all on our bed this morning so I really can't avoid doing it.


Have made a real effort NOT to buy lunches this month, I'd happily nip to the shops on my lunch break and spend every day, can't say that the OH is doing the same mind, but at least one of us is! So I think that must have saved at least £20 a week and I'm taking in leftovers or homemade soup instead so also being a bit healthier hopefully!

chocoholic_chick

The mountain of ironing has been defeated! I also logged on to topcashback this morning to see that I have £41.02 sitting there so have requested a payout and once that's cleared it'll be winging its way over as a mortgage OP. With inflation rising I'm glad we went for a 5 year fix on our mortgage, taking advantage of the low interest rates so that come re-mortgage time we'll hopefully have a decent LTV