Working towards being debt free and a new house.

dipdap

Morning diary
Well money is still tight but we're surviving at the moment.
I've set myself a new savings challenge for this year (I tweaked an idea I saw on Facebook)
Save £1 Mon, £2 Tue, £3 Wed thru to £7 Sun and start again.
Hopefully we can stick it out to the end of the year, if not it's still a nice amount to have in the jar in an emergency
Roll on pay day!

Working_Mum

Hi dipdap,
I do two savings plans each year - one is known as a penny per day and give me £667 at the end of the year. The other is a £1 for the week we are in £1 for week one, £2 for week two etc which give me £1378 at the year end.
I start low in January and build up but you can effectively start anywhere.
I am doing the weekly one for my emergency fund this year and the pennie one for Christmas pressies!
Good luck with your savings goals :-)

dipdap

Hi workingmum
They sound really good ideas
I'm hoping to find a good savings idea I can get my kids involved in, in the future (eldest is already pretty good with money, next one down, not so good :mad:)
Need to get in some overtime next week, start of the year is usually quiet for overtime in most companies I think. May have to put in more hours with my low online earnings for the month.

dipdap

Morning diary.
Insomnia time! :mad:
I hate waking up and not being able to get back to sleep.
Just logged on to check the end dates for the 0% rate on the credit cards.
The lower one ends at the end of this year, which I was pretty much aware of.
The higher balance credit card ends in 2020. Hadn't realised it was so far away (I actually thought it ended in January next year)
Will be glad when it's all cleared off

dipdap

Morning diary.
Still slogging along.
Got in a few hours overtime this week so extra money for next payday :j
Down to the last £30 or so in the bank, just waiting for some extra money to come in at the end of the week.
I do find it funny that my bank account has a £1,000 overdraft and I never use it. Gone are the days when I'd be forever in the red, now I treat the overdraft as the evil it is and will do everything I can not to go into it (dipped in for 4 hours a few months back, was having palpitations until I fixed it!)
I don't know whether to bring the overdraft down or leave it where it is (doesn't cost me anything so long as I don't use it)

dipdap

Hello diary.
Well today I found out how the 'help to buy' aspect of our house works.
Our fixed term mortgage comes to an end in 2020 and if we want to remortgage apparently there is only a limited amount of lenders we can use.
If we want to remortgage we also need to make sure there's at least 10% equity in our house.
We also intend on borrowing more to pay off the htb so it looks like we need to focus on our debt clearing differently.
My plan now is to be debt free by the end of 2019. Our current debts are all at 0% so it doesn't make a lot of sense to pay them off much quicker. We're better off overpaying the mortgage instead so we have more of a chance of a good deal in 2020.
Hopefully all that gibberish makes sense
We should hopefully still be debt free by the end of next year :j

abba1772

That's sounds like a good plan........we are due to remortgage at the end of March and it's very stressful I'm targeting my debts to see how much we can pay off before the financial adviser comes round to start the process xx

dipdap

Morning diary
Hey Abba :wave: it doesn't seem that long ago either of us were discussing moving and new mortgages and now we're talking about remortgages :eek:
Where does the time go?!

Paid £150 off the credit card debts, but managed to forget the car payment is due next week so now we're back to being short of cash again till the end of the month
We've probably got a hundred quid in the bank to get us through the month (fuel and groceries will go back on the CC as they usually do)
Roll on pay day!
Oh well, that'll teach me to read my list of direct debits properly!

abba1772

Oh no it's easy done tho isn't it

Time has defo flown in that's for sure and do much has happened within these last couple of years xx

dipdap

Morning diary
Just logged on to my savings and seen how much money is in there :j
I've been saving money since 2015 (it comes out of my account on pay day so I rarely notice it's gone) and there's now about £6k in there.
I set the payment to go up to £500 next month so things could get a bit tighter (although it means more in savings)
It's locked into a few savings accounts and access to it isn't easy (it's not meant to be) so the first time I can access some of the money is 2020
It is a nice way of saving - makes us do more overtime to compensate
I shall feel better about our debts when the savings exceed the amount owed