Can i join your club???

beanielou

All sounding good

dano17439

Payday woop woop!


Hope everyone had a nice month? Ours was OK. Moneywise we done good, apart from 2 new tyres for MrsDano's car....£312! This was slightly annoying as I thought we were on course to finish the month about £500 still left in our current account but alas no.


Motoring has cost us about 2 grand since July...MrsDanos insurance, 4 new tyres, MOT and service for my car, and now the 2 tyres this month. Still hopefully that should be the end of it for a while


Managed to save the standard £1,750 today though, so our NET position is officially in the 20s!!! £28,658 to be precise when tomorrows mortgage payment is paid

dano17439

Hi again - happy Halloween!


The car curse carries on....This month saw a broken Thermostat housing for my car and a new sensor for Mrs Danos....grand cost £440 for the 2 repairs. I'll say it again...hopefully this should be the end of car expenditure now. Fingers crossed!


The good news is that we are well into the swing of Christmas shopping eeeeek, already sorted our daughters present....we have bought her a MacBook. Our PC at home is very slow and quite old and is quite frustrating to use sometimes when she is doing her homework, so what with GCSE time coming up, we took the plunge. It will be a surprise of course, but she has said she wanted one many times over the past couple of months. I found that John Lewis offered 0% interest and a 2 year guarantee so we took the plunge. Personally I hate all things Apple but what do I know eh?


Also bough my wife a handbag that she wanted that was in a sale, so that was good news, and also I pointed out a golf club that I wanted from a 2nd hand supplier, which arrived today. Very frustrating that I have to wait 2 months before I can use it lol. I am so pleased with the quality of it...its looks brand new apart from a few very minor marks. But the best part....60% saving on the brand new price. Why people by brand new golf equipment i'll never know


Saved our standard £1,750 today so that's good. We had around £200 left over before payday but we'll use that for other xmas presents in the month so it doesn't really eat into the usual monthly budget


So after tomorrows payment, the Mortgage NET balance will be £26,205! :-)

dano17439

Hi folks


Another month whizzed by super quick! Officially on the countdown to Christmas....only 9 days in the office until 2020 woop woop


November was an interesting month....cant believe I am typing this but another bit of car expenditure!!! A nail in Mrs Danos car (luckily not one of the new tyres we had fitted a few months back), but still it couldn't be repaired so a replacement was £160. That's every month since July we have incurred additional expenses over the norm. Ridiculous!!


We celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary last week, a nice day out just the 2 of us while our daughter was at school, then we went out for a nice meal in the evening with my friend who was my best man and his wife and of course our daughter


Christmas shopping is going well...just a few bits to go and then we are done. Good job really being as December is a 5 weekend month and heavy on the social calendar!


We have also paid the deposit for a holiday next year....Abu Dhabi baby! Cant wait for this


We transferred £1,750 over the weekend to savings so NET Mortgage balance today is £23,725. Will be a bit of a milestone on the 02/01/20 when the actual balance will drop into the 30s as the contracted payment will take it there.


I've said all along that we'd had a target of Sept/Oct 2020 to be mortgage free....however we have plans for 2020 which may mean that we use some of our savings instead. As well as Abu Dhabi, we'd also like to have a break away in February (our daughter is going ski-ing for a week so this will mean a bit of quality husband/wife time somewhere could be possible) and also we'd still like to go away in the school summer holidays in August.


We also are maybe looking in replacing one of our cars at some point aswell so this may hit the savings. With our mortgage rate at only 1.64% it won't be worth paying this and then getting car finance at a much higher rate. Lets see what next year brings

dano17439

HAPPY 2020!


Wow what a month December was.....very long and very expensive!


Both myself and my wife had 2 weeks off, which on one hand is nice, but on the other.....so much socialising that it costs ££££


Although we had a great time with family and friends, we had to take back £1,000 from savings into our current account. We also put £1,300 on our credit card eeeeek! As mentioned in my previous post we had talked about doing something while our daughter is away in February, so we booked 6 days in Lanzarote for a bit of pampering. Will be the first time away just the 2 of us in 10 year. Can't wait TBH. Its also my wifes birthday when we are away aswell


So not much savings going on this month as we have to pay off the credit card, and then when we go to Lanzarote we pay the hotel on arrival. Also my wife has a bit of a tax bill to pay this month (about £1,000) and then in March we have to pay for our Abu Dhabi trip


It may seem that we've been a bit extravagant lately, but we have saved our wotsits off in 2019 and are more than comfortable with our mortgage position currently. My wife especially has had a lot of stress at work which has taken its toll, so the holidays are well needed.


We are still determined to be mortgage free this year, and our NET balance is circa 23k (39k mortgage against 16K savings), but I can see the next couple of months us using our regular monthly savings on other things

dano17439

Got my Christmas Credit card statement through today, and the payment doesn't have to be made until 3rd February, which means we can save our regular £1,750 this month, and use our spare cash that we would of earmarked as Februarys savings to pay the CC bill


We are also hoping to have money left over at the end of the month from our "living" money, as we are both on dry January (8 days in and going well!), and the social calendar is not very busy at all this month.

dano17439

February update time!


January was a good month....ended with £800 left in our current account at the end of the month, due to a very small social calendar, and also we completed Dry January which saved a bit of cash


But unfortunately nothing saved in February due to Mrs Danos tax bill (£1,200), and our credit card bill £1,700, which included flights for our holiday in 2 weeks, and a new home PC that we bought as our existing one was 10 years old, very slow and still running windows 7. We bought a refurb PC from a supplier my IT Director recommended, and its saved us loads of £££


So just the contracted monthly payment for the mortgage this month :-(


We have also bought a new car which we pick up in a few days time. We had talked about replacing our 2nd car (Mini Cooper) as its just too small for our needs now. My daughter is now too tall to fit in the back. I was hesitant, but we can see that we'll need to replace my wifes car probably in 2021, so my car will be that much older then and we didn't want to risk ourselves having to buy 2 cars around the same time


But I am in a dilemma now....for the first time i've bought a car on PCP, as we got a great deal and also 2 free services. Although we secured a great APR rate for a used car (7.4% APR, which I was really shocked about as generally used PCPs are between 9-12%), my initial thought was to pay the PCP off straight away with our savings


However the monthly payment is relatively low (£250pm) so I am thinking we should leave it, still pursue our dreams of being mortgage free in approx. 8 months, then once the mortgage is gone, this will free up £765pm to add to our monthly savings budget (approx. £1,700pm). We will be able then to clear the car approx. 6 months after that if we get our head down and save hard


However my MSE head screams that we should stick to the original thoughts and clear the PCP as its a much higher interest rate than our mortgage. However it will mean that it'll be more like 16 months until we will be mortgage free.


I would be grateful of some input as my head is a little scrambled


PS - if anybody fancies an excellent condition 59 plate Mini Cooper, please DM me for more details. As said we only changed it because we needed a bigger car!

dano17439

Well been 2 months since I updated my thread.....and how the world has changed! I hope everybody reading this is well
So further to my last post where I had just bought a new car....I did end up paying the finance off to save the interest...16k paid off....oh how I wish I hadn't done this now....the beauty of hindsight eh?
Although myself and my wife jobs are relatively safe, I would feel more comfortable with 20k+ in cash savings, instead of now this cash tied up in a lump of metal lol
Still we have no debt so we could always borrow if we needed to...although if we reached that point it would be desperate times indeed.
So we are still saving or £1,750 per month. Current mortgage balance is £37,720 less what we have saved so NET position is 31K owed
However theres no doubt this year will be a year of uncertainty, so we'll continue to save as much as we can. We are on a tracker mortgage so the interest rate for us is 0.99%. Unbelievable really
We've also cancelled our Abu Dhabi trip we had booked for May. Our holiday company have allowed us to defer the deposit paid, for a rebooking up to the end of 2021, so that's the option we took

dano17439

Hi folks
I hope everyone reading this is safe and well? Strange times and I feel a little bad about writing this with a lot of people suffering financially with loss of jobs/reduced pay etc. Nothing has changed for me and my wife...both working from home effectively, both being paid full salary so i guess we are lucky....
Anyway what has come to light is how much money we're not spending by being locked down. For a start we are saving around £450 per month in travelling costs, plus money saved not filling the cars with petrol etc. Amazingly we finished the month with still 2k in our current account, so this has gone straight into savings, along with our regular £1,750 this month. I cant see us being back at work in May either so could be the same this month aswell. Therefore this makes the mortgage NET balance just over 27k owed

beanielou

That's a good result then