Mortgage free by 2023 (!)

Firegirl

Hope you feel better soon!! Keep on overpaying - even if its wee bits here and there it all adds up!

debtfreeoneday

That's a good take on it hidden shadow and you're spot on, you don't see the need until you have the need. Right will factor that into my 2016 goals as job could be changeable for me next year and I've no guarantee of coming out of it with something.

mummytogirls

Hope your sniffles go away quickly and don't bother you guys in the meantime DF0D xx

debtfreeoneday

Tipping it down here.. with that in mind I'm debating buying an electric clothes dryer - wonder if it would be cheaper than the tumble drier, but there is the whole ' clothes drying in the house / space ' issue and the resulting increase in moisture in the air, thinking about the damp problems we had last year.

Just cashed in £3 from p-cone, and done a £1.70 survey from p-base, up to £4.20, YG doing well again at about £10/£50. 1poll is so quiet and Ips0s is at payout, but they are out of am@zon vouchers, so I'll just let that continue to build until they are back in stock.. decided now most of the xmas shopping is done that I will not touch the am@zon credits at all next year and just let it stockpile for christmas and birthdays.. managed to snaffle the extra £7 Martin was on about this week after buying gift cards, which I needed anyway..

Hoping Mr T CC arrives soon as S@ntander keeps declining payments even though I am nowhere near the credit limit - not impressed really. at least once that is paid, I can get rid of the app on my phone.. too many banking ones at the moment after all the changes recently.

Got to wait in today for someone to look at our fan in the bathroom, but not planning on venturing out anyway, one little person is still a bit under the weather.. we are out for the next three days doing various stuff, so a quiet day isn't the end of the world.

debtfreeoneday

I need a face palm emoji.. just made a payment to the S@ntander CC and it failed on the mobile banking app so I redid it and OMG, the pesky thing has gone through twice.. so then I though stuff it and paid the last bit off and cut the card up.. so that is the end of me and s@ntander.. being honest, this also means that CC2 pot is now down and in theory that isn't paid off, but I'm not opening that up again.. it'll be back up to paid off again by Xmas.

Tried to wangle a pay day figure out of payroll so I knew what extra I had to play with, but no such luck, will have to sit and wait till Thursday.

Just reworked the monthly payments based on current pay, pay increase is likely to bring in £25 extra I think, so will split this between increasing the OP for the mortgage and CC1.

Debating not having a CC at all as I can't seem to control spending on them.

debtfreeoneday

You can tell I've got a day at home,, doing lots of finance thinking. Messing about with the OP calculator and it's looks unachievable for us to hit MF by the end of 2023.

So I'm going to switch focus.. I will just leave CC1 alone and pay minimum payments moving it between CC's for 0% deals when I need to. I'm going to start flinging what I can at OP's now. We need to get £400 a month to even be in with a shot of hitting target.. at the moment the budget allows for about £318. I've reworked all the pots again to be more realistic, ie putting money aside for a month in hand fund, car insurance, house insurance and holidays..

I appreciate I'm likely to have transfer fees, but hopefully it would only be about 2/3 times until the balance of CC1 is gone. I will also try and send little bits that way as and when I can. I figure these amounts would be nowhere near the interest saved on the mortgage?

Any thoughts?

hiddenshadow

What's the interest rate on your mortgage?

You'll generally pay 3% to do a balance transfer so you'll want to compare that against the mortgage rate. If the mortgage rate is lower then you could stop OPing it altogether and knock out the CCs and then make > £400 OPs for the mortgage once you're debt-free (including whatever you've sent towards debt in your mortgage OP).

Of course the balance transfer fee will go down each time as you'll be paying off the debt. Assuming you sent £100/mo towards it and kept it on 0% deals, it'd take 46 months to be gone. If you got that across 3 balance transfers you'd probably only spend ~£300 in balance transfer fees to keep it on the 0%. (And then you'd have £100 extra to OP the mortgage.)

The interest saved on the mortgage is beneficial over time - if you OP £5 today you save on the next 10+ years of interest on that £5. But that only helps you for those 10 years - if sending that £5 to CC1 would save you, say, £15 in interest over the next 6 months because it's at a higher rate, you may as well save that £15 and then OP it to the mortgage down the line.

You could always do a hybrid approach - set a target for CC1 or the mortgage and OP that with any saved/found/earned money, and then anything above that goes to the other one. Ultimately any debt OPs will help you out, it's just a question of what gets the debt gone fastest.

debtfreeoneday

Thanks hiddenshadow.. the mortgage is 4.09% so higher than the balance transfer fees.. and it feels right to OP on that.. I could easily take another 12 months to pay off CC1 and it's a whole year of decent OP's wasted for as you say something that could cost me £300 in the long term to pay off month by month interest free. That's a really helpful answer though thank you!!!

That said, anyone who has read this diary regular will know I just won't leave CC1 alone. and maybe it's the regular OP that goes towards the mortgage and then the saved / earnt / extras that go towards CC1. I'd really like to start OPing at least £300 a month as of January 2016.. so that would mean a target of at least £3600 next year..

hiddenshadow

debtfreeoneday wrote: »

That said, anyone who has read this diary regular will know I just won't leave CC1 alone. and maybe it's the regular OP that goes towards the mortgage and then the saved / earnt / extras that go towards CC1. I'd really like to start OPing at least £300 a month as of January 2016.. so that would mean a target of at least £3600 next year..

That sounds like a good balance.

debtfreeoneday

After yesterdays' double payment fiasco, my bank balance is £158 today. For anyone that thinks I've got this MSE thing sorted, that shows you I haven't. That's it, that's all we have. No savings, no other accounts.. bit of a wake up call.. Just today and tomorrow to get through and then my wages go in.

I really need to concentrate on building up a buffer, especially if the focus is switching to OP's as that money will go out the bank account as fast as i can build it up.

In general my 'pots' look healthy, but I've just under £500 of ruddy car bill offset against them, which means the balance will sit at about £500 for this month - way too close for comfort..

One way to make me stop and think about every purchase I guess!