ATB's £171k quest begins.... NOW!

Luckyinlife

Defiantly the right decision would be silly to pay more interest to make extra overpayments plus it will be fun to see the money build in your accound for 2 years and ship it over after this time :]

If you cant control yourself put the money into premium bonds where you cant just transfer it over and spend it instantly :]

Watty1

After your lovely comments I had to come and find diary Great stuff! I'm self employed and I totally get the dilemma. The 10% only thwarted my attempts to really get going whilst I dithered about whether to really tackle mortgage. My dithering took years until I got focused. That might be the key really. Overpay the 10% you can and then save the rest but keep a track of the savings - so you can see it growing daily. That was what motivated me in the end to save. Keeping tack so I could see the 'pile' growing. I wrote it in my diary and kept a tally and wrote down why I removed anything.
It was the 'focus' that really helped.
Will be cheering you on

atypicalblonde

Hi Watty thanks for popping by.

I am going to find an online fixed rate account so I can log on to see the pile grow

The key to success on this journey will be living below our means. We are pretty good at this now, and come September we will have a spare bit of money in the budget as DD gets her 15 free hours of nursery at 3

Time for a cuppa before getting back to my desk x

atypicalblonde

Afternoon All,


Well I am mightily pleased because... we are sub £167k! Well, £166,999 to be precise! I have just spent a bit of time playing with our figures and realised that I could make that extra OP to bring us to just under the £167k mark, and what a good feeling it is. I wish my blimmin smilies worked!


There is just no way March is going to be anywhere near as fruitful as February has been with overpaying, however to say I only started on this quest properly a mere few weeks ago I am really chuffed with the progress we have made.


Time for a celebratory cuppa x

System

Thought I'd pop in and say Hello

All the little targets will really add up as you go along.

Will also keep the motivation up to carry on.

I'll be reading up on your progress

Enjoy your cuppa!

Luckyinlife

well done on sub 167k :]

Watty1

I love those "below milestones" on this journey . Congratulations

atypicalblonde

Happy Sunday folks!

We are easing into the day here (well, as much as you can ease into anything with a baby and a toddler!). Breakfast eaten, washing machine on and Frozen on the TV :-)

Tomorrow is the day all of our bills go out by DD so I have made sure there is enough in the current account to cover them. It will also be the first mortgage payment to be taken since we started this challenge so I will be interested to see how much capital is paid off by our normal monthly payment - not a lot I reckon!

Our balance as at today's date is £166,999. Not bad going to say we have been on this journey less than a month! My aim is to get to £165k by the end of March - I have a business meeting tomorrow which will give me some idea of what income I can expect from my business for the month ahead, and I'm hoping we can use that money to make the required overpayments. It will be a fairly tight month I think - DS is 1 (not that we are buying him anything but we are hosting a little party for him), my best friend is 40 and she also gets married this month so we will have a few reasons to spend. All lovely things though!

Ok enough of my witterings, best get on have good days all xx

atypicalblonde

Back again!
I have been inputting my figures into the mortgage overpayment calculator and have actually printed it all off and stuck it in the hardback notebook I am using to keep track of myself on this challenge.

To meet our goal we need to OP £2200 per month, which will be entirely doable some months, not so much other months. We just need to stay focussed. I have revised our MF aim date - 1/1/2020


Lets do this xx

atypicalblonde

Good Afternoon everyone,


A great few days here. So far in March we have:

• Made some more OPs bringing the mortgage down to £164,500 exactly. I can't believe we have been on this road just one month & one day and we have achieved this much already. What on earth were we spending our money on before?!
• Whilst reading through the paperwork for the new deal, I realised they were putting us on an 80% LTV deal. Given the OPs made in the last week, this has brought us into the 75% LTV bracket now, so we have even more fixed rate options! So rather than 2.6% we have now got a deal at 2.34%!
• Budgets done for the month and attempting to be as frugal as possible - not easy this week as DH is at home and has hollow legs for food and loves a beer on an evening! So grocery shopping is up this week on what it has been in previous weeks.
• In my lovely hardback notebook I use to track this challenge, I have stuck in a print-out of the overpayment calculator results for our mortgage. To be totally free of it in 5 years we need to overpay £2,200 a month. This is a large amount and some months will be really difficult, but we are determined to stick to it.

I don't know if anyone is reading or if I witter to myself, but its keeping me focussed! Happy Mondays folks xx