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Luckyinlife

Blue fire thats great :] you should of watched sponge bob its great hehe

just surprise him when you do hit the target :] £550 is amazing target

mine been good thank Sunday i just chill been to beach today

Bluefire

Stage 2 of the remortgage complete, we just need to take the necessary paperwork into HSBC for photocopying later.

Point of confusion was the amount we were putting aside each year to pay off the capital at the end of the interest loan - apparently they will only consider 90% of what you're saving, therefore we now need to save £78300 in order to pay off a £70500 loan. Go figure.

Of course it's all arbitrary in the end anyway, because we know as soon as our residential mortgage is cleared we'll move on to overpaying the BTL, but still, it seems a little crazy to me!

Bluefire

Another £100 knocked off the mortgage tonight. Turns out DH actually withdrew £2100 from the premium bonds rather than the £2000 he was meant to, I think he was hoping I wouldn't notice... We've actually decided tonight just to stash the remainder of the premium bond money in a savings account rather than use it as an overpayment. The interest rate is higher, so basically we're just offsetting it for now.

Bluefire

Slight re-jig of our overpayment goals yet again, taking into account the fact we now want to offset some of it in savings. So the total goal by the end of this year is still £13,900, but £5000 of that will be savings & £8,900 overpayments. £6,500 of which we've already made.

So hopefully we'll be overpaying £300 each month & saving £300, at least until the end of this year anyway, at which point the plan is to go back to overpayments only.

In other news, I started stoozing yesterday! Nothing exciting yet, but the Tesco credit card I got accepted for a couple of weeks back has 17 months interest free on purchases, so I thought it was worth a go. Started off with just the grocery shopping which should be around £200 p/m.

Off to make a surprise cake today for a friend's 30th birthday now, slight bit of money saving on my part as it's going to be my gift.

Bluefire

So the cake came out pretty well:



I have three friends turning 30 this year & they're all getting cakes for presents. I no longer do it as a business so it's fun to dip my toe back in!

Overpayments are done for the month so instead I've been concentrating on the rental account & whether we have enough to pay what needs to come out over the next financial year. I thought a good start would be to get the tax return done, so that's sorted & thankfully we have enough put aside to cover it. We're not actually going to submit it until January next year, the month can just sit in the account earning 4% interest until then. Not the most exciting way to spend a Sunday I'll grant you...

Luckyinlife

Love that cake mmm looks soo good great job

well done on another OP and i do the same keep it till end of jan and try to earn a little something from it iv put it into premium bonds this year tho so see if i get lucky :]
we also got a payment on account in july boooo to that lol

Bluefire

Luckyinlife wrote: »

Well done on another OP and i do the same keep it till end of jan and try to earn a little something from it iv put it into premium bonds this year tho so see if i get lucky :]

Don't tell my DH that, I'm still getting stick about convincing him to withdraw his money from the bonds! Still planning on buying him some back for Christmas though when I can afford it.

Can't get over how much easier a BTL tax return is compared to when I was doing it for cakes. So nice not to have to dig through mountains of receipts. Payment on account - that's when you have to do it in advance right? Luckily I never made enough money to have to do that, but I have a cake friend who suddenly had to do it one year & it hit her really hard. Think she had to hire an accountant in the end to sort it out!

Luckyinlife

Ya i know what you mean with the bonds i wouldnt put a lot into them but seeing as any winnings i may get will be tax free is makes sense for me

ya you pay a tax in jan then half of what ever it was in jan in july the same year which comes on the next tax years account its not to bad but if you dont know about it can kill you :[
I have an account costs me £25 a month saves me so much hassle well worth it :]

Bluefire

I've been keeping this diary just under 3 weeks now and it amazes me how much our plans have evolved during that short time. We've gone from wanting to go in all guns blazing throwing everything we could at the mortgage, to deciding to split our money between savings & overpayments, to last night finally coming to the realisation that now our account switching/opening is done, we have the opportunity to save at a higher rate than we're paying on the mortgage.

Therefore, the plan from here on out is all about offsetting. Overpayments are going to cease for the time being, at least until we've achieved the targets we're setting for savings. If I can sell some of our clutter it's possible we'll overpay that, but we'll see how it goes.

New targets are as follows: £2000 in the rental account, £2000 in a HSBC regular saver, and £800 in a Club Lloyds monthly saver. In total that's £4800, which was our original target for overpayments. So we have the same amount of money to find each month (£550) but it's just going in a different place now.

Bluefire

Just had confirmation that the underwriters are happy with the BTL remortgage application, we're paying the fees tonight & then there's just the valuation to go. What a relief!

Stoozing continues well here, I go shopping with my Mum once a week & she's agreed to let me run her shopping through my credit card too, meaning more in the stoozing pot as well as extra clubcard points! I can see some nice date nights in the future with DH courtesy of clubcard vouchers.