My Diary - Mortgage free in five years! Here's hoping!

MAMAPANDA

Having spent many hours deciding on whether to move area or not, we are staying put and have decided to embark on being mortgage free ASAP, as of May 1st this year we are hoping to pay off the remainder of our £90k mortgage and be mortgage free in five years time. I'm really excited to start this journey and hope we can achieve our goal without stretching ourselves too much.
Our first step is use our savings to pay off £46k of our mortgage of £136k to leave use with £90k.
Step 2 is to make overpayments of £500 and to put £500 a month into savings. Planning to use the £500 savings to pay of more of the mortgage every quarter, just in case we have any extra bills or outgoings.
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i'm hoping by documenting it it will spur us on Any tips?

Luckyinlife

Amazing work saveing up 46k wow :]

I think your doing the right think to pay of the mortgage i bet youll save a massive amount of time and interest have you worked out how much ?

i think the 50/50 split is a great idea maby keep a emergency fund ? 6 months of living and chuck everything at the mortgage ? this way youll always have cash for a rainy day and be paying of the mortgage quicker
both ideas work well tho :]

I shall follow with intrest

MAMAPANDA

thank you

It should save us about 13 years and £30k. I'm thinking of keeping about £8k as an emergency fund which with the extra every six months should keep us out of trouble if anything bad arises. Its an exciting prospect having no mortgage :-)

shangaijimmy

Great plan and the best of luck. The best tips will be found by reading all these diaries as some of the advice and encouragement is terrific. I also think your only diary well help as it makes you accountable if you like. I personally look forward to the 1st of every month as a day to post mortgage accounts and update signature (tomorrow incidentally!)

MAMAPANDA

Well, back from holiday and the car requires a hefty repair costing £1000 :-(

But on the plus side this has meant we are being very frugal with our shopping/spending so hoping it won't dent the plans particularly.

Looking forward to getting the big chunk paid off, the money should be through any day now. I do love this feeling of excitement at doing this. Already been good and bought lunch with me to work rather than buying it, oh and made sure my coffee was the free Waitrose one.

I am loving reading everyones stories, love the sense of community and encouragement from everyone.

Quick question, our interest is calculated daily and in my sleep deprived (we have two smalls) I can't work out when is the best time to make the big payments. Our DD goes out on 1st of the month so I need to do it either after this or enough before to make it possible to cancel the direct debit (our mortgages are in various chunks rather than one whole product)

Any advice gratefully received.

MAMAPANDA

Quick update.

Paid off £10k today - feels great :-) Other money should be paid off in the next few weeks :-)

Oh and was very good with my shopping bill, £15 so far this week and I should only need to buy milk/salad once. Going to use up some of the store cupboard ingredients that have been sitting there a little longer than they probably should have!

Luckyinlife

Fantastic work :] 10k is massive amount what kinda payments do you have planned for few weeks ?

MAMAPANDA

We are awaiting some money to be transferred over then we can pay off another £35k so should be at £90k by end of the month

Plan from then is
Mortgage standard payment £504
Mortgage overpayment £496
Mortgage overpayment (but held in a separate account and paid in quarterly to keep a little more just in case money) £500
Emergency Fund (ISA) £250

Realised we spend a small fortune on food so looking at making big cuts there, and being good and getting on with selling stuff we no longer use. First on the list is a classic car worth about £3k which will go into the Emergency fund, and then we've instruments and assorted small peoples paraphernalia to go too!

Luckyinlife

Amazing work :] very motivational stuff

Ya i sold a car few months back to get funds back into accounts i am now stopping myself getting a cheaper car for a bit of fun hehe

Ya food can be expensive if you dont watch it

MAMAPANDA

So today I've been playing around with figures and spreadsheets these last two days and have sorted a new budget for us. I'm pleased to see the areas we've been spending a little to freely in are things that can easily be cut out/down so shouldn't have too much impact on our daily lives. Even more pleasing is that our unbudgeted holiday actually didn't see us spending ridiculous amounts, so again not as big an impact on the finances as i expected.

Today I've moved a few more things around and we are now down to £120,000 :-) and I'm keeping £10,000 as an emergency fund now and going to put the extra savings we were going to put towards the ISA pot towards the mortgage OP as I'm happier with having the Emergency fund already at the amount I wanted.

Spend wise although no NSD's yet this is our first month and we are looking to be on target for the monthly budget so I'm a Happy Panda at the moment.

Luckyinlife

Emergency fund is great idea
when the mortgage gets down to a level where you can chuck the EF at the mortgage then well that's my plan once i hit 8-10k left ill use the EF to finish of my mortgage