My Diary - Mortgage free in five years! Here's hoping! 28 April 2015 at 1:34PM edited 12 May 2015 at 10:42AM in Mortgage-free wannabe 19 replies 2.4K views

MAMAPANDA

I expect we will do similar with our Emergency fund if we get to that stage too :-)

Luckyinlife

Bluefire wrote: »

I wish my DH would agree to this! We'd be finished this time next year then. When I queried it I was met with point blank refusal though. Will try again when it's actually a possibility & see how the idea flies...

I can see why resistance is there hehe the way i look at it the EF is incase i cant pay my mortgage which is the biggest bill most of us have so when you can pay it off you may as well. without a mortage my EF would be a third of what it is now lol

when the time comes im sure youll fire it over

Ohhh the single life so much more simpler but lonely haha

MAMAPANDA

Been a busy month but we've sold the car, and have now put that in towards paying the mortgage off. Overall budgeting is going quite well, though we are still a bit over for the month. This may be that i've set slightly unrealistic targets. Plan is to see where we are in three months time and then review the figures.

Feeling happy though, we are now down to £117k and hopefully another £26k to come off at the end of the month bringing us down to a very exciting £91k outstanding.

Just the smalls savings to sort out now, although if we are mortgage free in five years time in might be easier to wait until then and just chuck some money at them then? decisions, decisions!

must update my signature too :-)

MAMAPANDA

Well what a few months its been, more saving and the rest of our money has been transferred so we are now down to under £90k which is brilliant news. the savings plans and our budget still need some tweaking but I'm really excited for the New year and seeing how well we can do.

Luckyinlife

amazing progress well done :] wow

MAMAPANDA

Amazing how the time has been rolling on by, lots of changes have happened, but the good news is we've been plodding away at overpaying and are now down to 83k and we will have another 1k to pay in on top of our usual amounts in the next couple of months. Our emergency fund hasn't changed but i'm looking to get it up to 15k by the end of the year. Seems like the target is getting harder to reach at the minute but maybe we've just had some expensive months go by. I've just redone our budget for the end of the year and hope to keep us on track. It will be interesting to see what the interest rates do, as to whether our plan comes off.

enjoyyourshoes

Regular savings can generate 6% (HSBC & FD) which might be a better return than your mortgage interest rate?

Have you looked at remortgaging to lower rate as there are still deals to be done?

Look at 5 year fixed as this is the timescale you have given yourself, and then compare Vs RS as mentioned above.

Once you have maxed out the FD/HSBC, Santander do 5% RS along with TSB.

Both partners can have 1 RS each for each of the above accounts.

MAMAPANDA

Thank you enjoyyours, I've been pondering savings vs paying off just always felt happier knowing the money had actually gone off the mortgage. But I'm going to have a look at HSBC/FD accounts and see if we can get them. we havemt looked at remortgaging as our interest rate is only 2.5% but this might well mean that savings are a better option for now??

MAMAPANDA

Well what a year!

It's been a long time since I updated. We successfully got our mortgage down to £78K at the end of the year and have plans to pay off at least another £12k this year. We will also be building the emergency fund back up to £10k. Our goal date is probably unrealistic because we have decided that we also want to live and do things with our kids, as we won't get this time again. So it's all about Balance this year.
My main focus is cutting our food costs and random spends down so we have more money to do fun stuff with the kids. I'm also getting better at finding deals. We will be using our clubcard points for days out and also doing lots of National Trust visits as we had a membership for christmas.

Hers's to a good 2017