My MF Mission 2015

EatingTheElephant

Congratulations - for exam passing and bill cutting.

lippy1923

FML - my 123 account, 5% current account and now my £5 reward account are all slashing their returns. Getting really miffed about saving. I'm doing the right thing, not diving head first into debt like so many millions of people and I get F all for it. What's the point.
Literally going to shove as much money into my mortgage now as possible. Sod the banks.

hiddenshadow

The silver lining to that is that the mortgage balance ends up looking amazing very quickly.

But yes, sod the banks.

One "trick" we do is to keep as little as possible in the reward account so that the "interest" it pays is astronomical. DH's pay is deposited directly into it (meeting the deposit requirement), then I add up the CC payments that will go out on direct debit (meeting the 2 DDs requirement), and round the amount left in the account down to <= £10. e.g. if £1,000 goes into the account from pay and £200 will go to CC1 and £205 will go to CC2, I move £590 out to an account that pays interest, leaving £5 in the account. Thus the reward ends up equating to 100% "interest" as only £5 stays in the account all month.

Doesn't actually change the math, but at least it means that the £590 can live elsewhere (ideally earning interest, but really, not living in that account also works for me just on the principle of the thing ).

...wow that was wordy, sorry!

lippy1923

I do the same. Add up my bills in 1 account and put that sum plus about £10-20 extra just in case. Our pay goes in at the end of the month and bills get taken on the 1st.
Same with my other one, I add up my CC bills and put in that sum plus £10-20. There is never a balance in there for more than a couple of days.


My company have offered us a sharesave shceme with a 15% discount on share prices for 6 months. Think you can buy a % of your salary each month. I might go for this as getting nout elsewhere. Anyone done this before? Any advice as I am new to sharesave company schemes.


TIA.

hiddenshadow

lippy1923 wrote: »

My company have offered us a sharesave shceme with a 15% discount on share prices for 6 months. Think you can buy a % of your salary each month. I might go for this as getting nout elsewhere. Anyone done this before? Any advice as I am new to sharesave company schemes.

I've done this in the US before - it was pretty easy. Had the company auto-debit a certain amount (think it was $100) every month for the share scheme, got a notice once or twice a year as to the value of the shares. I think I was required to not sell them for a certain amount of time, so you may want to look into that, but 15% off is pretty sweet even with those restrictions.

shangaijimmy

Think ill continue with funding circle for now!

lippy1923

Gone off the spending wagon lately. DH especially has been spending on the CC like its going out of fashion.

Trimming my bills as much as possible but saving the odd £10pm here and there isn't going to get me far. So I have to increase my income. I put in a payrise request last week so hopefully that will go down ok. It's just got to be signed off by senior management. This would really help with my MF mission.

hiddenshadow

Fingers crossed on the pay rise.

lippy1923

Payday next week. Can't come soon enough. In the meantime I have £41 whizzing its way to my account from Topcashback.

It's my last month worth of 5% current account and 123 account interest before they slash the rates. Hopefully next month I will get my pay raise so will make up for the fall in interest income and then some. Fingers crossed. :cool:

I signed up for my sharesave scheme at work. They take an amount from my pay each month and after 6 months they then buy the shares with a 15% discount. I am then free to continue to save in the scheme for another 6 months or withdraw the funds, which seems pretty good considering I get bog all in interest with the banks now.

Moneyfordreams

We are in my OH's share scheme.... it seems almost too good to be true. He believes if we were to sell them at current market rates we would have an increase of more than 33%. He wants to cash it in next summer, pay it off the mortgage, then start again but £200 a month instead of £100.