Mortgage free by 2021?!

hiddenshadow

Ali-OK wrote: »

Food shop at £25 a week budget in Ald! is probably a good regular one for me to use - fingers crossed it works in there ok.

Do you send money over to refill back to £2k after using it too to keep the max on interest?

I've got a to-do list item for this week to phone them up and ask why their contactless is wonky. Hoping they'll have a helpful answer.

Yes, I go through every few days and top up the accounts to maintain the £2k balance - probably lose a bit of interest rather than checking every day, but less than keeping all three accounts at £2100 from the start of the month. (Clearly I've thought this through way too much. :rotfl:)

Sundaysgirl

What an amazing reduction to focus on - good luck and keep chipping away at it, all the small amounts really do add up quickly!

hiddenshadow

Thanks!

Did my workout yesterday and today - legs are soo tired, but I'm glad I'm pushing through.

As a reward post-workout I made the £500 OP with the money from MIL. Should be able to do at least 2 OPs next week, one from budget tidying and our regular February OP on payday. Current balance is down to £158,845.81 - not bad considering the year started at almost £162k!

Going to try scrapping our milk/eggs/veg delivery and get a regular (weekly or biweekly as needed) grocery delivery. The milk/eggs should be about half the price with grocery delivery, and the veg DH can pick up on his weekly stop in the town centre (should also be cheaper, but more importantly we can get only the specific veg we want rather than random extra veg that we end up throwing out).

Have made 4 7-day meal plans, need to work this weekend on shopping lists of ingredients and figure out which supermarket to go with for a delivery saver. Hoping we can stick to this as then we'll spend less time debating what to make/eat, and use up more of our cupboard store. Also should have regular leftovers to take to work, which would be good. We've been spending ~£250-275/mo on food, would like to get that down to £200 at most.

Not much else to report. Clyde$dale switch should happen next week, got a text from S@ntander confirming that they know about it, so that's better than before. Looking into a short (4-5 day) holiday around Easter, need to figure out where to go - so far we've narrowed things down to Italy, but that's still a bit vague.

debtfreeoneday

All sounding good in here.. awesome start on the OP's

hiddenshadow

debtfreeoneday wrote: »

All sounding good in here.. awesome start on the OP's

Thanks! I'm hoping we can keep it up.

Ali-OK

Echoing DFOD - over £3k off in one month and more to go - superb OPing :T

Grocery plan sounds good too, as much as I used to love having our milk delivered it was quite a bit more expensive. I try and keep a spare 2 pints in the freezer as well to avoid the corner shop trips

cazmanian_minx

Wow, epic start to the year!

hiddenshadow

Grocery delivery with the first week of meal planning arrived today - bit more than ideal spent (£69.54), but that included stocking up on some things not in this week's meal plan as they were on offer, as well as tissues thanks to our profligate use of them recently (also on offer).

DH went into town yesterday to run errands and get the veg part of our shop, and he voluntarily went to S@insburys instead of A$da. Granted, he went because he had coupons for free biscuits (I can't have them thanks to gluten), but while he was in there he decided to shop for the rest of the things. Definitely a bonus as we have a pre-payment card that gives 4% back (A@da discontinued their card about a year ago). Only spent £13.67 total, including the biscuits that we got for free after cashback. :j We'll make an MSEer of him yet!

Quiet weekend otherwise - browsing online for sheets as the ones we have (and love) are about a decade old, and the greyhound's ripped holes in them making himself a nest in our bed during the day. :mad: :rotfl: Our travel insurance from last year wanted to auto-renew at twice the price (!) so cancelled that straight away. We won't be travelling until March anyway, so no point paying to have it in February, and a quick comparison shows that we can get an annual policy for ~£20 as we won't be going to the US until next March.

In tidying up our budget I consolidated some categories and shifted things around. Based on seeing someone's comment on the YNAB forums I've renamed our emergency fund category "B anana Stand" (minus the space). :rotfl: (Still have to finish watching that show, come to think of it - we're still on season 2, I think. Also have no idea why that got caught in the forum's word filter.) At any rate, it makes me smile when I look at it in the budget, so that's a (very) small win.

Quiet weekend all 'round - was good and went for a run yesterday, and will do some ab exercises today.

debtfreeoneday

Sounds like DH's training is working!!! :-)

hiddenshadow

debtfreeoneday wrote: »

Sounds like DH's training is working!!! :-)

I know, it's amazing! Not that he's anti-MSE, but he's very much a creature of habit and resistant to change.

Once we have a car it'll be easier as well, as we both can go together, and possibly even branch out to places like A!di. One step at a time though...