Mortgage free by 2021?!

EatingTheElephant

You'll notice a big difference having the containers to freeze leftovers in, we use them so much. I just cooked a large pork and black bean chilli in the slow cooker friday, so now have 6 portions ready in the freezer for easy meals later on this month. I also use them for soup and defrosting the dog food and pretty much everything really!
Rome sounds fantastic, got to have things to look forward to.

hiddenshadow

Thanks, ETE. Sadly half the containers arrived broken, but am hoping the seller sends us new ones. Definitely appreciating having them already - DH has stopped griping that the fridge is full of large pyrex containers and we've already got some containers in the chest freezer.

First FIT payment arrived! :j No idea how they did their math, as they paid us £26.96. Our online solar panel app shows us accumulating £26.67 (up to now, and we provided our reading for FIT on Jan 29) - plus that includes the first day of generation where we weren't yet registered. Still, nice to have money! Somehow it went into our Ll0yds account which we haven't used for years, so we were a bit baffled at the credit showing up on my text alert this morning (it only showed "BGC", not E0N, still not sure what that might stand for). Duly sent off to the mortgage at any rate.

hiddenshadow

DH's season ticket loan has gone through and been OPed.

Spreadsheet says...£37.15 interest saved by paying it as a lump sum now and OPing £300 less/month for the next 10 months. Not earth-shattering, but it's a meal out!

Speaking of, DH has agreed to have his birthday dinner this week rather than at the end of the month. S@ntander has a 15% cashback offer which expires on Friday for the restaurant we were going to go to, so may as well save some extra money. I'll probably cook on DH's birthday to make up for it as well (though he does enjoy cooking).

hiddenshadow

£4.90 OP today from Sh0pit!ze - current mortgage balance of £152,948.95. Not too exciting as we're far from another thousands threshold, but nice to see the balance closing in on the £150k mark!

Spreadsheet predicts beating the £30k reduction goal by £349.62 at the moment, though still £1,319.24 short of the £130k final balance not-so-secret-goal. Hoping it won't be too hard to come up with an extra £132 OP every month - get ~£50 on bank interest alone.

More bank switching fun - DD to pay off the S123 credit card in full every month didn't happen, so got charged £10.43 interest. Called up S@ntander and got the interest refunded, manually made the payment to clear the CC and not carry a balance. Then spent far too long on hold with Clyde$dale but they also refunded the £10.43, will send that over to the mortgage when it appears. We're £15.43 ahead from DD faffing. DH said it was an ok way to make extra money, but he's not the one listening to hold music each time.

shangaijimmy

I spent quite a bit of time last year opening up various current accounts, switching bonuses, credit cards etc... And I must be honest I'm now thinking of reducing the amount of account searching this year. I'll definitely keep the Halifax and TSB accounts, but I'm done with credit cards (apart from the tesco one for the club card points). That's said I may well need an account to store a few thousand from an accident claim that is going through whilst we decide how best to utilise it (off the top of my head either Tesco which is easiest to manage for me with CC and savers for DD's, or Club Lloyds built that will start a whole new banking set up).

Great stats, and what is your date for smashing thougth the 130's? Our 120's will be gone by June, so exciting!

hiddenshadow

Right now the forecast is...

150s...April 2016
140s...September 2016
130s...January 2017 (hoping to move that forward to December)
120s...May 2017
110s...September 2017
100s...January 2018 hit 5 digits! Bring it on…

hiddenshadow

shangaijimmy wrote: »

And I must be honest I'm now thinking of reducing the amount of account searching this year.

We'll probably do one more round at the end of this year. If we go the car loan route we'll get another N@tionwide account for the 5% this spring. Our existing N@tionwide accounts end the 5% interest in October so we'll figure out what the best options are for those accounts then. Otherwise we're pretty happy with our account mix right now.

No real way to have avoided this switch, anyway, as we definitely weren't going to keep paying the S123 monthly fee when that jumped up! Wonder how much business they're losing due to the fee hike.

jodles16

Hi Hiddenshadow, just wanted to say you are an over payment machine! Meant in a very nice way of course! You are doing so amazingly! We found that S@ntander is still the best for us currently even with the hike, still earning back more than that though have started the switch to FD and they have a 6% saver that I have my eye on! Another massive kong fan here, my two love peanut butter though I only freeze it in the summer as I worry! haha.

Will call in again!

Jodles

hiddenshadow

Hi Jodles, thanks for your kind comments!

I try and think of ways to OP every day. I'm not always successful, but it helps to keep momentum up, and sometimes turns up interesting ways to tweak the budget that I wouldn't have considered.

We didn't have a full 20k in S@ntander after we paid for solar panels, so it made more sense to spread things around to banks that'll pay 5%.

The kongs are way less messy when frozen, though our bedroom pretty much permanently smells of peanut butter, haha! We've started putting their regular food in (with top/bottom layers of PB), both to control the smell but also to keep their calories down. They get a kong every weekday and sometimes on weekends, so that's a lot of peanut butter to go through. I'm sure they'd be fine without it, but it means they're super excited to see us leave the house. :rotfl:

gallygirl

hiddenshadow wrote: »

We'll probably do one more round at the end of this year. If we go the car loan route we'll get another N@tionwide account for the 5% this spring. Our existing N@tionwide accounts end the 5% interest in October so we'll figure out what the best options are for those accounts then. Otherwise we're pretty happy with our account mix right now.

No real way to have avoided this switch, anyway, as we definitely weren't going to keep paying the S123 monthly fee when that jumped up! Wonder how much business they're losing due to the fee hike.

Still worth our while having a S123 as we have close to the max in there but such a lot of faffing about elsewhere - why can no-one offer a regular saver for a minimum of 12m but let it run on . Also M&S are changing their rules and from April you'll need two DD's in your current account so next Feb that will be another one done