Mortgage free by 2021?!

shangaijimmy

Fantastic progress being made. Very inspiring.

hiddenshadow

Thanks SJ!

hiddenshadow

Obsessive internet research pays off again...

I'd read somewhere that you don't pay vehicle tax when importing a car from the UK to Ireland if you've owned it at least a year. Thus we were figuring our earliest move date would be late April 2017. I found a vehicle tax estimator online to see how much it'd be if we did move earlier than that (€460, so not horrible), but then also discovered that you only have to have owned the car for 6 months. That frees us up to move anytime after October 2016, though I think we'll still probably shoot for April sometime as DH's work year resets then so it'll theoretically be a bit more palatable for his boss if he switches to remote working with the new year, plus he'll have a new holiday allowance to use for moving.

My office is getting a bit crowded plus we're hiring more people so I'm hoping by April the idea of a permanently freed up desk will seem super appealing. We have a fairly flexible work-from-home policy anyway, so with luck they won't object to me making it a permanent thing. If so, it's not a huge deal, I can switch to freelance but it'll likely take longer to find a fully remote gig.

hiddenshadow

Only £7.62 cashback from T$B last month. I think due to our trip to visit the in-laws as we didn't get cashback on travelling to work for those days.

Current mortgage: £136,004.93

Super tempted to just shuffle £5 around in the budget somewhere, but I know I won't be motivated to move through the £900s so may just stockpile any extra savings for the rest of the month and do them all in one go. Expecting at least £60 at some point (not sure if it'll all arrive by the 31st though)....maybe I can hit £100? Plus MB should net another £100 or so, I think.

shangaijimmy

I was tortured by the find an extra £5 scenario, but in the end sense prevailed thinking I'd only be in the same boat again next month! Equally where does it end...£5, £10, £25, £50...aaaggghhhh! Torture!

hiddenshadow

Speak of the devil, N@tionwide has paid our referral bonus today - didn't expect that until the end of September! £100 in my current account, £100 in DH's.

That firmly puts us in the £135s. Current balance: £135,804.93 Next month we should get fairly close to £133k, so will look to that as our next goalpost. £339.68 to find by the end of September...

SJ, I try and keep our budget fairly "fixed" each month regarding OPs. I do the planned amount at the start of the month (to maximise interest saved) but any extra I try not to count too firmly until the end of the month, as you never know what will come up. The exception to this is for fixed expenses where we encounter savings, e.g. our water bill is due in a couple of months and we'll have £90 saved. If I get an e-mail next month saying the bill is only £82, I'll immediately OP (or offset) that £8 as I know I won't need it for water. Anything likely to change, though (food, petrol, etc) I try and tidy up at the end of the month...usually we can get about £50 out of our travel pot, but I'd rather know we have that extra throughout the month in case we need to go somewhere (case in point: last month with FIL's illness).

Re: the debate on where to stop with £5/£10/etc, I try and treat those things as challenges for creating money, rather than an urge to save money somewhere (as I'm likely to need that money saved at some point so it does no good to lock it away in the mortgage). I use the goalpost as motivation to do MSE things (get off a stop early and walk for 20 minutes in to work, spend 20min extra at the store comparing prices/using coupons, etc) and as motivation for earning extra money when I don't necessarily feel like it (surveys and MB primarily). I figure if I try and get that extra £5/£10/X with extra money and fail, no harm done and at least I've tried. If I don't try, or I cheat and steal from savings pots that are meant to be for other things, then there's not much point. So, for me, not too much pressure to end up in a never-ending cycle of "but I could just hit that next milestone too!", otherwise we'd probably end up extreme and not contribute to pensions (costing us money in the long run), eat beans & rice 24/7 (boring, much as I like it sometimes), give away our pets (DH would be happy to see stupid cat go ), and live a very miserly life.

TL,DR; I try and look at all our numbers holistically and find the next goalpost to shoot for that's the easiest - choosing from any of end-of-month balance, daily interest, % completion towards annual/MFIT goals, % LTV, etc. Once I hit a milestone in a month I try not to focus on any other goals in that month unless they're super easy (like OPing £3 or whatever last month to get to 22% on MFIT for reporting time)...both for sanity's sake and to practice mindfulness/appreciating the achievement before moving on to the next.

(Wow, my TL,DR was pretty long too, oops!)

hiddenshadow

£25 from sw@gbucks bringing our mortgage to £135,779.93.

£314.67 to find in the next month to reach 132s.

Spreadsheet also says we broke 30% of our original mortgage amount paid off this month.

Quiet week otherwise. Payday for me on Thursday, probably Friday for DH. We had a good chat at the weekend about our third year of marriage and upcoming plans/life events/etc. Overall we're cautiously optimistic about moving/lifestyle changes, though we'll need to see what we think on our September trip as well.

DH may even be considering decluttering his giant collection of books/dvds/blu-rays/etc. :eek: Will believe it when I see it. :rotfl:

shangaijimmy

Oooh, Id love to declutter Mrs SJ's DVDs and books. Books I don't mind but DVDs never get watched. Crying out for music magpie!

hiddenshadow

That's the problem, SJ, DH does watch most of his things....for 10 minutes, or once for an extra commentary, or whatever - but then of course he has to keep it forever.

He has sold a few things on Music Magpie, though, so not entirely a lost cause. I suggested this could be the incentive to digitise everything onto hard drives and get rid of the physical disks...I was originally opposed to that due to the cost of the hard drives, but if the alternative is paying loads for storage for 1+ years while we rent in Ireland, hard drives seem a lot more attractive! We'll see - he may go for more binder-style storage things which are at least a lot more compact than individual disks (but of course he also wants to keep the DVD jackets). :rotfl:

edinburgher

Hard drives are very cheap, cloud storage might be an option if you're ok with that as well? I worked with an interesting chap who digitised his entire life using a NAS - childhood photos onwards, correspondence, work and all his media