Mortgage free by 2021?!

hiddenshadow

We got a free sample of Clover spread from our milk/egg delivery this morning, so I've shifted 75p from our Grocery pot to our savings pot. Every little helps, right?

hiddenshadow

:mad: Tried to submit an online application to move our S@ntander account over to H@lifax to get the £125 reward rather than £100. Of course it errors out. Phone up the support line and they say that the new account team is only available 9-5 Mon-Fri. Why have your deadline to open an account be Sunday at midnight then, especially if your system is going to throw an error? (Which, as a software developer - every system is going to error sometime so it's no good assuming that every application will work anytime.)

Guess I'll phone up tomorrow and see if they'll still credit me the £125. Would be nice to get the £5/mo anyway. Original plan was to shift to Ll0yds (where we already have a joint account) as it pays 4% on 4k+, so may just fall back to that.

pennystretcher

hiddenshadow wrote: »

:mad: Tried to submit an online application to move our S@ntander account over to H@lifax to get the £125 reward rather than £100. Of course it errors out. Phone up the support line and they say that the new account team is only available 9-5 Mon-Fri. Why have your deadline to open an account be Sunday at midnight then, especially if your system is going to throw an error? (Which, as a software developer - every system is going to error sometime so it's no good assuming that every application will work anytime.)

Guess I'll phone up tomorrow and see if they'll still credit me the £125. Would be nice to get the £5/mo anyway. Original plan was to shift to Ll0yds (where we already have a joint account) as it pays 4% on 4k+, so may just fall back to that.

Do you have TSB? They pay £125 too to switch?

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/compare-best-bank-accounts#tsb

hiddenshadow

pennystretcher wrote: »

Do you have TSB? They pay £125 too to switch?

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/compare-best-bank-accounts#tsb

Sadly already opened 3 TSB accounts in the last month (for the 5% interest) but didn't switch an account to them. (Hadn't yet fully decided to ditch S@ntander.)

DH submitted an application successfully for Halifax, but as it is a joint account being switched, it won't be processed for at least a week. Ah well, £100 is better than £0.

(Also expecting £100 in the next few weeks for "switching" our other joint account that we never used. Apparently it had 3 DDs setup for it, but only one was active, to pay off the associated credit card in full every month. We don't use that card, so no worries there.)

hiddenshadow

In other MSE news, I made £46.06 via MB over the weekend.

Allocating it to home maintenance for the moment as it will likely go towards solar and/or water softener.

Two weeks until mortgage reduction day!

hiddenshadow

Going over the budget again this morning (Mondays are my review days as I get all my banking text alerts), I realised I've been "cheating" a bit.

I'm subscribed to a yarn-of-the-month club that bills in USD. As I have a US credit card and bank account, and get money sporadically put in there, I haven't really been counting this spending as it all stays on that side of the (financial) pond.

I have yet to spend any of my £150 allowance this month, which I was quite proud of - until I realised that I should count that $$ as spent on my allowance.

So, budget shuffling... £55.87 off my allowance this month, which frees it up to go towards house expenses. Must remember to do this every month and not get lazy/give myself freebies.

Will see if I spend any of the remaining allowance money - not really tempted to buy anything, but I may leave it in there as my birthday is next month and I might want to treat myself then. If not, it can also join in on the house expenses fund (or maybe a mortgage OP ).

hiddenshadow

+£10 from Panelbase surveys. Pinecone rejected my application but panelbase seems pretty good about giving regular surveys.

hiddenshadow

Just got a phone call from the solar company and they're coming next Tuesday! :eek: and :j

I've been planning on things being installed mid-November, so this is a bit of a surprise, but may as well start getting money back from solar sooner rather than later.

Monkeychops16

Hope the solar panels work out, I am glad you went with it now after hearing the incentive is likely to stop in Jan x

hiddenshadow

Thanks, looking forward to seeing how they do.

On the energy front, we finally got our final bill from BG. (Shockingly, the meter readings they got from EON were identical to the readings we submitted as we sent the same readings to EON as starting readings, yet it takes a month to process. :doh:) Called up to get a refund, which seemed to surprise the customer service rep quite a bit - he asked several times if I really wanted a refund, and if I wanted a refund of the full amount. I declined to make a donation to the BG coffers.