Five Year Plan

mikenolan

So we've had the smart meter installed for a few weeks, but had to phone them up to get it switched to half hourly reporting. That means I can now generate graphs (we all know how much MFW people love a bit of chart p0rn!)

Cheapest day so far cost £1.32 for gas and electric:


Strangely the month view shows a different cost for the day:


One of the main reasons for getting a smart meter was to reduce the risk of me underpaying by direct debit and ending up with a big bill at the end of the fix but as things stand we're actually paying way too much!


Probably won't take up their offer of a refund or adjusting the direct debit just in case our usage next winter is much higher but it should make a nice little lump sum next February!

mikenolan

The baby is three months old today and proving quite cheap to run so we've restarted over payments with a standing order running for the next six months to make the 10% annual maximum.

mikenolan

Time flies when you're having fun! Nearly 6 months since the last update and things have been ticking along. Mortgage free progress has been hit and miss. On the positive side we had a cheap summer "holiday" taking our Scouts camping in the Lake District. I've been cycling to work every day for the last two+ months and bringing in lunches most days. One of our cars hasn't been filled up with petrol for over three months!

Which brings us to the main spendy thing - buying a new (second hand) car. This has eaten into our savings a little and there's still currently a chunk on a 0% credit card with a plan to pay off in under a year.

On balance though I think we're doing okay. This month's over payment brought us up to the 10% annual limit, so after regular payments in Nov/Dec we should go into 2017 with £58,000 outstanding.

mikenolan

Another 18 months on and where are we up to?! Well, we've another child on the way, due in May, around the same time as the current 5 year fixed mortgage deal is up. The balance for our new (used) car on a credit card is well paid off but we then went and bought a van to convert into a campervan. We're doing the conversion ourselves which will save some money but it's still not cheap!

On the mortgage side, we're fortunate to have stumbled across a chunk of money so have decided to go for an offset mortgage account, fixed for the next 5 years. While we could probably pay off a good proportion of the outstanding balance, or get slightly better interest rates on some of it in savings, I'm willing to pay a price for liquidity.

So the plan is now to be fully offset this year, then start drip feeding money into higher interest savings accounts wherever they can be found. At the end of the 5 year fix we'll hopefully be able to pay off the remaining mortgage balance and still have a reasonable savings pot.

mikenolan

Another year on and the baby is nearly one year old, so how goes the mortgage free progress?

We remortgaged last year to an offset account, fixed for five years and moved all our savings in there, plus some money that is for our children's benefit. The debt is now fully offset so it's nice to have paid no interest since last summer! The balance is being paid off from the offset savings accounts so the task now is to build up separate savings pots with the spare money that was previously going towards the mortgage.

We've filled up as many high interest paying current accounts as we can get our hands on so I've now started putting a bit into Ratesetter - getting around 3.1% on the rolling market at the moment. Campervan is usable (not sure it will ever be 100% finished!) and we've been away for cheap holidays and weekend breaks.