Lumina's leap towards a brighter future

greent

Oooh - exciting stuff! Fingers crossed all goes smoothly x

Lumina

Not much to report on the new house, we seem to be waiting for some documents to turn up.

I feel like having a bit of a rant though: I get a small pay increase in June, after tax it's about £70 a month, only to find out that nursery fees are rising by 9% in July :eek: Leaving us £30 worse off despite my payrise. :mad: I know that we're fortunate to both earn good salaries, but I still feel like we can afford very little and allow ourselves very few luxuries. Rant over.

A couple of MSE jobs to do today:

• I didn't think we could get Child Benefit, but it turns out we still qualify. I'm going to fill in the forms and and send them off as soon as I can. I think it's about £87 a month?
• We're spending what feels like a fortune on food at the moment despite buying only own-brand items. I'm going to make a mealmplan with the things we already have in our fridge.

try_harder

Good to see you back

Lumina

House buying/selling process is frustratingly slow - no news and no overpayments to report.

A couple of MSE related activities though:

• we got out of the meal planning habit, but have now started again. And it's so much easier (surprise)... Also went to @ldi for our weekly shop and spent only £45 on our weekly shop. We normally shop online somewhere else, but it costs us £30 more a week...
• Child benefit form filled in and ready to go, just need to find that pesky birth certificate.
• I noticed a couple of month ago that our joint account needed topping up all the time, but i put it down to one off expenses (holiday flights, car repair, ...). I had a look today and found that our old energy supplier is still takening money out of our account!! £124 every month since February! :mad: I tried to phone them today, but gave up after waiting in the queue for 20 min. I will need to try again tomorrow...

Lumina

House buying/selling: It seems like the end is in sight! Our buyer is ready to exchange, we're just waiting for the searches to come back on the house we're buying. Our solicitor even started to ask about our preferred completion date :T

Last shop at @ldi was £58, and I will try and keep our weekly total under £80. This leaves £15 for our veg box and £5 for a small milk and bread top-up. I had a look at the food shopping board and I'm amazed on how little people manage to spend.

I also played with the overpayment calculator and once we've moved we'll set ourselves a £300 OP target each month. :money:. It wouod shorten the term by 10 years. This will be a bit of a stretch, but we will give it a go.

Lumina

We finally moved to our new house a couple of days ago!

It's a lovely feeling to finally be in - we have grand plans for it, but more on that later.

I thought I mark this occasion with a new SOA:

Statement of Affairs and Personal Balance Sheet

Household Information
Number of adults in household........... 2
Number of children in household......... 1
Number of cars owned.................... 1

Monthly Income Details
Monthly income after tax....... 2523
Partners monthly income after tax.. 1800
Benefits................... 85
Other income............................ 0
Total monthly income..... 4408

Monthly Expense Details
Mortgage.............. 694
Secured/HP loan repayments.............. 0
Rent.................................... 0
Management charge (leasehold property).. 0
Council tax........... 180
Electricity......... 45
Gas.................... 45
Oil......................... 0
Water rates........... 45
Telephone (land line)................... 0
Mobile phone............................ 0
TV Licence.......... 13
Satellite/Cable TV...................... 0
Internet Services.......... 18
Groceries etc. ........ 400
Clothing............ 30
Petrol/diesel............. 100
Road tax................................ 0
Car Insurance........ 50
Car maintenance (including MOT)... 50
Car parking............................. 0
Other travel............................ 0
Childcare/nursery.... 1080
Other child related expenses... 25
Medical (prescriptions, dentist etc).... 20
Pet insurance/vet bills................. 0
Buildings insurance........ 18
Contents insurance...................... 0
Life assurance ...... 95
Other insurance......................... 0
Presents (birthday, christmas etc)....15
Haircuts............. 5
Entertainment....... 60
Holiday.......... 110
Emergency fund.......................... 0
Total monthly expenses.... 3098


Assets
Cash............... 28000
House value (Gross)...... 250000
Shares and bonds......... 0
Car(s)........... 3500
Other assets............................ 0
Total Assets.... 281500


Secured & HP Debts
Description....................Debt......Monthly...APR
Mortgage........ 171000...(694)......0
Total secured & HP debts...... 171000....-.........-

Unsecured Debts
Description....................Debt......Monthly...APR
Total unsecured debts..........0.........0.........-


Monthly Budget Summary
Total monthly income...... 4,408
Expenses (including HP & secured debts). 3,098
Available for debt repayments........... 1,310
Monthly UNsecured debt repayments....... 0
Amount left after debt repayments....... 1,310

Personal Balance Sheet Summary
Total assets (things you own)........... 281,500
Total HP & Secured debt................. -171,000
Total Unsecured debt.................... -0
Net Assets............ 110,500

Created using the SOA calculator at https://www.stoozing.com.
Reproduced on Moneysavingexpert with permission, using other browser.

A few comments:

• Our Grocery costs are really high, I had a look at the grocery challenge the other day and am just amazed how others manage to spend so little.
• Gas and Electric are estimates for the time being.
• Not sure we really do have £1300 left at the end of the month? We're going to start overpaying by £106 to begin with.

We have a few jobs to do:

• submit meter readings to our new energy supplier
• write down all grocery spends. we did this when we first moved in together and it worked well at the time.
• start clearing the garden.
• Set up standing order for OP

jodles16

Oh a new house so exciting! Best of luck unpacking and settling in!


Jodles

zcrat41

Good luck with your house!! Exciting times. A huge chunk is childcare isn't it. Is it a while before the 30 hours kicks in? Do you do the salary sacrifice vouchers thing?

Lumina

It's been over a year since my last post, but no-one in real life would understand our excitement

Very pleased to report that we made a 10% overpayment last week! £17,500 wiped of the mortgage!! Bringing our balance down to £149k :j

We seem to be rubbish at updating a diary, following meal plan or sticking to a budget, however a combination of buying (almost) everything second hand, slightly increased incomes and no desire to keep up with the Joneses means that we muddle along just fine.

LeighofMar

Congratulations. It must feel very satisfying to see the balance drop so dramatically. Great job!