Ruby's Bought a House, Now I want to Own It!

BravingSaving

Well done on the phone saving - £84 for a few moments of your time is fantastic! Your weekend sounds lovely as well glad your lunch went better than you were anticipating  

ruby_eskimo

Morning all!  So after everything has cleared this month we're now 56% of the way towards my savings goals for the year.  Hoping that will go up a little more by the end of the month as I have a bit of a slush fund going on at the moment in my current account which I shouldn't have to dip into and will therefore be distributed to various pots just before pay day.  Currently things stand at in the main pots:

Mortgage - £254,179.13
Emergency Fund - £2146.15 / £5000
House Pot - £1692.29 / £2000
Car Pot - £810.56 / £1000
Holiday Pot - £3567.95 / £5000
Christmas Pot - £251.06 / £375
Long Term Savings - £1401.18 / £2500
LISA - £1596 / £4000

Overall really pleased with how things are looking (even with the really high mortgage still ) and I will pay that 13p off the end of it today!

I started seeing some people on the debt free accounts I follow on Instagram posting about their net worth and so I started taking a look at what ours currently looks like.  Taking the purchase price of the house, minus the outstanding mortgage, plus the savings we have, at the end of July it was £37,918.94 and currently its £39,537.88!  I know that's not all tangible money but its still a little bit reassuring to see the numbers go up.

ruby_eskimo

BravingSaving said:

Well done on the phone saving - £84 for a few moments of your time is fantastic! Your weekend sounds lovely as well glad your lunch went better than you were anticipating  

Thanks BravingSaving.  It was nice but again, felt totally drained from all the human interaction.  We're seeing my parents this weekend and then I can go back into my little bubble and only interact with people virtually for a while again.

BravingSaving

I'm the same its going to take some time to readjust to society once I get back to work. The plus side is we only have to see the people we really want to - there's never been a better excuse for not meeting up with people

South_coast

BravingSaving said:

The plus side is we only have to see the people we really want to - there's never been a better excuse for not meeting up with people

I love this 🤣! Wonder how long I can feasibly get away with it for!!!

ruby_eskimo

I'm sure you can get away with it for longer than you think South_coast!

Made a brave decision today and sent a £179.13 payment to the mortgage to round it down to £254,000 and then added the odd £20.87 to the emergency fund.  This leaves me with a £500 cushion in my current account to cover petrol if I need it and any additional spends that I haven't accounted for.  Thought I'd take advantage of doing it now as a) it will save interest and b) I'll be back to paying my student loan next month and that will be by direct debit so won't have quite so much extra cash floating around.  I'll also probably be back in the office a couple of days a month so will have to factor in parking or train fare.  It will feel even better when the payment clears tomorrow and I see that nice round number sitting there.

We're braving the outside world again this evening for a nice date night at Miller & Carter.  While taking advantage of the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme, we also have a £25 gift card for there and DH can get 10% cashback on instant use gift vouchers through his work so quite an MSE evening all round I think.  Looking forward to getting a little dressed up and spending some time doing something "normal" out of the house.  Currently working in my pyjamas for the first time in order to get the full benefit of my transformation later

ruby_eskimo

Morning all.  Hope the weather hasn't been too hot where you are!  Our meal out on Wednesday was lovely - we each had three courses and after all the discounts we ended up paying £45 including a tip which I was pretty happy with.  

On Saturday I managed to get what I think is the bargain of the century.  I've been saving to buy a new set of dumbbells as I want to keep working out at home rather than joining a gym and it will be more cost effective in the long run.  The one's I've been looking at are the Powerblock range which are extendable, in that you can change the weigh up or down on one handle thereby saving lots of space!  To buy brand new the base set are about £300-£400 and I've been using the Monzo round up feature to just squirrel some money in there as and when.  I've had alerts on ebay and facebook marketplace for them but they're few and far between and certainly not in my area, until Saturday.  I had an alert on facebook that someone in the next town had listed some for £100, used but in really good condition, and I had £102 in my Monzo pot.  Bit of a no-brainer really!  Have used them this morning and I can already feel a difference just going up another kilo so they'll last me a long time before I have to graduate to the next expendable set.

Cashed out another £5.88 from Prolific and added it to the EF.  I think any leftover cash this month will be split between the EF and the LISA just to try and top them both up.  

Hope you're all keeping cool and hydrated in this warmer weather.

BravingSaving

What a bargain with the dumbbells! I love it when you get exactly what you want without having to buy at full price. 
Personally I am keeping hydrated - and getting my steps in going to the loo 

ruby_eskimo

BravingSaving said:

What a bargain with the dumbbells! I love it when you get exactly what you want without having to buy at full price. 
Personally I am keeping hydrated - and getting my steps in going to the loo 

I know!  Have used them a couple of times already this week and I can definitely feel the difference in my workouts - I'm burning more calories and just feel stronger for using them.  I'm the same on the hydration / loo front - quite glad I only have to walk about 20 steps to the bathroom and only have to worry about my husband giving me strange looks for the number of times I'm going

ruby_eskimo

Morning all!  Are we fed up of the heat yet?  Despite feeling like I was melting yesterday evening, I apparently managed to get my best night's sleep for a while according to my fitbit.  It's about 3 degrees cooler here today but still almost passed out while doing my workout this morning despite having all the windows and patio doors open!

Had a quick look on Right move last night as there are some new builds at the other end of the village that are almost complete and I wanted to be a bit nosy but it turns out that one of our neighbours 2 doors down has put their house up for sale but there's no board outside so we had no idea.  Their house is exactly the same as ours layout and size wise but as we're on the end of the row of houses we have a slightly bigger garden being on the corner plot.  I'd say ours was in better condition when we bought it 3 years ago judging by the pictures, but it's on the market for £2,000 less than we paid.  One of the other corner houses in our road sold last year for £8,000 more than we paid so it's interesting to see the variability in house prices around here.  We're going to be here for the foreseeable anyway so I'm not going to get too worried about house prices yet and I know we're definitely not in negative equity at the moment.