PinknSparkly's Mortgage Wannabe savings dairy

savingwannabe

Father Pink sounds like a great dad so Baby Pink will be cherished. Luckily Baby Pink is so young and will forget that they haven't met other youngsters yet and will have a great time when they do. So glad you are all ok and that you are happy at work.

This self catering cottage sounds great. How wonderful that you can get away. I hope you can both relax and enjoy the freedom and space away from home. Roll on the summer. 

pinknsparkly

Hi all,

I'm really getting quite bad at updating here. I've just updated the mortgage overpayment challenges I'm on for the first time since July and then realised it's been even longer since I updated here!

It's funny to read my last update about being excited for our first family holiday..... Less than 1 hour after arriving we got an email to say we had to self isolate for the entire time we were away and then Baby Pink developed a cough so had to have her first PCR. She's now a pro at them now after doing one pretty much every couple of weeks since starting nursery....   

I'm really glad we did shared parental leave though - she has the tightest bond with DaddyPink as a result!

We've done surprisingly well with mortgage overpayments in the meantime but that's mostly due to not having work done on the house that we had planned.

Hope you're all well. I'll try to have a catch up with your diaries now to see you're all getting on!

MovingForwards

The bond is worth having and will make a huge difference long-term.
With so much going on it's hard to find time to update. Aim for once a month to keep track of where you are and what your plans are.

savingwannabe

Oh no that you had to isolate during your holiday. I'm glad Baby Pink is doing ok after coughs. Well done on working so hard. Thank you for posting.

Skint_yet_Again

Good to “see” you Pink. What a shame about your holiday but let’s hope there will be many others to enjoy in the future once things settle down. 

Good to hear baby pink has a loving bond with her daddy ❤️

pinknsparkly

@MovingForwards - that's a very sensible suggestion about aiming to update monthly! I definitely have a tendency to leave it for ages and then build it up to be a massive deal in my head (not necessarily updating on here, but life and tasks in general!)

@savingwannabe - BabyPink was doing great when I posted the update but on Sunday evening came down with a raging fever so we've both been at home juggling childcare between us and waiting for yet more PCR results.... Her temperature is gradually coming down though so hopefully we'll be a rather happier household by the end of the week!

@Skint_yet_Again - thanks. I've actually just this week booked a week away at Bluestone Wales. It's one of those holidays where you stay in lodges and walk or cycle round the grounds as you leave the car in a carpark all week. She's going to love the swimming pools and they also have toddler entertainment which I hope she'll enjoy :-) for less than £200 I figured it was worth trying!

MovingForwards

This is a quick escape from your home life, a place to work ideas and plans, tracking whatever your aims are, having a chat and whatever else you want it to be. 

Your holiday sounds great, little one will enjoy it.

savingwannabe

Brilliant. It is great that you are having a break. 

Skint_yet_Again

Hope you are all well Pink and baby pink has recovered from her illness. Have a wonderful Christmas 🎄 

pinknsparkly

Hi all!

Hope you're all well and surviving the cold bleakness of January. I've started using an app called Gratitude to journal on a daily basis (they helpfully provide writing prompts). It's only a couple of sentences a day but it seems to be really helping me feeler calmer and more connected to myself. I wasn't expecting it to make a difference at all. I usually view January as a month to get through in order to get to Spring but the app seems to be helping me to at least slightly appreciate the perks of January days.

BabyPink has recovered from the illness in my last post and since come down with, and recovered from, a vomitting bug. Such is the life of a small child at nursery! We're still miraculously covid free too. Between me working in three different hospitals and BabyPink attending a nursery four days a week that has constant staff shortages and children off due to covid, I have no idea how we've escaped it so far. But I'm sure our time will come

A bit of news since my last post..... We've decided to sell our house (it's not even up for sale yet and I'm already discovering why people say it's the most stressful thing you'll ever do!). The house we're currently in is fine for the time being, but the location isn't where we want to bring up BabyPink (I realise I may sound snobby saying this. but it's a council estate full of 7-8 year olds running around calling each other all the names under the sun and threatening to kill each other. The parents use equally delightful language!). We're hoping to have it listed in the next few weeks, and are madly decluttering and doing all those little bits of DIY that you never normally get round to!

We're hoping to stay in the same area, so won't have to switch nurseries and can still walk to work. If we stay local though, we'll definitely have to downsize to a smaller footprint house, and pay an awful lot more than our current house will be listed at for the privilege! It's a toss up between moving further away to get a cheaper house with larger rooms, but then having longer commutes and still spending the same sort of money each month, just that the cost will be public transport/petrol/parking plus a cheaper mortgage rather than just a larger mortgage. I'm actually quite looking forward to downsizing. I've been trying to get DaddyPink on board with decluttering for YEARS without success and suddenly I'm the one having to rescue things from the bin Houses are going like hot cakes down here, so hopefully we'll get an offer quickly and can start looking for our next house. The estate agents won't let you view properties unless you're a first time buyer or already under offer.

It's only a few weeks until our little holiday, and I can't WAIT. 

In terms of an actual financial update, and the reason for this diary in the first place, I need to update my signature but I made a big dent in our mortgage at the end of 2021 (literally the end - I made the payment on 31st Dec ). Our mortgage is still in the fixed rate period, which means we'll have to pay a fee to clear it. I got the bank to work out how much more I could overpay in 2021 without paying any early repayment charges and pulled that out of savings to make the payment. I didn't realise that the poor lady would have to calculate it all manually and I'd made so many overpayments throughout the year (many less than £10 as I'm a fan of rounding down our balances to make OPs...) that it took her almost half an hour to calculate :O We still have enough in savings for solicitor fees, moving costs etc etc, but this should save us a good couple of hundred pounds. The logic is that those savings would have been added to the house sale to be used for the purchase anyway, so this just means taking them out of an account paying very little interest a few months earlier than intended! I know we could simply port this mortgage and get a top up for the extra, but I want to fix them both at either 5 or possibly 10 years as we're hoping BabyPink2 might make an appearance at some point and so remortgaging while on maternity leave or paying two lots of nursery fees will be rather tricky! However, the idea of BabyPink2 has been in the pipeline for almost a year now without success so I'm not holding breath on them actually ever making an appearance!! Sometimes the right decision for your family isn't the "best" financial decision on paper, and this is one of those situations!