Reducing Debt - being accountable and taking responsibility

wishingthemortgaheaway

Ahhh DSL a MFW diary will be fab - you'll probably be mortgage free, or at least neutral wayyyy wayyyy wayyyy before us. Our progress seems to get slower not quicker. Here's to progress on the house front.

DrSpendLittle

Yawn.

I've spent too much of the past few weeks working at home in the study. Today's trip into the office has been tiring. I feel I've regressed as an employable human I can't imagine having to go into the office 5 days a week and do a proper 9-5. Must do better. Things will pick up again with work over the next few weeks so I will have to ease myself into it! Got a 'sort of' holiday booked for the last week of August, so looking forward to that.

Filled the car up this morning so that's £25 to come off my fuel budget. Bought lunch as I was disorganised - bad form all around from me - and picked up some supplies from the Chinese supermarket near work whilst I was out. Its quite expensive when you run out of random Chinese ingredients!

DSL

DrSpendLittle

Wish, I very much doubt we'll be mortgage free before you! You might choke when you see the numbers!!! I'm a bit scared of it! Glad I love a challenge

[Deleted User]

I have just sat and read through all 33 pages of your diary

I'm in awe of how much you managed to clear in so little time! x

DrSpendLittle

Awww, thanks SSDD23 My shovel to hole ratio wasn't too bad but it was a bit of a slog at times. I'm naturally impatient so having the house move as an end goal was really helpful!

Funnily enough, I'd just subscribed to you diary and intend to read. Spooky!

DSL

DrSpendLittle

Still here, lots been happening behind the scenes so will keep it brief....

1. We dumped our buyers just after I last posted :eek::eek: They became massively unreasonable and started playing games, chipping away at the agreed selling price due to the 'costs' they were incurring as a result of the delays their incompetent solicitor had caused. It was a very hard decision but we were so fed up with them and decided enough was enough, we weren't reducing our price any more or engaging in their passive aggressive stalemate threats. It was a leap of faith and funnily enough, fully supported by our estate agents who, it turns out, had been on the end of many tempter tantrums from them and told us they were the worst buyers they'd ever had through their doors. Oh my, is so nice to see the back of them They, and their solicitor, were causing massive amounts of stress to all involved in the chain. We are all so relieved.

2. We resold our house almost immediately to a lovely new set of buyers. So far, so good. Their searches / surveys / mortgage valuation & application are all underway.

3. Our sellers for our onward purchase were very understanding and kept the house off the market for us

4. We do need to apply for a new mortgage as our current one expires soon. However, this is a blessing in disguise as rates have take a nose dive since we got our original offer in April. Even our mortgage broker is jealous! We've been quoted a 5 year fix at 1.64% can you believe! So we're applying for that this weekend. It means we'll be saving about £48 per month in our budget when compared to our original mortgage offer

5. Had a lovely holiday at the end of August, just what we needed after the trauma of dumping our buyers. We stayed in the UK so it wasn't super expensive but we did spend some ££s. I'm hoping the damage to savings will be less than £500.

I need to reconcile my YNAB and get a clearer picture of my budget as I haven't updated it in about three weeks - that's this weekend's job.

For now, we're back on the Waiting to Exchange journey but we are much more relaxed now. We have (re)sorted the house out and are no longer living in boxes. Its been nice to get back to some sort of normality.

DSL

Silver_Queen

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Sounds like things are looking up. Frustrating that buyers can be such a pain sometimes. Glad you have better buyers now!

DrSpendLittle

Thanks Silver Queen - yes, deeply frustrating as they tried to chip the price so much that we wouldn't have been able to make our onward purchase (without the ££s in savings that we had planned for). I can't get my head around it. Why wait so long to exchange and then decide to try and chip further? Chancers. They chose the wrong couple!! Anyway onwards and upwards!:D

Finances reconciled and balances not looking too bad. We're on a super saving mission now to try and save as much as possible before the move and the 'big mortgage'. We both received small pay rises (DF 4%, me 2%) recently. I'll get another 2% in January. Every little helps and it will provide a bit more room in the new house budget to get those monthly savings up to 15% of our net salaries. However, we want to overpay the mortgage, so we may round that down to 10% and put 5% into the mortgage overpayment pot. We'll see how the first 6 months go.

Not much else to report really. Feeling nice and frugal but also allocating spends to places where we know we will want to spend from, like personal spends and going out / entertainment. No point in trying to do scorched earth and feeling like we're having no fun when realistically there is room in the budget for a bit of fun. I tried and failed at that during my debt free journey! Lessons learned.

DSL

DrSpendLittle

:hello: Popping in to say hi, see what's happening on the DFD boards and provide a bit of an update.

We got our mortgage offer through today :T:T It took 7 working days from submitting the application. Fabulous. We got a great 5 year fixed rate deal which is the best on the market and 0.26% lower in interest than our original mortgage offer from April. It'll save us £49 per month on our mortgage payment, which is the equivalent of the electricity bill. This is the very reason why I decided to pay off my debt, so I'm really pleased that, 26 months after my LBM, I am able to write about this positive outcome I would say its made it all worth it, but to be honest, I haven't ever felt hard done by or like I've gone without on my debt free journey. I always maintain that since I started budgeting, I've never felt richer.

We're now just waiting on news of our buyer's mortgage and whether they've sent off for searches etc. It's odd as we've done all we need to do to exchange contracts on our purchase, so we don't have anything keeping us occupied, so to speak, whilst we wait for our new buyers to do all their conveyancing for our sale. My mind is running away with me a bit. I need a big project on a work to distract myself or something :rotfl: I think all the hassle we had with our previous buyers has put us both on edge a bit. Oh, on that note, we heard on the grapevine that our previous buyers had been thinking of pulling out!. That explains the price chipping. I can't imagine getting so close to exchange and them actually pulling out. I mean, we were nearly there, but... The reason I stopped reading the 'Waiting to Exchange' thread was exactly that!

In other news, spends and savings are going well. My savings are up to £6K theoretically I'm just waiting for some ££s to come my way in the next few days. I've updated my signature nonetheless as I was on here anyway and getting bored of being in the £4ks. And I'm a bit of a rebel Hope you don't mind I'm averaging about 30% of my take home pay into savings since my LBM. I'm a bit hard on myself and think I should have saved more by now. But that's about how much I paid off my debts each month on average over the 20 months it took me, so I guess I'm keeping up the habit!

I want to try and make it to the end of the month without overspending on the food budget. The fuel budget is doing well, I should make it to the end of the month with a few ££s left to tilly tidy into savings. I've got money set aside for a hair cut and my YNAB annual subscription (£44 pear year). I recently had a £300 bill from the garage as my car needed some work doing to it. That wasn't fully accounted for in my budget so I had to borrow from savings to cover it. Next month I will need some more foundation and possibly moisturiser so I must not forget to put that aside. I also need to budget for work travels as I've a couple of trips coming up, but the big travel expenses are being paid for upfront by work anyway.

Back to work. I'm in my home study today. The lovely sunshine is making it all the more better

DSL :j

enthusiasticsaver

Good news on the mortgage deal and savings. Hope all progresses well with your new buyers. House buying and selling is so stressful.