FinancialBliss: My mortgage free journey…

taxi73

Well done you seem to be getting there

financialbliss

I had a bit of a light bulb moment this afternoon…

In relation to post #150, I was thinking, why not post the graph relating to what I was trying to explain?

So, if you take a look at post #1 again, you’ll now see I’ve added a graphical view of my progress. As mentioned in post #150, I look up my mortgage balance each Sunday and record this for each week of the year. Was doing this while still on dial-up. Now a habit and don't really need to think about doing it.

In doing that, I can calculate the minimum, maximum and average mortgage balances and once you start plotting that year on year, you can see the progress made.

To put things into perspective, I’ve also added two further columns. Schedule is the original mortgage repayment schedule had I only paid the monthly repayments. 12/12/12 is a possible repayment plan that clears the mortgage by my target date, which in case you've not been paying attention, you guessed it 12/12/12

Note #1: I probably won’t stick to the repayment plan as demonstrated in the 12/12/12 line, but by putting this in I think demonstrates how far I still need to go.

Note: #2: As the 2008 info is currently made up of only 5 Sundays worth of numbers, the lines are pretty close together. As the months progress, the minimum and average lines should drop substantially.

Any comments appreciated on if you think this is a good motivational tool, or how you track your own mortgage progress.

Thanks,
FB.

LouiseJ

Hello FB

I also use a chart in the form of a Pie chart I cant figure out how to add it to a post as if I copy it I cant seem to paste it into a post as paste option is greyed out

Anyway I have 2 sections of the pie one labelled OWNED BY US and the other one OWNED BY MORTGAGE COMPANY, they have a much larger slice of the pie at the moment and I did only start it from January and not from start of mortgage term.

I think anything that can motivate you be it a chart or a picture stuck on the fridge its all good:D

financialbliss

Hi,

Quick bite sized round up of happenings in the last few days in no particular order…

Other posts. There seems to have been a spurt of posts of late, which is good. So far I think I’ve always been on page one of the MFW forums, but I’m not at all bothered if I drop down a page or 3. I try to post quality over quantity and I’m doing this primarily as a personal motivational exercise.

Sleep. Getting sleep this week’s been a bit of a challenge – both little’uns have conjunctivitis and we’re applying eye drops with varying degress of success. #1’s nursery have had quite a lot of cases, so I suspect he’s picked it up from there and transferred to #2.

Quidco. Got my first ever quidco payment earlier in the week. Was 10.41 after the admin fee taken, but every little helps. Was going to round up to 25.00 and overpay on the mortgage but I think I’ll sit tight until towards the end of the month when I can determine if my spending is likely to exceed income or not.

Rate change. Looks like the money is on a rate reduction tomorrow. I’m not the betting type, but I suspect the BoE will play safe and reduce the base rate by .25%. On a fix of 4.79% until March 2011, so not particularly worried about any short term changes.

Mortgage balance summary spreadsheet. I’ve just swapped out my desktop background picture of a Lotus Elise (mid life crisis?) to my mortgage balance sheet as displayed on post #1. The idea being that every time I log in, I see the graph and am motivated to achieve my goal.

Daily mortgage interest. As I logged the end of January mortgage interest, which worked out at 9.03 per day, I’m keeping a closer than normal eye on the interest charged and can now break the interest charged down. Nationwide display as one lump sum amount. I’m currently at 53.50 or 8.92 per day interest for February.

Bills / paperwork. I’m attempting to sort outstanding bills and paperwork, such that I get to a point where I’m fully up to date and I can then keep on top of them daily, rather than leave then for a month or two and play catch up.

Future posts. I’ve been getting into the habit of either jotting down ideas for larger topics / posts on paper or keying into my palm pilot. Still need to reply to #141 by JonnyBravo but need to gather some info first.

FB.

setmefree2

Hi Fb,

After reading your thread thought I'd pop over to my own mortgage spread sheet and add the figure for mortgage interest per day- bit scary:eek:

Good luck - that conjunctivitis thing can be a real pain to get rid off. Mr SMF2 had it once and it lasted for months...hope you get some sleep soon:A

financialbliss

Just a quick hi,

Haven’t dropped off the face of the planet.:hello:

Been trying to get ourselves organised a bit more financially. Have been doing the following recently:

• Keyed in credit card transactions (to MS Money), some as far back as October 2007
• Balanced both credit cards up to last statements
• Balanced the two main current accounts to last statements
• Been reviewing categories / sub-categories for recording transactions in MS Money
• Created a monthly “to do” list that I can tick off each month
• Been sorting out financial paperwork

Still have a handful of credit card receipts from this week to enter, plus quite a few cash receipts – which to be honest, I’ve been putting off for a good while…

I’m hoping that by the end of this month, I can be totally up to date and I can then do little bits often to keep on top of things.

FB.

Move_To_Portugal

Hi FB, I've started using my MS money again to back up what I already do on Excel. I also have a to do list, well three to do lists, weekly, monthly and annual:o

Good luck on your continued organisation.

mtp

one2escape

Just read through all the posts. Good going there. Work in IT as well (just started and getting trained) and I use 2 screens so much easlier plus I have another machine on my desk my broadband machine. For research purposes of course!

gallygirl

Loving these tales of graphs. Makes me feel less as if I'm suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder .

Pie charts........ yikes :eek: , all those opportunities missed. Off to [STRIKE]have a play [/STRIKE] analyse my data in a new and interesting way .

BTW FB, I'm at £7.45 a day interest, 31p an hour . Not that I've calculated it or anything.......

financialbliss

After about a week of not making any postings, I was on page 3. Made a quick post on 14th, #157 and I’d expected that I’d dropped to page 2 again.

Couldn’t find my own diary when browsing and here I’ve had a few posts today and I’m near the top of page 1!

Quick replies to each of those:

Move to Portugal. As well as using MS Money, I also analyse data in Excel and between Money an Excel, I can determine and analyse numbers on various things.

One2escape. Nice to hear from someone new – also in IT! I’m a .net / web developer. I develop transactional company intranet applications / web pages that hook into a SQL server back end. I was having a moan at one of the tech support lads on Friday – we use Microsoft Visual Studio - despite having reasonably new PCs – Visual Studio quite often runs slow, so it now looks like we’re getting a memory upgrade from 1Gb to 2Gb. Should help some.

Ali007. Compulsive disorder confession – I’m finding it really interesting to calculate the daily interest. January was 9.03, February so far is 8.90 and I can’t wait until 1st March to see what another 1,250 applied to the mortgage will do to the daily interest. Suppose it keeps me out of trouble.;)


And on to a few other points…

Northern Rock is going to be nationalised. I’ve 1,000 shares, so this is of interest to me. Acquired at conversion in 1997 for free. Haven’t had much time to digest the information to hand, but as I currently understand it, the shares are being suspended before start of business on Monday.

From BBC news: “…will enable the government to acquire the bank's shares and its assets. It will provide for compensation to be determined by an independent valuer.”

This suggests to me, that I’m going to get a single compensatory amount in return for my shares. I guess this could be as low as 25p a share, but it would be nice if it wasn’t less than the Friday closing value of 90p. No doubt, whatever amount is decided, there’s going to be unhappy people somewhere.

Bradford and Bingley. While we’re still on shares, they took a massive nose dive this week. Got 524 shares. I’m wondering if they’ve also had problems raising capital to lend out as mortgages too? They have recently issued a profits warning.

2007. Sorted through a small mountain of receipts. Finally got the monthly breakdown for our 2007 income / spending calculated. Was not pretty reading. 2007 income: 39,575.02 – spending: 40,948.30. In only 3 months out of 12 did we spend less than our income. 2007 was a pretty hard year – new fridge freezer as old one died, and a new car, then a replacement car as new car had been in a shunt was an unforeseen / unexpected expenditure are two that spring to mind without really thinking.

Thanks,
FB.