FinancialBliss: My mortgage free journey…

Peonie

How much is the monthly pass? You could be a spring, summer and autumn cyclist and use the train in the winter months when it's dark during the commuting hours.

financialbliss

Peonie wrote: »

How much is the monthly pass? You could be a spring, summer and autumn cyclist and use the train in the winter months when it's dark during the commuting hours.

Hi Peonie,

Prices are as follows. First block is current price and price in brackets is a price increase, which takes effect on 8th April.

One week: 23.10 (24.50)
Four weeks: 80.90 (86.00)
Annual: 882.00 (927.00)

We have a corporate travel scheme and I can currently get the annual pass for 840.00 which includes a corporate discount with a small further discount to be applied based on number of applicants (typically 5%), but I also need to add £20 for admin / insurance if the pass it taken through work.

I've today decided NOT to renew my pass. I thought I could only renew before today, but that's just the cut off date as I already have a pass. I can theoretically renew any time up to December (first 9 months of the annual scheme), but as you say, I'm planning to be a "most of the year" cyclist.

Next decision on the cycling front is do I cash my existing pass in a month early to get some cash back? I'm off for two weeks out of the last four, so (to me), it seems sensible to cash in and take the money rather than pay for four weeks of pass while only using it for two.

Would mean I'm a full time cyclist from next week though... :eek:

Financial Bliss.

Peonie

I say cash in the pass now and buy a monthly pass when you need one.

financialbliss

Thanks Peonie.

I've a number of options for travelling to work. If I limit myself to one bus, I can purchase a weekly pass for just £15 - cheaper than the monthly pass, or a daily return at £3.90

Many options - bike being cheapest of course...

Thanks for the input,

FB.

thriftylynny

Hi FB, could you give me some advise please? I've been lurking on all the wonderful MFW diaries for a year now & you seem to have a great financial head on you so hope you might be able to help?:o I'm a single mum, work f/t hrs on a fairly low wage & have this last yr worked my butt off paying mort 2(consolidated debt) off from 7k to 2k,this is at an int rate of 4.9% & tied in until aug 2013. Every penny counts with me & i would like to transfer the remaining debt to 0% over the next 12 mths but of course i can't pay off loan/mortgage with a 0% credit card can i? Do you know of any other way i can do this so as to minimise interest? I have zero rainy day savings at the moment either that i could use. Many thanks FB

Peonie

thriftylynny wrote: »

i can't pay off loan/mortgage with a 0% credit card can i? Do you know of any other way i can do this so as to minimise interest?

You use the CC to pay your bills and shopping; rather than keeping the cash you would have spent you credit the mortgage. But make sure you have enough cash at the end of the 0% period to pay the bill or transfer the balance to another 0% card.

thriftylynny

Ooh that was quick Peonie many thanks, never thought of doing that,so i'll apply for a 0% c/c nxt week & doing it that way also means no balance transfer fees also! Have a good wknd & thanks again

financialbliss

Peonie wrote: »

You use the CC to pay your bills and shopping; rather than keeping the cash you would have spent you credit the mortgage. But make sure you have enough cash at the end of the 0% period to pay the bill or transfer the balance to another 0% card.

@thriftylynny,
Peonie has hit the nail on the head and that's pretty much what I'm doing.

Having a look at my last Tesco CC statement, the new charges for that month were £857.50, but the minimum payment was only £35.00.

I've just paid £37.50 off the credit card balance - it's 0% until next February, so I'm not being charged any credit card interest and this frees up the cash I would have normally used to pay the CC account to use on the mortgage. That said, I'm putting away the funds in a savings account at a better rate than the mortgage.

This is called slow stoozing. The theory being that I clear the mortgage before the 0% term ends, and then use the mortgage money to pay off the cards. Effectively moving the debt from 2.5% (mortgage rate) to 0% (credit card promotional rate).

Got two cards I'm doing this with:

Tesco - £5,200 limit - 0% for 15 months
Nationwide - £7,5000 limit - 0% for 18 months

Hope that helps,

Financial Bliss.

thriftylynny

Many thanks FB, great advice from you both, ive got my head round the c/c stoozing & im definitely disciplined enough to do it,so this morn ive applied & been accepted for a 13 mth 0% virgin c/c,great stuff i thought!! only thing ive realised this morn is as im tied in with NW tracker until aug 2013 i know that i can alter my standing order to a minimum amount thus avoiding ERC ,however i can only op a max of £500 per mth, when i could probably pay the whole lot off in 6 wks? Theres not a way around this at all that im missing is there?? Sorry to be a pain FB, i always seem to get there in the end, but do it the long way & ive worked so hard to pay off what i have, i begrudge paying them anymore interest

financialbliss

Any regulars in the MFW section may have noticed I posted a potential third three year challenge poll today.

Here's hoping that I'll not need to join that one, but I've been playing around with the google documents and charts this afternoon / evening.

One thing that bothered me with the last batch of google docs changes is that they no longer gave you the option to publish a sheet as a web page. You can still share the sheet, but you get to see all the formatting controls at the top of the document.

Well, with a potential third challenge, I've had another look at the publish as a web page issue and I've managed to get a document published by altering the link (URL).

I've just altered my two cycle documents as an example:

Cycle summary:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnhcWfGMRVgddGNmWGhidkNhWFZBLUZkeUNKeE5qM2c&hl=en_GB&single=true&gid=2&output=html

Cycle detail:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnhcWfGMRVgddGNmWGhidkNhWFZBLUZkeUNKeE5qM2c&hl=en_GB&single=true&gid=0&output=html

I much prefer them with just the data

On the subject of cycling, I've pretty much decided to cash in my travel pass too. This means I'm cycling in from Tuesday to Friday, although at present, BBC weather is showing a maximum of 15c on Tuesday, dropping to 8c on Friday, but most importantly (currently) dry all week.

Not going for any mad dash commutes this week - steady as she goes and I'll report how my legs feel on Friday after four days of commuter cycling.

Financial Bliss.