FinancialBliss: My mortgage free journey…

financialbliss

For some reason, my November mortgage payment has just shown on mortgage account today - normally it's the next day Nationwide current account and also Nationwide mortgage. Odd.

Anyway, it's now at 69,733!

Updated signature - I've also completed 9.12% of my MFiT challenge.

FB.

Little_Pickle

Well done FB!
I'm going to subscribe to this thread... I don't have a mortgage - never bought anywhere, but I want to one day... I just like seeing how well you and the family are doing!
Good luck!
LP
xox

SALTY69

Hoping to be Mortgage free in 5 years, Possibly with a little help from you all if things get tough!

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Glad to be sorting my depts. Before Retirement.

£40000 Mortgage

Minimum £350 overpayments per month!

Mortgage free within 5 years retire 14/12/2012. 5 years

financialbliss

Hi all,

Thanks little pickle / salty69 for the support.

Feel like I'm having a bit of a roller coaster ride at the mo.

One moment I feel we're doing well, eg holidays, new car, plus attacking mortgage, then I notice that I've actually paid less than 4k off my mortgage this year.

Guess I can't have it all ways, especially on one wage, and it's about balance.

Anyway off to watch property ladder - be back later!

FB.

financialbliss

Back in post #1, I mentioned that I’d keep my introduction deliberately brief and update along the way.

We’re on our second property – more about that later, but first, I’d like to give you all some background about first property.

Way back in 1996, we decided we wanted to get on the property ladder and started looking around. Mrs bliss had only recently started employment again after one of her many redundancies, so we didn’t budget for all of her salary.

Decided we wanted a 3-bedroom house with a garage and found a 3 bed modern-ish terraced. Had a bit of grief with offers, but as other similar 3 bed properties were out of our reach financially, we bid up to near the asking price. Was up for 42,950 – we were eventually accepted at 42,500. Put 4,500 down, thus was looking for a mortgage of 38k.

Think my income at the time was around the 10k mark, giving me 600 per month to play with. As an aside, I’m currently paying 600 a month just for mortgage – all of my then take home pay.

In hindsight, I think we overpaid for the house, but I can remember we couldn’t find a house with a garage in an area we wanted that didn’t stretch us too much financially.


So, being young and naïve and all took some mortgage advice and opted for an interest only with an endowment as a repayment vehicle. Totally understood the endowment, and as this was over 25 years, seemed more as an “investment” than just a repayment vehicle.

What I didn’t understand at the time was the interest only mortgage. This was an annual interest policy, as I think most were back then, with a fantastically low first time buyer rate of 4 point something percent, when the base rate was at 6 or 6.50 and actual mortgage rates were around 9%.

The interest only mortgage had a product overhang – after the first 2 years on my super dooper first time buyer rate, I was locked in for a further 4 years, be it fixed or variable. Any attempt to overpay on the mortgage attracted an admin charge. Think this was 5%.

Over the 6 year term, we paid about 18k in interest for the privilege of owing the same amount of money and our endowment, which we were putting in about 800 a year was loosing 600 a year. In short a bit of a mess.

Think my problem was that I just wanted the numbers to see if that was within our comfort zone and was happy at that. Didn't do enough research. Internet in it's infancy - don't we rely on it so much now???

During those 6 years we had some low points and decided we wanted to make amends – we started saving as hard as we could, mainly via tax-free products, TESSAs and ISAs. When the 6 year term ended in 2002, we remortgaged to nationwide (daily interest), paid 18k off the mortgage and another 8k in 2003 from a TESSA. By late 2003 we’d chipped away at the remaining balance to leave 4k outstanding, plus we sold the endowment at a 3k loss.

By this point mrs bliss was pregnant and we decided we needed to upsize. A completely gutted and redecorated house went on the market in the autumn of 2003 to our shock for 109,950. We accepted an offer less than 2 weeks later for 105k. With a mortgage of only 4k, we then had a deposit of 101k for property #2.

Things I’ve learned from property #1:

DIY – Picked up on a lot of things here, painting, wood work, touch of plastering, tiling, laying paving etc – things I’d never though I’d attempt.

Finances – during property #1, we really sharpened up our act financially. Mrs bliss was made redundant in March 2003 too!


Hope you enjoyed property #1. Hopefully property #2 to follow soon…

setmefree2

Thx for that FB - bet you can't imagine paying that sort of money for a property now:p. Your right about the internet. I think one of the best things that ever happened to our financial situation was online banking and spread sheets - and of course MSE:money:

Kaz2904

I've been having a look at my figures and just thought that we have council tax free and water rates free months coming up soon. I always pay these months onto my mortgage so will be able to bring my DFD closer.
At the moment my final mortgage payment should be £167.38 on 22/12/2012 so 2 months of £104.37 not paid and 2 months of £26.56 not paid will bring that forward to 22/11/2012.
At present my final payment of my Mums loan will be £387.38 on 22/08/2013 but I'm hoping that these payments and the reduction in interest will clear all of that and make my final payment 22/07/2013. Even if they don't I will have my cashback from my Egg card in March which will go some way towards it and will have some quidco monies to pay towards it soon.
I received £6 this month from quidco but refrained from paying it onto the mortgage. Instead I paid it onto what we owe DH's savings as they are doing quite shockingly badly.
We really need to stop spending them or they will all be gone too soon.
I feel that I am managing to reign in the spending a little but it is going to be a bit of a struggle to keep within budget as I am going to have to pay £16.60 a week for DS to go to pre-school and that will have to go from the food budget as I have nowhere else for it to come from.
I have 8 lots to pay before Christmas and have another £66.40 to pay out of this months grocery budget. This is going to leave me needing to be imaginative I think!
DH went to Asda on Tuesday and picked up 3 steaks that were hugely reduced.
He's the only big meat eater so we may get away with using them for him while me and the kids have eggs chips and beans that night or something!
I need to run down the freezer at the moment because it's getting really frosted up so that'll give me the boot to get going and get it emptied.
I have a bag of salmon fillets in there so that will do a few meals so I am hopeful that we actually scrape through to the end of the month on (if not under) budget!

I also have £50 worth of cheques to cash and a £20 one that DH has stashed somewhere and my mobile bill that I need to post off to get the cashback which DH has also stashed.
The phone bill will defo go to the mortgage as it comes out of my monthly spends but I haven't decided about the cheques yet. I just know they are worth so much more against the mortgage (as is every penny) but I want to get DH's savings back up again.
I'll just have to ask him I think and see what his opinion is.

financialbliss

Found out yesterday that both the percentage increase and the back pay are going to be applied for the December pay run. Get paid on 19th of every month - I roughly estimated I've got about 475.00 owing in back pay!

Nice little early Christmas present. What to do with money? Normally, I'd put some onto mortgage and spend or put aside the remainder. However, we've pulled more out of savings this year than we've put in, net effect is we're down by about 1k, so I'm tempted to just push back into savings for now.

Base rate - this stayed the same today. I'm on a fixed rate until March 2011 - a 5 year fix, so I'm less worried about rate changes at present.

NRK shares - they had a further slide today. Sitting @ 1.50

Just bought #2 another pair of shoes. Gone from a 3 to a 4 and I'm sure it was only 6 or 7 weeks since we got her the size 3.

Going to try and put some time aside this weekend to make notes / write up property #2 and current mortgage.

Thanks,
FB.

financialbliss

Ha, looked in the fridge today and found a selection of chillies that needed using. So I hopped on the t’interweb for a sweet chilli sauce recipe, which I roughly followed / adapted – added ginger and soy to give a rough Thai style sauce.

Except that my money saving got the better or me. There was about 8 fresh chillies, some red some green, and despite de-seeding some of them, boy has the chilli sauce got some kick to it. :eek:

Used some sauce with some beef for a stir fry and made egg fried rice. Yum, rather nice. I quite enjoy cooking! Sterilised a jam jar and the rest is now refrigerated. Not sure how long it will last, but as I only used two tea spoons of the sauce, providing it keeps, it should last a while.


Currency conversion. Can anyone help out here?

We have 260 euros just sitting here. As I can’t envisage a foreign holiday any time soon, I want to convert back to pounds and bank the cash. Any tips on where to go to get the best rate?

On the subject of holidays, we’ve also been doing some initial research for a holiday next year. As the kids are presently 3 and 1, we’ll be doing another UK holiday, but we’re still looking around at various dates and options. Nothing concrete just yet – requested a few brochures. #1 is at nursery – we’re not required to look at out of school term holiday dates as there’s no legal requirement for him to be at nursery. We’re considering taking him out of nursery for a week, as come September 2008, he’ll be in school and after that we will be forced to abide to term dates, along with horrendously differing prices.

One holiday option we looked at: mid July 352 for a week – 1st week of summer holidays: 556 – that’s a massive difference for 1 week apart. Guess I’ll have to get used to that!

We’ve also got a 6 man, no they’re called person now, tent. Hopefully we can try out going away with the kids camping for the first time next year too. Previous to the kids coming along, we used to get in from work on Friday evening, look at each other, decide we fancied popping off somewhere, threw a tent and some essentials in the car and a few hours later, we’d be in the lake district or somewhere similar.

Thanks,
FB.

Karmacat

Hi fb

I like the range of your posts! From £475 savings to the chilli sauce, excellent. Not sure about where best to exchange the euros - does Martin have any advice on the main site?