FinancialBliss: My mortgage free journey…

Kaz2904

Karmacat, out of interest, what are you going to do about your capital one card in January?

financialbliss

Hi,

Nice to be back again, again.

Before I move on to the boring financial stuff, further to my post #40, we also had a pork stir-fry with noodles using the chilli sauce on Sunday. Couldn’t get on the forums at all yesterday to view or make posts.


I’m going to start the ball rolling with equity / liability. We’ve all got a keen eye on our mortgage, after all it’s a mortgage free board, but how many of you also monitor the equity in your home?

Don’t want to mention too much about this at this stage, as I’ve still not got around to writing up property two, but each month I monitor the house price index and I’ve been applying this index to my initial purchase price and price at the end of subsequent months. For October, my home theoretically lost 3,438 in value. I say theoretically, as I don’t get too hung up on these values – I just treat as a rough ball park.

Holidays – we don’t mess around in the financial-bliss household. Further to my initial chatter about potential holidays, we booked up on-line on Sunday evening. We’ve booked a static caravan in north Wales for a week in June 2008. This was after an e-mail from the company touting 50% discounts on 2008 holidays. Does anyone actually pay 100% prices or is this just a marketing gimmick? Still, after a comparison of other options, it was the cheapest by a good amount.

So I’m just about to book up, when I remember that I’d read about quidco on MSE. So, a quick registration later, not only did I get the 50% discount, but I for a further 6% via quidco. Ok, only 15.41, but as I was booking on-line anyway, it’s a bit of a non-brainer. Should see this in January.

FB.

Karmacat

Hi Kaz

The Cap One card - I was going to let it run out, to "dare" myself to pay it off from the matched betting I'm about to learn and the quidco I'm about to do. And then, the A&L account I've just opened up has a 0% card facility, so I went for it.

I've decided that current savings allocated to mortgage overpayment will still go to mortgage overpayment, but anything I make from matched betting and quidco will go to the debts - whether thats a couple of quid off the card, or saving up to pay the settlement figure of the loan.

Kaz2904

£2144.63 is quite an amount to pull together in a couple of months, good luck!
At least you have a back up plan just in case you aren't able to clear it.

financialbliss

@ karmacat / kaz2904.
I've a 1,800 credit card bill to pay this month :eek:

The bulk of that was the extra I had to pay when swapping the car. It's coming out of savings, some of which will be replaced next month when I see my pay rise, but yes, 2k is quite a lot to pull together in a short amount of time.

FB.

setmefree2

Good Luck FB:money:

financialbliss

Hi all,

One thing about working in IT (I'm a software developer, in case anyone missed one of my early posts) – I spend pretty much my entire day on front of a computer with not 1 but 2 screens attached!!!

I’ve really not had the inclination to get in front of one at home much this week.

That said, I've made some rough notes for property #2 that I can hopefully tidy up and post tomorrow evening.

Thanks,
FB.

setmefree2

Hi Fb

Hubby works in IT too. He has 3 screens :eek:(Honest!)

rca779

I work in IT, but I've only got the one screen

By the way FB, I am loving your posts and look for updates each day...keep it up!

financialbliss

Hi all,

Following on from property #1, here are some details about property two, which I apologise for not getting written up sooner…


So, in the summer of 2003 with mrs bliss being pregnant, we discussed up sizing and after a quick look on the internet I found, not 1 but 3 “ideal” houses. We were after a 4 bedroom detached or a 3 bedroom with potential for extension to a 4 bedroom.

Can’t 100% remember now, but I think we’d budgeted around the 175-180k mark, with 101k coming from property 1, the 75k or so being financed from my salary, a substantial chunk, but still allowing for a few little luxuries, and we ignored any future potential earnings from mrs bliss.

This was for 2 reasons – no job to return to, but more importantly, we wanted to try and have some quality time with our first child without mrs bliss being forced back to work within 3 to 6 months.

Having viewed the 3 houses, they were all disappointing in various ways despite them being ideal on paper. We’d by that stage agreed a sale on our house, started sale / legal proceedings and had nowhere to move to!

So we upped the stakes, viewing at least 3 or 4 houses a week, sometime 3 or 4 a night depending on what we could find / deemed suitable, until a 4 bed detached previously on at 225k came to our attention. This had been reduced by 8k to 217k. This was still well outside our budget, but we didn’t have anything to loose in viewing it.

Structurally it was fine, but internally hadn’t really been maintained all that well. House was 13 years old at the time having all the original décor, wood windows, kitchen and carpets looking tired etc. So, with that in mind, we put a cheeky offer in for 195k. This was immediately rejected.

So, we continued searching without success until about 6 weeks later, the vendors asked if we would be prepared to stump up another 5k for the house. Despite not really considering the house as our ideal house, this was a no brainer as it was in a nice area and many of the issues just needed attention.

So, we put a revised offer of 200k in to the estate agents, which was accepted in November 2003. To not hold the chain up, we moved out of house #1 in December 2003 to rent a friends property, thinking that the completion of the deal would take a few weeks.

It took more than 3 very stressful months to complete – numerous complications on the vendor’s side such as vendor not having a house to move to, not prepared to vacate the property etc.

I dealt with all the legal / estate agent issues leaving mrs bliss to deal with the pregnancy. That said, despite being made redundant in 2003, she secured a short term contract in the autumn of 2003 which was meant to be only for a few weeks, but lasted until the day we got the keys for the house – mrs bliss then being over 8 months pregnant.

Paid out the 101k from house #1, plus a further 4k from savings as a deposit and 3.5k in fees / stamp duty, giving us a mortgage of 95k.

Talk about stress – the solicitors even forgot to request our mortgage money, so they effectively paid for our property via a bridging loan and our mortgage started about 5 days after we moved in, saving us a little interest.

The previous 6 months or so were probably the most stressful I’ve ever experienced to date! We were in just over three weeks when #1 (son) turned up.

Since we’ve moved in we’ve decorated the 4 bedrooms, en-suite, the main bathroom, hall stars and landing, downstairs toilet, living room, dining room, kitchen and utility. We’ve also floored the loft, added fitted wardrobes to the master bedroom and re-carpeted / laminated in places. Oh and the boiler broke down twice, so the second time around, we replaced it with a condensing combi.

We added a 4m x 4m conservatory in 2006. I’ve wanted one of these for a good while, but the previous house was too small to add one. Rear of house is south facing and the conservatory gets flooded with light and is well used. This was financed out of savings.


What have I learned from property #2?

Pace yourself. Despite it being a “new” (read small) detached, it’s much bigger than our previous property, so things take that little bit longer.

Budget properly. We were initially at the very maximum of what we could afford. Our “can we afford it?” pre-move in budget wasn’t 100% accurate and it was initially much harder financially than I expected. Our previous mortgage of 4k on the old house (17.15 per month – financial advisor pretty much fell off chair), went to 543.80, while income dropped 900.00 a month.

More about my current mortgage shortly...

Thanks,
FB.