FinancialBliss: My mortgage free journey…

Floxxie

gallygirl wrote: »

:think: my money's on a new Blissling

Yes but FB said it is going to get worse before it gets better and in my eyes if the above was true, that would mean it would be better before it gets much worse!

Floxxie

financialbliss

gallygirl wrote: »

:think: my money's on a new Blissling

OMG - what have I started...

Diary post #8 "Not planning on having any more kids!". Sorry, but it ain't that.

Anyway, we're married we don't spend time together any more. :rotfl:Mrs Bliss is downstairs catching up on programmes from our PVR - probably Criminal Minds or similar, and I've jumped on the 'puter.

"It's" in my earlier post, was in reference to the finances and not anything else - we've been spending big style, but more about that "soon", as I was going to try and rustle up some supporting figures but haven't had the time this evening.

Back to the In-Car DVD player - purchased at lunch today and was used in a quick drive this evening to test it out. Kids absolutely loved it and #2 kept asking to go back in the car. Works well, as we have a rear cigarette lighter as well as a front one, so no wires trailing from the front of the car.

Off to do some number crunching, but may not be back this evening...

FB.

llamahead

But the suspense is killing me ...... :rotfl:

Good morning everyone by the way!

fiddling_flower_petals

Finally sorted out the discrepancies in my mortgage figures, after another call to bank to double check when interest is applied. Spreadsheet now acurate- ish, enough for my comfort anyway. My bank must think I'm a complete nut job, however who ever deals with me tries their best to hide their amusement at my questions.:D

Oh Dear, these spreadsheets are some what addictive, I've been pondering asking Stuart for his spreadsheet, as this seems to be mentioned regularly across this board. But fear this will just be feeding my addiction and the ironing will never get done, if I've got another spreadsheet to play with.

On a down side this month, the bank failed to take my regular OP this month, so I decided to use the money towards a rather large credit card bill and I'll try and make up the OP later in the year.

Lunar_Eclipse

gallygirl wrote: »

Personally I'm not remotely interested :whistle:

:think: my money's on a new Blissling

My guesses are a house move, extension, refurbishment or new car (Stuart's influence! ).

financialbliss

Mortgage. The February payment and overpayment cleared today - I've now updated my signature. Mortgage is 57,367.72 today :j

I have also updated the graphs and the months elapsed on post #1. I’m now 14 months in to a 60 month challenge, with 46 months remaining.

Currently attempting to commit 1,200.00 a month to the mortgage, although to be mortgage free in December 2012, I need to commit 1,364.07 each and every month to the mortgage between March 2009 and December 2012 to guarantee being mortgage free :eek:

Thanks,
FB.

financialbliss

Aims for 2009 revisited. One “idea” I had for an aim for 2009 was to give a fuller picture of my finances. Two reasons really:

One. I’ve got all sorts of mortgage facts and figures here, but they don’t really paint a rounded picture of what’s going on financially. Say if we have a net income of 4k a month – then putting £500 a month to the mortgage may seem a bit low, ie you then know there’s potential for improvement. But this information is not available here, so there’s no baseline to see how we’re doing with the mortgage in respect to net income.

Two. Since starting this diary, I’ve upped my game with the mortgage. I now know all sorts of things about the mortgage, eg daily interest figures and can now calculate (mortgage) things fairly accurately. Happy bunny. :j

However, I’ve slipped in other areas. I used to track my monthly net income, spending and savings and analyse these to get a feel for if we were doing ok or heading towards financial oblivion. I don’t quite like the way some of the information is presented in Microsoft Money and anyway, I used to use spreadsheets to calculate this before Money, so I do still it that way.

Another complication is that one of my main sheets where I can simulate moving money from one account to another is week based – summing the weeks gets most of January, but calculating exact savings values is a bit more involved. Doesn't help with the proliferation of regular saver accounts either.

Taking the “January”-ish based on the weeks figure gives a savings value of –2,471.80. As week 1 of this year started on 29th December - I had to move money out of savings to cover direct debits from 1st January, it's summed that so it looks like a great big deficit.

In short, I’ve not calculated these numbers at all in 2008. While I’ve got the data to hand, it just needs working on so I can report the numbers…


So, I’d pencilled in a 2009 aim to report net income, spending and savings for the previous month by the 5th of the following month, but then discarded this as I didn’t want the diary to be too heavy numbers wise.

I’ve reflected on this and decided I’m going to add this in as an aim, mainly to encourage me to calculate spending against income, although these may not be pretty numbers. :eek:

To get January off to a start I’ll post as follows:

Month / Net Income / Spending / Savings

January: 2,383.29 / 2,536.24 / 28.20

Oops – spent more that my income for month. I’ll discuss that in another post.

Financial Bliss.

StuartGMC

FB
I think the balanced portfolio you allude to is the best way to tackle things; as you know my preference is the household budgeting spreadsheet I use (less inputs than MS Money for on-going items but gives a very accurate picture on financial position) so I can relate to your comment on data being available but time consuming to input etc.

We just hit net positive position after my pay day, but, with pending credit card bill it has dropped to a few hundred net negative now. Projections show we should be "increasingly" net positive longer each month (provided the S&S ISAs continue to bump along and not drop a lot more) and hit net positive plus 100% offset in the summer.

I find these points real hooks to focus upon and to improve on position. However, like you, we've had heavy costs carrying into Feb (unplanned car costs etc) so things are tight in the aspirational savings area (only £612 vs £912 in January) but we have continued to hit OP targets (£650 vs £269 minimum) and I've lifted our S&S ISAs to £300 per month too.

Hope for both of us that Feb even outs to a level position and improves thereon after.

It's late... time to quit

financialbliss

The man with a plan... :rotfl:

So, I want to be mortgage free. Guess you’ve all worked that out by now. I originally had a plan ‘A’ as follows:

Plan A. Starting from January 2008, pay 1,250 a month to the mortgage. This would have resulted with a mortgage of less than 6k in December 2012. Use 6k of savings to clear remaining balance – mortgage free by the end of 2012 – job done. :j

Problem: Budget of 1,250 a month wasn’t realistic.
Result: Kicked that particular plan into touch.


So, a bit of recent head scratching and plan ‘A’ has been restructured into plan ‘B’ as follows:

Plan B. Starting from January 2009, pay 1,200 a month to the mortgage. At the end of 2011, there should be around 22,250 left on the mortgage. If in 2012 the 1,200 is also maintained, but 700 a month is taken from savings and also paid to the mortgage, then the mortgage will still be cleared by the end of 2012. :j

Problem(s):
Still not 100% sure if 1,200 a month is realistic. Life keeps throwing things in the way, eg washing machine breaking down. :mad:

As you can see from my last post, I’ve overspent in January. Should I decide to revert the mortgage to the original 25 year term (finishing in March 2029), then I need only pay about 498 a month, ie the bulk of the overspend is the mortgage!

Is this a problem? I can’t decide if this is actually a problem or not. Our best savings account (ignoring regular savers) is now 5.1% and that included a 2.5% bonus rate until December 2009.

Mortgage rate of 4.79% needs savings of 6% or more before it’s effective to save rather than pay off mortgage.

So basically, I’m slow drip feeding the mortgage out of income and savings. Plan ‘B’ requires £8,400 of savings to be present at the end of 2011 in order to still guarantee clearing mortgage.

Due to my financial “issue”, this may no longer be there. I’ll report that in another post, but probably tomorrow now.

Plan ‘C’. Clearly, upping the income will help somewhat and I’m sure I’ll hear calls of get Mrs Bliss back to work. #2 starts nursery this September and school in September 2010, so perhaps 2010 is a good time scale.

Any plan ‘C’s would be most welcome, as I’ve not got one just yet…

Financial Bliss.
PS - plans need to be legal :rotfl:

financialbliss

StuartGMC wrote: »

It's late... time to quit

Stuart,
As ever, a detailed and informative post, even at this late hour. I'm throwing in the towel too...

FB.