Mortgage Free by 55

Creetown_Billy

Don't do it , I was mortgage free by the time i was 45 and I soon found ways to spend the extra money and felt no better off.
So much so that I remortgaged and bought a place in Scotland just so I was in debt, it's a different mentality but I'm happy 😂😂😂

VDOT47

January update. Despite having a horrendous credit card bill this month due to all the expenses set out in my posts this month, I managed an overpayment today of £435.36.


As I said above, the decorator is here this week (and the beginning of next) so we will need to dip into savings to pay him, as well as putting some additional items on the credit card (light fittings, light switches etc) and also paying an electrician to come round tomorrow to change the aforementioned light fittings and switches.


Next month will see the expense of carpeting the stairs, landing and DD's bedroom, so another expensive month in store!


Balance should be about £236,250 now. Once the statement comes through, I will update my signature (which I haven't done for a couple of months).

VDOT47

Signature updated. I must have done my sums wrong, as the balance is actually about £375 lower than I'd thought! Bonus!

K11m

hey, just been reading your blog! thank you for lots of useful reading. looks like you have made great progress since starting! look forward to reading more bits to inspire my journey

VDOT47

Thanks K11m - I'm afraid I won't be adding anything of note this month though. An horrendously expensive month for various reasons means I am not really expecting to have anything spare to overpay at the end of this month. Maybe £100 if we are lucky.

VDOT47

A refund of £180 from water company this month may have rescued the possibility of a small overpayment at the end of the month!


Otherwise, February has followed on from January in being horrendously expensive. Partly through choice (redecorating and re-carpeting parts of the house, paying for one holiday and the deposit on a second later in the year) and partly due to annual costs falling in this quarter of the year (car service, car tax, home insurance). To top it all, car insurance is due in March, as is the balance of the holiday booked for later in the year!


We will need to spend the next 3 months reimbursing the emergency savings pot, and overpayments will have to take a back seat unfortunately.


Back in November I wrote the following. My comments now are next to this:


"My next targets I would like to hit are, in order:
End date brought forward by 2 years (hopefully could achieve this by the end of 2018, and if not then definitely by Feb which is the 2nd anniversary of the mortgage) NOW ACHIEVED
Daily Interest below £14 (getting closer) NOW £14.10 - SHOULD ACHIEVE £14 BY 30/4/19
LTV below 60% (a longer term goal)" NOW 62.83% - HOPE TO HIT 60% BY FEB 2020

VDOT47

Was only able to make a £100 overpayment this month. As expected, the massive expenses so far this month have really put a drain on the finances. Will take a couple of months at least to bring the savings pot back to where it should be, so overpayments will probably be low again for March and April.

greent

C'est la vie - however, don't be too hard on yourself - you're still overpaying and everything really does help!

VDOT47

Signature updated as at beginning of March. Would like to see the balance reduce by £1055 to get it down to £234k by the end of March, but that will mean having to find an overpayment of about £280 which is looking unlikely at the moment.

VDOT47

Overpayment of £100 for March just made.


It was another spendy month, with a week away at Center Parcs and all the associated costs (activities, meals etc) meaning that spare cash at the end of the month was minimal. We had a great time there though!


I probably could have stretched the overpayment to a bit more than £100, but I didn't want to push our April budget too close to the wire, as council tax restarts and we have some other bits and pieces expenses to take into account.


I expect the mortgage balance to be around £234,185 now.


The good news is that I have a new job starting at the end of April, which has given me a decent payrise from what I am on currently. This will free up some more cash to throw at savings initially (I want to get our savings pot to more than 12 months worth of living expenses first, just in case of redundancy if the Brexit fallout leads to job losses) and also overpayments.


Within a year I will also look at increasing pension contributions a bit too.


Medium term goal is also to get savings to a level within 2 years where we could move house and, even after paying for SDLT and moving costs, still have 6-12 months worth of living expenses in savings. The plan after that would be to blitz pension & mortgage for a few years.