Reduce to Increase...Towards the Forever Home...

jenni_fer

powerspowers said:

Well done JF! Just got to find the right place now. What’s the market like where you are? It’s dead slow for us, hardly anything coming up each week. 

It's definitely picked up in the last week or so. Demand far outstrips supply though which is an issue.

powerspowers

🤞 for the forever home 

jenni_fer

We've found a house! Had been SSTC last year but it feel through and went back on the market on Monday, we viewed on Tuesday and had our offer accepted before anyone had chance to view this weekend. Such a relief!!
Good news...it's well within budget so new mortgage won't be anywhere near as much as we were bracing ourselves for.
Bad news...it's going to mean the kids changing primary school.
In the grand scheme of things it feels pretty much ideal though. A house on our street but bigger came up today and I wasn't even vaguely interested despite always saying that buying one of the bigger houses here was my ideal. Taking that to be a good sign.

Spend wise, I haven't paid much attention this week as have been focusing on house offers, mortgage options and an internal promotion opportunity.
Totting up, we're on £771.66/£1000 with 9 days /1 weekly shop to go. Fairly confident we'll come in pretty well under budget which is good news.
Going to downgrade April's target to £750 seeing as we have already covered the car service etc.

powerspowers

Any news on the house jenni? 

Do you know why it fell through before?

jenni_fer

So far so good here.
We've got mortgage in progress, survey on our current property booked in and hopefully everything is going along nicely.
We were originally aiming for July but hoping now we can aim for last week of June to save a little money!

Credit Card for Feb was £921, not quite sure what I spent in the last few days, but mostly supermarket and still under budget so that's good.
Aim for next month still £750, we need to start thinking about running the freezer and various covid stocks down so it feels reasonable.

jenni_fer

powerspowers said:

Any news on the house jenni? 

Do you know why it fell through before?

Not sure, but think it was the chain below collapsing rather than anything linked to the house, which is why us with our cash buyer beneath us was therefore a compelling offer.

powerspowers

That all sounds really positive!!! 🤞🤞🤞

jenni_fer

Another house spurt going on here this week. Buyers had their survey and as a result wanted £10k off the price, they seem to be going through the motions more than really seeming to have much conviction that they deserve any reduction so we're pushing back quite hard and will see where that gets us.
Survey on our new house is booked for Tuesday, fingers crossed it doesn't turn up anything concerning. We won't be doing the negotiate for the sake of it bit, but obviously if there is something actually wrong we'll have to deal with that.

Budget for the next credit card bill was £750, running at about £600, think we've got a week to go but other than one supermarket delivery I don't expect to spend much. We might have to put some fuel in the car soon though, last filled up in December! Will be interesting to see how much the spend creeps up as things start to relax a little, hopefully not too much!

Lots of spreadsheeting going on playing with the new mortgage outlook and realistic paydowns. We've got a fair bit of renovation to do on the new property so trying not to be too ambitious with the mortgage free deadline, currently aiming for an 'easy' target of 50 (which gives us 14 years, term is 25). I'm very much at the 'just want to be in' stage already, could be a long few months!

Plans for the Easter weekend...lots of packing up random stuff and getting rid of even more! Plus an awful lot of easter egg hunts if last year is anything to go by, and chocolate of course!

jenni_fer

Urgh house buying is so slow!

Survey on our purchase house was fine, a few minor things and it looks like we will need to replace the double glazing sooner rather than later but nothing that has made us reconsider or renegotiate. We finally got the fixtures and fittings listings etc from the sellers, there are few random things on there which are probably mistakes but needed questioning.

There are apparently 8! adults living in in the house at the moment, we knew it was parents and grown up kids but weren't quite prepared to see so many names on the forms! It does go a long way to explain the size and volume of furniture in the house though.

We went for a walk past today in the sunshine, there is a skip outside which I'm taking as a good sign that they are serious about moving, it helped to see the house again, if only from the outside, because the whole process is feeling more than a little stressful at the moment, our buyers are pushing for a date and like us would like to be in by the end of June to get the benefit of the LTT reduction but our buyers have suddenly stated end of July! The chain is just us 3 so we've essentially just told them to agree between themselves and we'll go along with it.

After my last post the spending went a little wrong, I bought a new winter coat and who knows what else, so we ended up on just under £900, still not bad by pre COVID standards but we are definitely slipping into bad habits again and I expect the next bill to be a similar value.

May will then have the house insurance for the current house on, I can't muster the enthusiasm to shop around and save a few £ when we are hoping to move so soon but I'm sure I will in the end.

New mortgage allows up to 10% overpayment a year and has pretty hefty ERCs for the 5 year fix but we don't have any intentions to move in that period of time so it's unlikely to be an issue. The 14 year target I had last month has reduced to 10 years in my head so we would be MF before the eldest starts university should they choose to go.

powerspowers

So slow but worth it Jen, you’ll get there!