julicorn's journey

BVic28

Hi Julicorn, I found your diary yesterday and have just binge read it. You’re doing amazingly, around £50k paid off in under 2 years is phenomenal!! I’m intrigued by your spreadsheet and how you managed to get it to tell you where you’d be without OPs, is there a magic formula for this? Hope you’re having a fabulous time in Japan, it’s on my bucket list!

julicorn

Thank you both! :heart2:

BVic28 wrote: »

Hi Julicorn, I found your diary yesterday and have just binge read it. You’re doing amazingly, around £50k paid off in under 2 years is phenomenal!! I’m intrigued by your spreadsheet and how you managed to get it to tell you where you’d be without OPs, is there a magic formula for this? Hope you’re having a fabulous time in Japan, it’s on my bucket list!

Thank you for your kind words!

Basically, in my spreadsheet I have listed out the following things (among many others, it's huge with way too many useless stats :rotfl: ):
A: Month
B: Mortgage balance without overpayments (I also have a few additional comments to calculate that, but you could just stick it into an online calculator to list them all out)
C: Actual mortgage balance
In column D, I have a little formula that prints for each month the 'equivalent month without overpayments', i.e. how far ahead I am. That formula looks like this:
=(INDEX(A: A,MATCH(TRUE,INDEX((B:B<C2),),0)))
[remove the space between the : and the A, the forum turned it into an angel emoji :P )
C2 would of course change with each row, so become C3, C4, C5, etc.

Might be worth noting that I actually use Google Sheets for ease of access, but I reckon the i
same formula should work in excel too.

I hope that helps

BVic28

Thank you so much! I’ve just added another sheet to my spreadsheet for this! I would never have been able to work that out by myself (it’s a very impressive formula!)

julicorn

BVic28 wrote: »

Thank you so much! I’ve just added another sheet to my spreadsheet for this! I would never have been able to work that out by myself (it’s a very impressive formula!)

Thank you, I hope it works for you too!

julicorn

Happy "time between Christmas and the new year", everyone!

I hope you all had a nice and reasonably calm few days. Mr julicorn and I went to visit my parents in Germany, and it was lovely. I also have been doing a silly amount of knitting (got gifted a jumper kit for Christmas, and am almost half-way done already), and it's just generally been a wonderful, quiet week off. Work starts again tomorrow, but should be fairly calm - touch wood, but nothing much tends to happen this time of year

On the mortgage front, we've been able to make more overpayments, and are now below £150k. In 2020, we are almost definitely going to hit our overpayment limit, so will need to mix up overpayments and payments into a savings account. We can cross that bridge when we get to it - bit of a luxury problem to have, anyway! Once the last bit of interest and etsy money comes in and we make a final small overpayment, I will also update my little mortgage cross stitch. I can't believe that ultimately inspired me to open my etsy shop, which has been responsible for quite a bit of our overpayments this year. Everything is connected, clearly.

I seem to be spending the last few days of the year making plans and trying to get a bit more organised again. Just made a meal plan, starting from Tuesday. How amazing would it be to keep on making meal plans for the whole year? My record so far has been 3 weeks, I think - maybe I need some forum support & accountability on that one too, it seems to be working for the mortgage overpayments at least :rotfl:

Either way, I hope you are all well :heart2:

julicorn

Happy New Year everyone! Wishing you all a great 2020, full of happiness, health and success. :heart2:

On the mortgage front, I've found a pretty cool report in YNAB showing our mortgage balance over time. It's great to see the progress we've made over the last (almost) 2 years:

Karmacat

That's quite a graph, congratulations! So, what regional foodie specialties does your area of Germany have? I want to be enthralled by tales of rich cream cakes in particular

beanielou

Love the graph.

julicorn

Thank you both! :heart2:

Karmacat wrote: »

That's quite a graph, congratulations! So, what regional foodie specialties does your area of Germany have? I want to be enthralled by tales of rich cream cakes in particular

Oooh, I'm not sure how much I can deliver on the cream cake front! Where I'm front is mostly famous for savoury dishes. People from other states in Germany would associate Thuringia mainly with bratwurst, but also really nice potato dumplings (Klöße) that you would usually have with a roast. There were a lot of roulades growing up as well. I still love Klöße, now that we're vegan my mum makes the most wonderful nut roast with Klöße and red cabbage whenever Mr Julicorn and I come to visit!

Growing up, we did have some great cakes though, lots of them are on my list to veganise. Some of my favourites were:
Donauwellen (sheet cakes with cherries, cream and chocolate)


Hanchen-Jensen-Torte (cream and meringue layer cake with either gooseberries, cherries or citrus fruits)


Maulwurfkuchen (these are just made from Dr Oetker cake mixes, but it's basically a cream banana cake)


Aaaand now I'm hungry :rotfl:

julicorn

I usually am not that into new year resolutions, but this time I've gone ahead and actually made a whole lot of plans. The involve the following:
- put consistent work into my etsy shop (goal is 5 new patterns a month, and posting on Instagram every 2 days - the latter is something I have periodically neglected quite a lot, and need to get better at! So I've made a schedule and plan for January already, so know what patterns to make and what to post when)
- try and stick to meal planning for the whole year (my record so far is around 3 weeks! :rotfl:)
- always have 4 different freezer meals in the freezer, for evenings when we can't be bothered to cook. This involves batch cooking every weekend in January (plan atm is home-made pizzas, chilli, lasagne and a split pea curry), and then just batch cooking again each time one of the dishes runs out. Will need to get some new freezer-friendly containers though as our plastic ones are falling apart. Maybe something a bit more sustainable, like glass?
- Help Mr Julicorn with his goal of making some sort of improvement to our flat every weekend. This could be anything from a full-blown DIY project, down to just tidying one of those cupboards of doom that never gets tackled.

I think that's it! Although I'd like to review them monthly as well, to see if other things come up.

In terms of the mortgage, I think we're allowed to OP £14,871.48 this year - precise, I know! I think we should be able to hit that in July, and then save up next year's overpayment from that point on. It's becoming a bit trickier logistically, but with good old YNAB it shouldn't be a problem at all. (Also, I understand how much of a luxury problem it is to be able to OP this much anyway!)

Ooh, one other goal I just remembered thinking about was that I'd quite like to get our spending (without OPs) down to under half of our income this year, by which I mean income from our main jobs, the etsy shop and survey sites. This year we were quite far off that, so I'm not sure if it will be feasible, but I'm hoping my etsy shop will grow a little more, and that we can reduce our spending a bit more as well.

Either way, happy Friday everyone! :heart2: