Writing off the mortgage

Part_time_writer

Oh dear, I've already resorted to a punning title, let this be a warning of what is to come...

I've been reading MFW diaries for months, finding a lot of inspiration and now I've decided to start my own.

A little about me. I'm a mum of three, the youngest child was born in october so a very busy little household. My husband works full time and I am on maternity leave. We are in the fortunate position of having no debts (although we don't have much in savings) and I would describe us as comfortable, not rich.

Here's where MFW comes in. We have two mortgages, one on our house at around £68k and one on the sort-of-buy-to-let flat at around £50k. The residential mortgage just ticks along, but I would really love to start overpaying the flat. It's on a consent to let deal, which means we pay almost 5% interest - not so good. So any amount extra going into this would help immensely.

How am I going to do this? Here's where the username comes in. For the past few years I have been writing and publishing fiction as an independent author/self publisher. This has earned me a few hundred pounds here and there, but nothing substantial. My plan for going forward is to earn a proper wage through my writing, and use this to overpay the mortgage. What could possibly go wrong! :rotfl:

Anyway, I'll add some more posts with more details as I go, but I wanted to post this to motivate myself to get organised before the end of the year.

Part_time_writer

The money part...

My (very ambitious) aim for 2019 is to make £10k in ebook sales. This is gross, so crucially before taxes (although I shouldn't have to pay too much, more on that later...)

My back of the envelope maths for how to scale up my earnings to that level is as follows:
Month Amount
jan 250
feb 250
mar 500
apr 500
may 500
jun 1000
jul 1000
aug 1000
sep 1000
oct 1000
nov 1500
dec 1500

See, easy peasy!

The plan is that all this income will come from the books, but if that is looking unlikely I will try and supplement with survey sites and possibly content writing eg. Upwork. To get this sort of money from the books I will probably have to publish a book every second month. Pretty sure that won’t happen, but as I’ve said, I’m nothing if not ambitious.

Now, as I said, that 10k will not be take home pay. I want to put 25% aside for tax (this will increase as the profits – hopefully – increase too) and 25% to reinvest in business (advertising, covers etc). This leaves 50% as lovely take home money. Of this I would like to put at least 50% to overpay the mortgage.

Which leaves my overpayment total for 2019 at £2500.

I've got more details on this, but my eyes are getting sleepy and I've warbled on enough, will post more tomorrow.

Betterthanever

I look forward to reading more!!

erin_transport

Sounds fascinating
Good luck to you. Great goal.

Part_time_writer

Thanks betterthanever and erin_transport, I'm hoping it'll be a fun ride!

Today I'm off to a cafe to do some writing, leaving hubs with the three kiddies, hahaha!

beanielou

Happy shiny new diary

Part_time_writer

Thanks beanielou!

Not much done today, a little writing, more procrastinating...

Begsey

Part_time_writer wrote: »

Today I'm off to a cafe to do some writing, leaving hubs with the three kiddies, hahaha!

Sign the cafe up to a future profits deal. Once you make it, they will come. Just ask JK.

Part_time_writer

Begsey - the elephant cafe in edinburgh basically trades off the fact that some of harry potter was written there. Not sure Cafe Nero will ever do the same for me!

Part_time_writer

A little money update while it's on my mind. My target for January and February is £250 each month, luckily I'm pretty much there already. The reason is that amazon pays 60 days after you earn the money. So my November earnings are my January paycheck, and my December earnings will be paid in February. November I know I earned over £250, and I should do more than that easily in December as I have a bookbub advert for one of my books (these tend to pay nicely).

That's the good news. The scary news is that my March target of £500 will actually have to be earned in January. I'll have to get my thinking cap on for that one!

Part_time_writer

Well, not much writing done in the last few days as hubs got a rather spectacular bout of food poisoning. All better now, thankfully, but christmas will take over for the next few days so won't get much done then either. We've not been very MSE, but the kiddies will have a fab time (and so will I, big child at heart!).

Next big deadline is to finish a book by the 10th January. Hoping I don't leave it until the last minute, but past experience suggests otherwise!