The first hurdle - Nichelette v the huge mortgage

Nichelette

Not a great deal to report, but I've got £35 from receipt hog. I was saving up to reach £50 as the conversion rate was better but I think the site is American and I didn't want it going bust before I got my money so I withdrew in case!

I've made £175 from the sideline today which I'm happy with. It's more than I'd get for a day in my actual job anyway... I need to make another £375 before the 2nd to average 1k a month over the last 6 months, though I have a lot of gubbings (where you can't do offers anymore as you've basically made too much profit from the bookmakers) so it is becoming harder. I forge on... 

savingholmes

Lovely side hustle money. Well done you

Nichelette

I was having a look and realised last night that I'd made £400 over the past 4 days so I've decided to pay that off the mortgage regardless. I suppose the earlier in the month it's paid off the better the interest saving. That pretty much brings us to my (haha, husband cares but doesn't and just trusts me to do the right thing! He's not the best with money... ) overpayment target for the year. We broke into the 250's today and recently hit over 20k in overpayments.

It's crazy to think it has only been just over a year since we started overpaying and we've managed to pay off so much, but I'm still mindful the amount we owe is huge. We're not abnormally high earners and it is a bit of a slog, but being childless frees up a lot of cash that people would usually spend on childcare etc. I think we could probably manage another 12k in overpayments by remortgage time so I'll probably keep ploughing away. I did call to try and pay more off the car (I have a chunk of money spare on 0% card I can use for the car to reduce the interest) but they're still not taking overpayments which is annoying. 

Nichelette

Just thought, imagine how great it would be to hit 240's!

savingholmes

That's great news. Well done for staying focused.

Nichelette

Little wins today. Although I haven't overpaid anything since my last post, our regular payment went yesterday which has triggered the balance being 30k less than when we took the mortgage out just over 15 months ago *woop*. I'm not one to talk myself up usually but I'm really proud of what we've managed in a relatively short space of time.

We've also got the daily interest to sub £19/day for the first time, and overpaying is nearly saving us £50/month in interest compared to what we were paying last April. It just goes to show overpaying is worth it. I can't believe it's saving nearly £600/year 

jenni_fer

That is seriously impressive, well done!

South_coast

Wow, that's fantastic progress - well done you 😀

Brindlebabe

Well done. You are amazingly focused! 

Nichelette

Okay, so I've been having a think. We're paid on the 15th so we have about a week to go. At the end of the pay month I usually pay anything that is left over off the mortgage, but I also have the credit card and the car now. This is completely not how I wanted things to be as my plan was to get to my LTV target (original one reached now), and then switch to paying off the car which would have all/nearly all been paid off come remortgage time. Now I feel like I need to pay more off the mortgage, so that won't happen. I've been internally fighting about what to pay off and to what extent. 

My issue is that in terms of remortgaging I have what looks like a lot of other debt now. The cc is 0% until July 21 and in normal times I would not be paying this off earlier than need be because it's 0% so it's more sensible to divert money to the car then mortgage. There is just under 7k on that. The car is 8k + interest (obviously what it will actually be depends how quickly I clear it). My concern is if I divert all money to the mortgage I'll have a lot of other debt I didn't intend to have hanging around. 

I've decided to split any 'leftover' money as 50% off mortgage, 25% off cc, and 25% off car. Whilst they're not taking overpayments on the car I'll pay it off the cc and then use that to overpay the car when I can. Ideally I'd shift as much as possible to the cc to reduce the interest but I (and I could be wrong) think it would look worse if I had a lot on the credit card as at least the car is a 'legitimate' purchase. When I was able to make overpayments to the car I was asking them to keep the term the same to reduce the monthly so the commitment is as low as possible come remortgage time. 

I wish things were normal and I didn't have to think about all this. Again though, I know I am very fortunate compared to lots. I think we'll be able to reduce the mortgage by another 6k come October, get the cc down to 3k and the car to 4k. It's still a lot. I really wish there was sport on still so I could do the sports matched betting. I have about £150 free bets sitting in Sky I could convert to actual cash if there was actually something to bet on! I think there are obscure sports in far flung places but I don't really want to get involved with odd stuff. Never mind!