Update Paid off! - Six years and counting!!

debtfreeoneday

Well done on savings and holiday juggling. I think everyone has worries on some level or another during this time. Just take each day at a time. I find coming on here more has helped me stay in touch with normal things if that makes sense. 

Kat78MFW

FD RS has matured with a lovely £96 interest. I can't imagine ever getting 5% on an account again.

Sadly, i'm feeling too anxious about our return to work to put the matured savings into the mortgage. If either myself or DH (or worse both) need to take some unpaid leave because of our fear about work, we may need this money for our essential bills. So I have put it into a current account paying 1% and will drip feed it across to an instant access RS paying 2%. 

I need to shop around to try to get my car insurance renewal down from £300. I'm reluctant to leave Aviva though as they were very efficient and also understanding on the phone when I had a bump in my car just over a year ago. I will definitely speak to them and see if they can offer any reduction considering the car has barely been off the drive since mid March. 

I also need to email Virgin Media to see if they might extend our Oomph package special offer for a few extra months to make up for the current lack of live sport. 

Finally, I need to contact the travel insurer that I used for our postponed summer holiday and see if they would transfer our insurance cover to the rescheduled dates. It's unlikely but worth a try. 

Kat78MFW

No further reduction available from Aviva but I am going to renew with them anyway. Can only shave a few pounds off by switching and I was so impressed by their service when I had my accident so will stick with them. 

No reply yet from Virgin or travel insurance. 

Have cashed out £25 from Prolific which I have spent on delivery of a fruit box for tomorrow. It's an expensive way to buy fruit but it tastes amazing and will tide us over until we have our next shopping slot the following week.

Have had to spend a little bit on birthday gifts this month but still way down on normal monthly spending. 

ElmoR

Have noticed that you are very disciplined with the regular savers and harvesting them. I wish I was that organised, the work involved in remembering all the login details and passwords is what stymies me. How do you get around this?

Let us know how the travel insurance discussion goes - I'm wondering how to get back our holiday flights money?

Take care, stay safe

ElmoR x

Kat78MFW

The regular savers are all linked to current accounts and the money is automatically transferred into a standard linked savings account that I can access via Internet banking on my mobile.

Considering contacting Virgin Mobile to see if we can pause my daughter's £6 per month sim only contract as she hasn't used any minutes or data since mid March and is unlikely to until September. Annoyed with myself that I didn't think to do this sooner. 

Kat78MFW

Have made our June mortgage payment early, as we are due to get paid this week, to take us down below £42 000.  Still no reply from Virgin or from travel insurance.  My daughter doesn't want her sim cancelled as she wants to be able to use her mobile data to create a wi-fi hotspot when the wifi is playing up.  
Slightly more spendy this past week or two due to birthday season - we have 5 family birthdays between 15th May and 15th June!  Plus DD1 birthday in July.  Have managed to use amazon vouchers from surveys to help with some of the costs.  Also really pleased to have been able to use £40 of ASDA vouchers from surveys for this week's online shopping, despite the email saying that they were for use in store only.  I tried inputting the gift card code at checkout and it worked!
Credit card bill due in June is only £825 so I'm hoping to be able to save about £1500 of our May salaries.  I have opened up a new FD regular saver at 2.75% interest to drip feed £300 per month.  I am still anxious that either DH or I or both may not be able to continue with our jobs in the medium term due to the stress and anxiety about catching the virus so I don't want to lock away too much of our savings.
I am also in the process of setting up our Power of Attorney documents.  I have been putting it off for ages as they cost £82 each but hearing about people of our age being stuck in ICU for weeks on end has made me get them done.  Annoyingly, my printer ink ran out as I was printing them out ready for signing so need some more ink before I can get them finished.
Hope everyone is keeping well.  

Kat78MFW

Through April and May, I have been tracking our spending on a spreadsheet. I used to do this all the time up until about 10yrs ago when it got complicated by having different accounts and trying to get it correct with all the accounts balancing at the end of each month. So I gave up. Now I am happy for it to just be a close approximation so I am entering all the bills and all our spending but manually entering the end of month balances so I can see how our overall finances are looking and not worrying whether I'm getting it perfect.

Both DH and I are back at work now. I am managing to keep my anxiety under control. He is OK at the moment but we'll have to see what happens when some of the kids return to school on 15th June. 

Kat78MFW

So in April, we had a surplus of £1700, which has all gone into savings and in May we had a surplus of £1230. We used this to pay June's mortgage payment early and put the rest in savings. This takes our savings to around £8000. If all goes well with our return to work, I plan to transfer some of this into the mortgage to max out the overpayments but I will wait until September / October to do this I think, so I can be sure that neither of us need to take some unpaid leave for our mental health. 

Kat78MFW

Return to work is going well for DH and I so I have felt better about throwing a bit more money at the mortgage. We are now into the 30 000s. Also, I annoyingly discovered that the £5000 that I have in our Club Lloyds account is not earning any interest. I had overlooked that I needed two DDs going out of the account to get the 1% interest. So I have moved £1500 onto the mortgage and moved a couple of bills payments onto the Lloyds account. But they won't kick in until August. For the first time ever, I need to watch out that we don't hit the OP limit. As we have an interest only mortgage, we can only reduce the balance by £11800 each calendar year. We are already up to £8000.
We have had a refund on DD2s school residential trip which was unexpected and welcome. We are spending a fair amount on DIY currently as DH is converting the garage at the bottom of the garden into a games room. We have also had to pay £576 for a replacement window for DD1 bedroom which we ordered before lockdown.
Tomorrow is going to be expensive. I have booked an appointment to get DD2 sorted with her school uniform for starting senior school in September. I am very anxious about it but thought that it would be better to get it done now while a lot of kids are still in school. I'm fairly sure that we can exchange items if she has grown too much by the start of term or if they don't actually go back in September. 

Kat78MFW

I'm back! Still anxious about COVID but DH and I are both managing to work.  DH has made it through the term at school unscathed and I now get a lateral flow test twice per week as I work for the NHS.  DD2 has mostly enjoyed her first term at her secondary school and has got a little group of friends.  DD1 is working hard towards her GCSEs (due in Summer 2022) and has been selected for the Winter county cricket training squad again, although sadly I suspect that the indoor training may not go ahead in January as planned.  Financially, we finish the year having maxed the overpayments on the mortgage and with around £9000 in savings.  Savings rates are so poor though, I am wondering about transferring some into premium bonds.  We are now saving £110 per month into the girls' uni funds but I want to move some of our savings into a pot for DD1 as it is possibly only 3.5years until she goes. 
Mortgage now stands at £34 405 and we have paid off £12 400 this year.  I think we have two years left of our five year fix so if we can max out on those two years as well, there will be around £9000 left to pay once the fix ends.  It feels as though the end really is in sight now.  I guess we should work towards being mortgage neutral when the fix ends so that we can just pay off the final balance as a lump sum.  Could we really start 2023 mortgage free?