Time to stop (over)thinking and time to start doing!!

Throwaway1

I would normally have updated a couple of days ago with the OP to take the month to £1666.66 but we've had a chat and decided to take a different approach now with all the talk of No Deal Brexit. I'm not mentioning it to be political, just as a log in my diary for when I look back at this time. We've decided that we don't want to tie our money up permanently in the mortgage at such an unpredictable time but equally, we don't want to lose out on the interest savings either. As such, we have decided to go middle of the road and move the OP money into our ISAs rather than as mortgage OPs. Our ISAs have a rate of 1.5% so we will be losing out a little compared to paying off the mortgage, but not too much. To counteract that, I've put more into my ISA (knowing I can get it out at any time) than I would have put into the mortgage at this time so I will have all the money at 1.5% for 3 months rather than bits of it at 2.64% over the 3 months. I know the best approach normally would be to put all my money into the ISA and 'drip-feed' it across but I like to see my ISA as 'money to pretend doesn't exist' so I still don't like to let my current account get too low as I don't see borrowing from the ISA as an option.

So, last night, I put £2500 into my ISA to cover most of my mortgage OP needed before our house buying 1yr anniversary on the 7th Nov (need to check that that is the exact date) when our 10% allowance resets. My husband put £300 in his as he has less money sat in his current account. He gets paid a lot more than me but most bills, general day to day spends and the regular mortgage payment comes out of his current account.

Our thinking is that we should have a better idea of what is happening by the 31st Oct and we can use the 7 days before our anniversary date to decide whether to put the ISA cash into the mortgage to meet out £16,125 target or if we are going to need to keep it. I know this way makes sense but it's no where near as fun!

savingholmes

Do you have a separate 3-6 months emergency fund or is this it as that would influence my decision if I was in your shoes?

Throwaway1

savingholmes wrote: »

Do you have a separate 3-6 months emergency fund or is this it as that would influence my decision if I was in your shoes?

We have a 6 months emergency fund (so long as no emergencies occur during the 6 months we would be needing to use the emergency fund :rotfl:).

Throwaway1

Update time!

It's been forever since I've updated this as all OP money was being dripfed into an ISA rather than paid into the mortgage. However, since the Brexit extension has been confirmed, and our 1 yr mortgage drawdown anniversary is next week, we have paid the remaining £5666.68. That means we have met our 10% target for this year!!! :j:j:j

We need to decide what to do to celebrate this milestone before we launch straight into next year's 10% target of around £14,200 ish.

It has been a long hard slog at times and we have become absolute masters of couponing, doing surveys, using cashback apps, finding freebies for date nights (cinema tickets/pints etc.) Next year should be easier as our OP will be £500 a month less thank goodness as we couldn't have sustained this for much longer. We just have to remember that every year will get easier and it will all be worth it when we are mortgage free in 9 years.

Running the figures, we have so far saved £15,275 in interest alone and have taken 4 years 2 months off the term. :beer:

Throwaway1

The first OP of 2020 went in yesterday. It was only a small one - £172.64. We're trying to not pay into the mortgage as yet but keep feeding the 10% OP money into our ISA as our car is due it's MOT next month and as it is 12 yrs old there's a good chance that it might be time for a new one. If so, we'll need access to the money but if all's good then we can move it across to the mortgage. However, I couldn't resist this small OP as it takes our allowance for the rest of the year to exactly £14,000. Also, I've joined julicorn's challenge this year and I wanted an entry for January!

So far that's 4 year 3 months shaved off of our term.

Only £140,880.19 left to go!! :eek:

Cheery_Daff

Oooh, exciting :money: well done you! :j :j

Throwaway1

The car has had its MOT. We'd already fixed a few things ourselves that we knew it would fail on (leaking sump which the lowest quote to fix was £350 up to almost £600 so we bought one online for £25, spent £50 on jacks, axle stands etc. and £15 on sealant and fixed it ourselves after 3 attempts (the sealant kept leaking until we put it on thick enough), a rear shock was broken so as they should be done in pairs we bought 2 to replace them. Unfortunately, there were 2 bolts we could not undo so we ended up having to pay £70 labour for the mechanic to fit them but it was still definitely cheaper than just taking it straight to him) and a new battery (it was still using its original 12 year old one before it finally died a few weeks ago!) Even after these fixes, it still failed on 3 things and as the mechanic told us one was a dangerous fault we couldn't drive it away to fix it (this turned out to be a lie when we checked online but he had already closed by the time it appeared on there). As such, we ended up paying him £270 to fix the faults - I have no idea if this was fair or not as I didn't do any research on it as we really needed the car within a few hours as we are boarding a guide dog and we had to pick her up. We ended up just paying it and being relieved that our car should now hopefully last us another year.

The good news from all that is that now we don't need to immediately buy a new car, we've been able to put the 10% OP money we'd been saving in the ISA into the mortgage instead. This morning, we paid in another £4666.67 which covered November, December, January and February's OPs that we'd not yet paid.

In total, from all our overpayments so far, we've saved £18,416.98 in interest and knocked 5 years and 4 months off of our term.

Throwaway1

Just a super quick update.

As we're not expecting any large payments to be due this month (famous last words), I decided to pay my half of the OP in early for maximum interest savings. £583.33 went in this morning which means that in total, from all our overpayments so far, we've saved £18,954.13 in interest and knocked 5 years and 6 months off of our term.

savingholmes

Congratulations - you are doing really well at reducing your mortgage

Jessy103

Great progress, congrats!