Discipline buys freedom

Uthikoloshe · 30 September 2019 at 12:40AM

Hi all,

I have read many of the journeys on here when I need motivation. I had enough of a deposit to put down £160 000 on a house. This money was acquired by 15 years of renting a room in various peoples houses and saving, completely avoiding any holidays that didn't involved a tent, making rock climbing my sport (less than 200 quid a year on equipment), smashing the overtime, and 40k left to me when my father died. I went all in with no cash left over.

I leafleted all the houses in an area which i liked (big rooms, cheap) and got a response, and bought for £265 000 from someone who wished to sell and we skipped the agent fees. This left me with a mortgage of 101000 at an interest rate of 2.99% fixed for five years. I am single so there is no woman to help me with it, but also I can scrimp far harder than any sane woman would allow me to do haha. That was Sep 2013.

My mortgage had a 10% a year with no penalty clause, so that became my target, to hit that. This i have managed by some extreme saving measures. No mobile phone contracts, never see the inside of a pub, no foreign holidays, ride bike to work, cook in bulk for the freezer, insulating the house and turning the dial down eventually even down to things like switching from Mach III to Blue II haha. I can afford to live better for sure, and soon I will, but for now my mantra is "Discipline buys freedom".

Apart from saving, I have generated extra income by working a lot of overtime, and taking in a lodger. After 4 years of 10% payments the number gets smaller over the years so when the fix was up I had a big amount to put down saved up. So at the end of year six I have £16 000 to go. (refixed at 2.44%). Ill have this done by Christmas next year for sure and hopefully sooner than that. I think I will save somewhere in the region of 30 to 35 000 pounds worth of interest payments and clear the thing 17 years early.

Zoopla thinks my house has gone up by around 70 to 80k which works out to a 6% per year return on my deposit i think.

Freedom is so close I can taste it now. Hit it hard and hit it early. Thanks to all those posters who went before whose stories I read when I was feeling the urge to slacken off. Your stories have kept me at it.

As a PS here is another way I saved some money. I gambled on my health. When I first took this on I enquired about some insurance in case of ill health. The questions I was asked int hat interview were 1) any history of cancer in the family? yeah, my dad. 2) Do you take part in any extreme sports? yeah rock climbing & mountain biking. 3)have I ever smoked, yeah. Stupid teenager habit that I stopped at 25. The quote was 260 a month. NOT A CHANCE! The fact that as a climber I am really forced to keep my weight bang on the recommended BMI, and the fact I clock over a thousand miles on my bike a year meant nothing. I just couldn't get sick, so I went all in on the diet too. Very few carbs, a lot of greens & calisthenic exercise (no gym fees). This alone has probably saved me 20k.