Moral Support Needed On My Mortgage-Free Journey

cat04

So I've been having a little look at my OP figures. I knew I could pay 10% of the mortgage balance as it stands in January of each year. Reading further it looks like I can only pay 10% of each sub account. It's a good job I read that as one of the sub accounts has a small amount in it, £423, and I was thinking about maybe paying that one off entirely, or at least finding out if I can...luckily I haven't otherwise I'd more than likely be getting a bill for early redemption!

The DD is rounded up by £40.81, and I pay on the 1st of the month, so since Jan 2019 I've paid an extra £408.30 without even trying. Other OPs for 2019 total £576.60 (which isn't bad considering some months at the start of the year were only £5 or £8). Grand total of £984.90. Will easily top £1000 by Christmas - so pleased with that! That's £1000 I'll never pay interest on again. I can still OP £4,139.52 to get to that elusive 10% mark haha.

I'm keeping a record of all OPs I'm making myself (Ex pays 50% of rounded up DD so it's just my own personal OPs I'm recording). It was always me who suggested OPing and me who actually made them.

Now I can see how far I've come this year I'm so excited to see what 2020 brings! Well apart from my 40th, I'd rather give that a miss!

cat04

So what have I achieved today in my bid to be mortgage free?
I've made a FB sale that was collected today for £4. DD1 sold something for £10, plus the TV/DVD player went today for £10to be slpit between the girls. They are doing far better than me today! I have just sold something else for £3 to be collected tomorrow. It's all bits out of the house which is good for the mind as well as the purse. That's £7 for me after tomorrow.
I've added 4 items to the charity bag and have a bin bag full of bits for the cash 4 clothes place which I will take once the girls are back to school.
I've also filed a small backlog of paperwork and found a few bits to shred.

Something else I've done today is work out what my income/outgoings will be if the ex were to stop paying half of the mortgage as it stands now. According to my rough calculations I'd have about £400 left over after bills/food/EF savings etc. I went on to Martin's budget calculator and that gave a figure of £350, so my rough estimate wasn't bad. Some things I probably over estimated to be on the safe side. This is on a wage of one day a week, so hopefully my surplus will go up after January. Which means more into savings and more off the mortgage.

My original mortgage was for roughly £62.5k, got it paid down to £30k before borrowing £30k more!! Now down to £47,200, so I've paid just over £45k off in just under 10 years. My original MF day was Feb 2025, we were trying for Feb 2020, then with the additional borrowing it got pushed back to Jan 2030 sob sob. My slightly unrealistic target is now Jan 2025, just before my 45th birthday. Which is when the original mortgage would have ended if we had let it runs it's natural course with no extra borrowing, reduction of term or OPs.

Two reasons for this. A) I do not want to be waiting till I'm 49 and 11 months old to get rid of this mortgage.
Child maintenance will stop being paid once DD2 reaches 18, which is Sept 2025, child benefit will stop I think in Aug 2026?? And Child Tax Credit too if I still qualify by then (or UC for me now as my area had made the change so I couldn't change from joint to single CTC claim, had to start claiming UC instead oh joy!) will also stop. So I need to get this mortgage paid off by 2025, or at the very least get it below £10k then throw anything I can at it until it's gone!.

Dare I put my target MF date in my signature???

twinklie

Do it! Do it! Do it!

cat04

twinklie wrote: »

Do it! Do it! Do it!

Done!! Eeek now I've just got to try and achieve it! :rotfl:
Thank you for taking the time to read and reply

cat04

£3 item collected this morning, and £10 item I'd forgotten about is being collected today. This is specifically for the home improvement fund so will transfer that over once it's been collected.
So £7 to add to OP fund.

Read another diary on here this morning and it's prompted me to make an additonal £50 OP yay! That will be it this month though. Does anyone else actually look forward to their mortgage DD day?? Mine's the 1st of the month and as I get closer to the end of each month I find myself willing the days away so I can knock another chunk off the mortgage! Depending on when it falls and how cooperative the Halifax website is the interest doesn't always show on the last day of the month so I have to wait till the 1st to see how much extra I can pay off...and if that's a weekend I sometimes have to wait even longer!

Mortgage OP pot stands at £40: £7 of sales, £29 Quidco that I took as an Amazon voucher, and a £3 Amazon voucher from Swagbucks. I think I'm going to let this build up until Christmas then pay it off the mortgage in one go. Will challenge myself to see how high I can get it Not expecting amazing things though as also trying to build my various savings pots up slowly. Helps with the budgeting, plus you just never know what's round the corner.

cat04

Nothing of note to report really, just thought I'd check in to keep myself motivated as been busy with other things the last few days. And to get the thoughts out of my head and on to paper so to speak.

Meeting with banking friend has been postponed due to her being sick (not something I want to be picking up as I really can't cope with vomiting!).

£13 has been transferred to the OP pot as I cashed in a £10 Argos voucher from a survey site and £3 to Paypal from another, so new total is £53. Been looking at my budget for the month and what outgoings I have. CC bill will top just over £1000 this month eek (usually around £250-£300 but it includes my new bed and mattress this time). I'll transfer half of the bed costs out of my home improvement fund (I've been adding extra bits I've earnt/made into there specifically for the bed) and the rest will be covered my the excess in my account.

I really should work more at transferring out of my main account into the savings accounts. The thing stopping me is anxiety about seeing the balance of my main account lower than I've been used to the past 10 or so months. I also think that once I've transferred money into my savings pots my brain is telling me that's it, it's now gone and will forever be allocated to the Christmas/Gift fund, or home improvement fund etc. Then I panic because what if there is some kind of emergency and I need the money??!! Which is just ridiculous because if I ever really needed it in a few clicks it would be back in my account. There is always a buffer in my main account, in fact looking back right now I've had to scroll to August to find the last time it dipped below £2000, so it's not like I'm scraping the barrel! I need to make my money work harder for me. Even if it's just in the low interest savings accounts as this would mean it's earning me a bit of extra interest, plus I have the benefit of it being easily accessable and also not thinking I have plenty of money spare to spend on 'stuff' - not that I do but if you feel flush there is the temptation to give into the kids nagging you for regular treats etc.

I think I need to spend some time on here looking into where best to put the savings I'm building up (the actual 'this is not to be touched as it's your happy future fund for you and your girls'). Part of me feels like I need to put it somewhere with zero risk, but a small part of me thinks that maybe a bit of risk = better returns and it would be worth it in the long run. Maybe something to discuss with my dad as he is very financially savvy (both my parents were able to take early retirement because of their financial planning and variety of company and personal pensions).

Right, on with my super busy day with appointments galore. Quick meeting at 10.15 then picking DD1 up from school at 11am to take her for her first Orthodontist appointment so hopefully that all goes well for her. The rest of the day will pass in a blur!

cat04

It's the first of a new month which means my mortgage DD has gone out and I've made my monthly interest OP yay!!

Mortgage as of 1st Oct 2019 = £47,200
OPs made in Oct 2019 = £159.23 (interest plus £50)
Daily Interest = £3.601

Mortgage as of 1st November = £46,615 - clearly that £15 at the end needs to go but not today!
OPs made so far in Nov 2019 = £146.64 (interest plus I made extra payments to each sub account to round them down - first time I've done this. Unfortunately it won't show on my mortgage account until tomorrow, or maybe even Monday with it being the weekend - can't wait to log on and see all those round numbers!)

I'll do a proper end of year look at figures but so far my daily interest has gone from £3.915 in January to £3.601 in October, a drop of 31.4p per day.

Some people might think that paying small amounts off your mortage doesn't make any difference, but they really do. Out of interest I put that £50 OP into Martin's overpayment calculator. Just that, not including my regular rounded up DD OPs or anything else, if that £50 OP was all I did between now and the end of my mortage it would save me £18 of interest. Imagine doing that every month, or even every 2 months if that's what you can budget for, over the course of your mortgage. It would soon add up and make a big difference.

Using my current mortgage balance just rounding up my DD like I do would from today onwards save me £908 of interest and knock 11 months off the term. So for an extra £40.83 a month I'm shaving a year off my mortgage. Amazing stuff
If I can keep on paying the monthly interest as an OP on top of the rounded up DD for the duration of the mortgage as it stands I'll save £2,620 in interest and knock almost 3 years off the term. I love playing with figures and seeing what little things I can do to help get this mortgage down!

It's DD1's 15th birthday on Monday, she has a meal out with friends on Saturday evening, she would like to go to Meadowhall on Sunday, then on her actual birthday it's her choice of tea and she's chosen Domino's pizza, but we'll collect so it's BOGOF. A slightly spendy start to the month but I'll see what I can do with savings and OPs. Several of her birthday gifts were bought using Amazon vouchers, plus I've got cashback on some things so that's not too bad. She's spending her own money on Sunday so all it will cost me is diesel and lunch, plus I might be able to pick up a few bits for Christmas!

Hettyhound

Good luck Cat04 . I’m a single parent to a six year old handling the mortgage on my own. Luckily for me my ex husband is long gone and definitely history. Also nothing to do with my son who I adopted as a 10 month old being a single adopter. This is the right place to be for support, encouragement and absolutely no judgement. You are doing just fine and you are the best, ensuring stability for you and your girls :T

My deadline is Easter 2025 and I’m addicted to that overpayment calculator too :rotfl:

cat04

Hettyhound wrote: »

Good luck Cat04 . I’m a single parent to a six year old handling the mortgage on my own. Luckily for me my ex husband is long gone and definitely history. Also nothing to do with my son who I adopted as a 10 month old being a single adopter. This is the right place to be for support, encouragement and absolutely no judgement. You are doing just fine and you are the best, ensuring stability for you and your girls :T

My deadline is Easter 2025 and I’m addicted to that overpayment calculator too :rotfl:

Thank you so much, sometimes you just need to hear someone else who isn't biased towards you say you're doing ok :heartsmil


Last night was tough, it's coming close to the first annivesary of me discovering his betrayal, and although the love for him is long gone the pain of what he did is still there and rears it's head every so often. I'm not ashamed to admit I went for an early shower so I could have a cry without my girls seeing.

He's also finally got round to removing himself from a joint account and because he hadn't set up his share of the mortgage payment to me as a SO he lost the information so didn't transfer the money. He wasn't even going to do it until I messaged him, so I made the decision that from 1st November the mortgage is my responsibility alone. Maybe that's silly of me but he left me to deal with everything alone so that's what I'm doing.

I absolutely begrudge having to give him any equity from this house, especially when I was the one who arranged all the over payments, the extension and improvements we had done before he left were my idea and I was the driving force behind them. We wouldn't even have this house or this equity if it weren't for me so it hurts. Also, how am I going to pay him the equity once it's agreed?? I don't have that amount of savings, I'm not selling, I am NOT extending the mortgage...can we have an arrangement where I pay him x amount every month until it's paid?? I think he'd actually go for that, but I don't want that hanging over my head for a long time.

These are the thoughts that are constantly circling my head, not surprised I can't switch off and sleep properly at night. To end on a positive though, all my lovely rounded mortgage sub account amounts are showing Feels good to have order in some small aspect of my life :rotfl:

cat04

I've actually just done a happy dance around the kitchen. I am so blinkered sometimes, especially when I get in a panic about things. Last night when I was working out how much I'd have to pay him, I took the value of the house now using the Nationwide Index linked valuation, took off my protected share plus inheritance etc etc), then halved the remianing figure....What I didn't do was deduct the mortgage from the house value before taking off my protected share!!! OMG this is going to be so much more managble!!! I could actually cry happy tears! But I put that panic and stress on myself by not doing the most basic calulation first :o