Returning to MFW, my elusive unicorn!

coldcazzie

Afternoon everyone!

I used to post here a good few years ago, but stopped using the forums entirely for several years. Here's a summary:

Bought 1st house in late 2010. At some point discovered the joys of overpaying the mortgage and did so for a while. Discovered we didn't like the area as much as we'd hoped. Then new neighbours moved into the adjoining semi. Massive stress. Like, huge. We were so ill. We put the house up for sale, took a hit on the asking price and sold in 2015. Bought a new house which is round the corner from the rental we'd lived in for 7.5 years before buying. Had to take out small second mortgage in order to make up the difference in prices. Much happier. Love the area, lovely neighbours. House is a bit of a WIP - previous owner thought he was gifted at DIY (but wasn't) and made the house pretty at the expense of taking care of the basics. We love the house though. Haven't overpaid the mortgage since moving here because we've been fixing things and decorating etc.

- Second year here we replaced the gutters/soffits/fascias.
- The year after we laid a new patio.
- Last year we had new windows in the kids bedrooms to replace the blown wooden units, and also had a new boiler and extra insulation put in. New boiler is already earning its keep as our gas bills are noticeably lower than last winter.
- This year we are hoping to replace the last wooden window and have a new front door put in, and this is our main savings goal (about half way there right now).
- However, the roof has started leaking, which is probably going to be a big spanner as it's the original roof from the 50s - our adjoining neighbour had hers completely replaced last year and I suspect we will need to do the same. I'd estimate we're looking at around £5k to replace like for like, more if we decided to take advantage and change the roof and extend into the attic space.

We are essentially a single income household. OH works f/t but is chronically underpaid; I'm self-employed and my business basically tops us up to what he should be earning. I've recently applied for a p/t job, which I'd love to be able to do as well as maintaining my business, but I'm not sure whether that will actually work. To make things more interesting we home educate our kids, which means we have education costs to take into account each month, and it also makes working "usual" hours difficult as those are the hours we want to be ferrying the kids around to groups etc.

We have very little spare cash at the end of each month which makes saving/overpaying hard.

I did used to have a diary, which I would have searched for but I'm on my phone and the site won't load the pop up search box. I will find it later and link it here

coldcazzie

Just laughing at my signature; it really has been a while!

Moving House Fund: £1775.87/£1500 by March 2015 - 118.39%
Emergency Fund: £2120.79/£3000 by April 2016 - 70.69%

coldcazzie

Some more info for the beginning of the diary...

Family
Me, Manwife, offspring x3 (Big Small 15, Medium Small 12, Small Small 10), cats x2, rabbits x2, chickens x6

Finances
Bank Accs
- 1 joint account, into which gets paid his employed wage each month on the 23rd, and my self employed earnings as a SO on the 23rd, plus CB and CTC
- 1 joint account with no purpose
- 6 savings pots in my name: clothes, gifts, car, health, house and home
- Big Small has her own bank account, Medium Small and Small Small have goHenry cards

Debts
- 1 AMEX card, paying 1% cashback, which we clear each month
- 1 mortgage, 2 sub accounts currently standing at £92903.90. Int rate: 4.24%. MF date: 2043.

Current Goals
- Wanting to add the following savings accounts: pets, entertainment, toiletries and holiday, not that we've had one of those in a long time, but I live in hope?
- In the process of doing an assessment of where we are, and due an annual mortgage statement by the end of Jan.
- New front door: currently about 45% of target.
- Plan a holiday?!
- Find out what the heck is going on with the roof. Potentially cry about this.

Have edited to add more detail in line with later updates.

Official Diary Updates, complete with finances, achievements and goals
• This one right here - 14-01-2020 - mortgage £92903.90
• Beginning of Page 10 - 19-03-2020 - mortgage £92582.45
• Beginning of Page 23 - 17-06-2020 - mortgage £91774.57
• Beginning of Page 37 - 05-10-2020 - mortgage £90644.71
• Beginning of Page 45 - 03/01/2021 - mortgage £89271.11
• Beginning of page 52 - 07/03/2022 - mortgage £85579.20

coldcazzie

Spent some time yesterday going through the credit card spreadsheet for the last year. I already keep track of our spending each month on food, pets, petrol, etc - 20 possible categories in total. Some of those are rarely used (eg, holidays that we haven't had in 2.5y), some are used every month. I added a bunch of extra ones about 6 months ago, and yesterday transferred all the figures over into a new sheet so I can see them all side by side, compare, calculate averages etc.

Averages for the last 6-12 months (rounded to the nearest pound):
Food: £505
Booze: £32 (is that a lot for one person? I don't drink...)
Toiletries: £15
Pets: £43
Travel (mostly petrol, the odd bus journey): £126
Health: £40
Clothes: £95
Gifts: £71
Entertainment: £40
Eating out: £24
Home Education: £88
Vape: £28
Home stuff: £43

Initial thoughts:
- that's less than I thought we spent on our animals.
- wish we could spend less on clothing; anybody have any tips on stopping teenagers growing like weeds?? :rotfl:
- wish Himself would stop vaping (he's working on it)
- everything else is about what I thought...
- wonder if I can get the food bill down somehow? Will have a look at that in a couple of weeks as part of this audit that I seem to have started. I have spent the last few months building up a food buffer, as it were (which would be generally much easier to both do and store if we had a larder) and that will be reflected in the amount I've spent on groceries.

coldcazzie

Also.... I have an interview on Monday for the p/t job I applied for! :j:j

Moneyfordreams

Good luck with the interview :T

cool_techie

coldcazzie wrote: »

Food: £505

Quite a detailed diary coldcazzie. Well done for gathering all the data. That's always the hard part, to begin with!

Regarding the food, have you tried the German discounters, ALDI and Lidl. Also, if you do order a lot of frozen foods, ready to het etc, then Iceland is a good option.

As an addition, do you do any gardening? Fresh beans, carrots are plentiful via that route!

Giving these suggestions, since i do not know the supermarkets you go to!

Keep going.

Regards, CT

coldcazzie

Moneyfordreams wrote: »

Good luck with the interview :T

Thank you! 13 years since I was employed... I am not certain what I'm getting into

coldcazzie

cool_techie wrote: »

Quite a detailed diary coldcazzie. Well done for gathering all the data. That's always the hard part, to begin with!

Regarding the food, have you tried the German discounters, ALDI and Lidl. Also, if you do order a lot of frozen foods, ready to het etc, then Iceland is a good option.

As an addition, do you do any gardening? Fresh beans, carrots are plentiful via that route!

Giving these suggestions, since i do not know the supermarkets you go to!

Keep going.

Regards, CT

Thanks CT :beer:

The garden. Ugh. So many issues lol. The plan with the garden is to build a larger coop/run for the chickens further down the garden from where they are now, and then convert the area where they are currently into a veggie patch. The reason being that the area they are currently in is flat, whereas the area we want to move them to is sloped. We've tried growing on it using raised beds and it's a nightmare. Leveling it will be back breaking. Moving the chooks who don't care if the land is flat is, we think, the easier option. However, it requires funds. Everything always comes back to that. It is on the cards though! We even have a greenhouse which is just waiting for a space to be put in. It's been waiting 5 years so far... :rotfl:

Aldi is potentially an option - where we shop is rather dictated by whether or not they'll take AMEX (annoying, but cashback!). I do tend to chop and change where I shop depending on what we need. I usually go to Morrisons on a Monday while the kids are at gymnastics, and then top up at Asda or Tesco. Some of that is convenience - the nearest Aldi and Lidl stores are ten minutes drive away in the car, whereas Asda is round the corner from our house, and Morrisons is round the corner from gymnastics. It is something to seriously consider though, you're right.

coldcazzie

Haven't received our annual mortgage statement yet, but logged into online banking to see where things are. We have 2 mortgages and as things stand:

#1 is at ~£84,700, LTV 68%
#2 is at ~£8,300, LTV 6.6%

Both are currently on the standard mortgage rate of 4.24%, which is what they move onto after a fixed rate ends. I was aware of that, as they ended their fixed rates at different times and we'd wanted to deal with them together, plus there was some life stress going on at the time so we just allowed them to revert, but I confess I had forgotten and I'm now gulping at the rate.

Himself has been reluctant to remortgage because he thinks the house will have lost value since we bought it. I need to do some further research about this, but I do know a house up the road from us which is comparable (other than a slightly bigger garden) recently sold for £15k more than we paid for ours. There have also recently been 2 private sales, also of comparable houses, so I need to find out what the prices were of those so I can make a judgement. I suspect he's just being overly cautious (our old house lost a fair bit of value in the 4.5y we owned it), but it would be nice to have figures to back that up.

coldcazzie

Chatted with Himself this morning about remortgaging. He is cautious but okay with proceeding. Given that I've got this interview on Monday which I need to prep for I am opting not to make that phone call until mid/late next week, but I have looked at my Equifax credit report and started the process for seeing my Experian one. I don't anticipate any problems, but I am fairly certain I haven't looked at it in a good 8 years lol, so it seemed like a good opportunity to do so!

I confess I'm slightly terrified about this interview.