Aiming for Mortgage Free!

rugbymadfamily

Aw sorry to hear about your kitties. We only put a bit aside each month so it should be enough for any simple bits (like this....Still £150 roughly expected total bill). If it were something bigger then would have to use the EF but hopefully won't come to that!

mark55man

yes it does add up doesn't it.  It always made me wonder how deep into the EF we would have gone, but fortunately we never found out the hard way.   

rugbymadfamily

My boy is definitely doing a bit better today, saw the vet again and his temperature is down and tummy looking better. Back again tomorrow for what I hope is the final visit. Hes playing a bit more today which I think is a good sign!

savingholmes

Hope kitty recover s soon

rugbymadfamily

Kittie is all better, antibiotics all finished and he seems all the way back to his normal nutter self!

Finances doing well on food shop, will finish the month with about £15 left in that pot which is the first time in forever! Few pots are slightly in the negative which isn't great but its been a spendy month, hopefully will rectify in July. Payday at the end of the week and will include some of the month at my new pay rate having passed my probation - yay!

Done some good exercise this week and even got my first ever meditation session in! Have signed up to some online yoga and mediation classes on the Peloton app (free trial for 60 days so will see how much I use it) but hoping it will help with tight muscles and joint ache from too much sitting!

savingholmes

Congratulations on passing probation

rugbymadfamily

Have now been in our house 3 years! Which means officially there are 22 years of our mortgage to pay....OPs to date have knocked 5 months off of that which is good. Been recently reading more around investing etc and how paying off the mortgage currently doesn't make as much sense given low interest rates.

I think the difference for me is that our mortgage is such a huge balance that we really need to make some inroads into it so that if anything happened to one of us/ our jobs it would be less of an issue. Both have reasonable contributions into our pensions and monthly we are putting aside £100 into long term savings (for pre retirement), £500 into general savings (for kitchen refurb / new car etc) vs about £1,100 into mortgage OPs. I think once the mortgage balance drops below the £250k mark (forecast for early 2025) we may well change things up and get more into investing/ saving to aim for mortgage neutral. But for now, mortgage OPs make more sense for us. 

mark55man

as you know there is a spectrum of views between repayment and investment - however its not a binary decision - getting a bit of both is never a bad choice and you can shift the balance as you feel comfortable and as your circumstances dictate

remote_control

I always debate this too but I agree, at the moment our mortgage is so massive I just want to break the back of it.

rugbymadfamily

Some good MSE going on here. Husband has found a website called Teacher Discounts recently and so has managed to get us £20 off per month of our TV package, we have an expensive package (currently c.£80 a month for tv, Internet and phone line) but we watch a LOT of sport that we would otherwise go to the pub for and spend much more on drinks! So £20 off per month is great.

Both our phone contracts also finished, paying for handset and calls etc. Previously we would have forgotten and just kept paying a higher price, but both called our providers and have now transferred to sim only deals. Mine has reduced by £12 per month and husbands by £20. So thats £52 per month in total which is over £600! Plus £20 per month on tv = £850 annual savings for minimal effort 😃