Building a Brighter Future

WhoME

I have decided this year to give my life an overhaul. We are comfortable, we have a small amount of debt (£6k), with about £15k in savings and we overpay the mortgage by £600 a month.
Our joint income is about £5,500 a month and I honestly don’t know where we spend it - we should have about £1.5k a month spare after the overpayment.  We had a target of reaching £15k of savings and once we reached that a while ago we just seem to spend the spare money.
I have decided to take control and sort our finances out. First on the list is chasing up the refund from our cancelled holiday last April - we didn’t get anywhere with the hotel booking agency and so applied to the credit card company in August but not heard back. I’ve just found out DH has also been pay a standing order to the gym he cancelled 18 months ago so going to try to get £432 back that he has paid on that! Also cancelling WW, Netflix and Britbox.
I want to move house when our fixed term is up in 18 months time and our mortgage and bills will increase by about £1k a month (we’re making the overpayment to get used to the new mortgage amount). We also may need to look at paying for private IVF which if we need a few rounds could easily be £15-20k so I really want to get back in control of our finances.

I also want to open up LISAs for both of us. I want to put £2k in this month for me and £2k in next month for DH before the new tax year - some of this months will need to be made up of the refunds we are due as we paid for a holiday 😳.

WhoME

So I cancelled WW, Netflix and britbox, the gym wasn’t open as it was a bank hol yesterday. 

I also called the credit card company who have lost my claim so are sending out the paperwork to redo it!

I’ve made some small progress since yesterday but not managed to sort the bigger items on my list.
I’m going to try and do a no discretionary spend month, DH has music lessons but otherwise we shouldn’t need to spend on things other than food and household bills.
I am determined to get on top of our spending.  On the face of it we are good with money, we own our car our right, have no debt apart from the loan (which I’m going to look into repaying with the savings), decent pension savings for our ages and quite a bit of equity in the house but I keep thinking that we should have more put by - maybe I’m setting my expectations too high wanting to save 40% (if you count the overpayment as savings) at the expense of the discretionary spending.

Miss_Money_Magnet

Good luck! We are similar to you in our savings and house situation.  I want to accelerate our mortgage free journey rather than waste / fritter money to give us more options later- look forwards to following your journey!

savingholmes

Good to have goals. Just wishing you luck on your journey. 

Sarahwithlove

Good luck. Maybe come up with a SOA so people can make suggestions on places to cut back. Even if you don't want to post it on here be good if you can have an idea yourself where the money is being spent. So have a look back through the last 6 months statements.