Moved to the "forever" home. Now to pay it off!

pepperwand

Just been informed that the children's nursery is having to close as a confirmed Covid case in the room. Working with my two terrors at home is going to be...... interesting. It was hard enough in the first lockdown when nursery was closed for ten weeks and my youngest was still a baby then, now we're in the maniac-toddler stage! 
The only good news is that we'll be refunded for the days we miss so should be another chunk to add to the overpayment fund.

Bluegreen143

Subscribed to your diary @pepperwand! You’re doing fantastic at having already made OPs right from the first month. I wish I’d done that from when we moved into our house! We’ve lived here 6 years but remortgaged to a 30 year term just over a year ago though we did pay off about £12k in one go when we remortgaged (an inheritance and was necessary as we didn’t pass affordability otherwise as had gone from 2 to 1 incomes) so technically that counts as my only overpayment 😆

pepperwand

Thank you @Bluegreen143! We didn't ever consider overpaying our mortgage in our first house until my husband got a redundancy payout but found another job immediately so luckily we were able to put that off the mortgage. That was about four years into living there and we never made regular overpayments but moving house and upping the mortgage again got us scared so we've decided to try chipping away at it right from the start if we can!

pepperwand

I kick myself really as we definitely could have made overpayments on our first mortgage which would have helped us with equity when we moved, but I'm glad we've thought about it at this stage. You've got to start somewhere!

Bluegreen143

I kick myself too even though we actually couldn’t really afford to anyway (our finances were very tight when I was a SAHM and our mortgage was double the cost it is currently before we remortgaged). It’s easy to look back and wish you’d spent past money differently, but actually I’m sure we had reasons for acting as we did at the time! The important thing is that you are making them now.

pepperwand

I've checked the terms of our mortgage with Virgin again and I *think* the overpayment limit isn't £500 a month, just that any overpayment has to be under £500. We've managed to save £400 this month to put towards the mortgage which I'm really pleased with. That number has been helped by selling our sofa second hand in preparation for our new one coming, the old one we've had for years and was very tatty so I'm pleased we got some money for it.

pepperwand

Just looked and the balance of the mortgage is now at £269363.19.....it is still such a lot of money it just feels like it'll take forever to pay off. Got to keep thinking one step at a time and every little helps but at the moment it feels like I'm just chucking money into a bottomless pit.

Bluegreen143

I totally get what you mean and feel a bit like that too. But even if we knock a few years off we will be so glad at the end, won’t we? And the only way to get there is by making the overpayments, even when they seem so small compared to the debt.

caeler

I'm not sure I could have thought about the end at the beginning.  Too overwhelming and big.  I had to make the journey bite sized for me.  I focused on the impact my overpayments were having.  

pepperwand

@caeler that makes sense, I think I'm going to focus on getting down into each £10k bracket....so on £269k and can concentrate on being in the £250ks at some point!