Mortgage free in Forever Home :-)

jenni_fer

Well done for making your first overpayment. They really do add up quickly!

Baileys_Babe

To keep me motivated with overpaying the mortgage I track the daily interest. We now pay £1.29 less per day than in March 2020 😊

KajiKita

Baileys_Babe said:

To keep me motivated with overpaying the mortgage I track the daily interest. We now pay £1.29 less per day than in March 2020 😊

Good morning 😊

Can I ask how you calculate this?

KK

KajiKita

Oooooooh! <Squeal of excitement!> 😊

I’ve just logged into my Atom savings account, more in hope than expectation, and I have earned £2.77 in interest in the last month!! Whoop! Soooooo excited by this!!! 🎉🎉🍾🤩😂

KK

redofromstart

I like the savings interest, feels like free money.

KajiKita

Good afternoon all and welcome to the hour longer days! 

Done my post pay-day, monthly-money-shuffle and can report:
- £55.78 OP to mortgage - yaay!
- Passed the break-even point on my savings v. interest free debt and now have £275.10 in *actual* savings when I pay off the C/Cd in February next year - so far that is.
- Spending has been contained - just one indulgence of buying some melamine shelves (we had brackets and the supporting wall track thingies for them - hubby supplied labour and fixings ) for my best friend as her moving in present - cost £60.48. 

Just need to update my signature now 

Having a lovely time in the garden and I can see how my plan of moving the flower bed from one side of the front garden to the other will work well now  Just taking out one old, sad, lumpen lavender bush that was swamped with ivy on the one corner has lifted the whole area massively!

Planning lots of cooking and gardening for Easter - I have an extra week off beforehand - I really need it. I am hoping to:
- Clear and clean the conservatory to make it a usable space again - I will do an hour or so a day on this whilst waiting for fog / temperatures to lift in the garden
- Master making a vegan lasagne - I have various recipes and tips i have collated. The shop bought ones are pretty naff and I am pretty sure I can do better. That then will become a batch for the freezer.
- Batch cook pulses and grains for lunches / freezer. 
- Finish my Ehrman tapestry - this needs daylight hours to be done properly
- Buy yarn to knit my mother a knee blanket like the one I have already made for my dad but in a different colour

KK

Suffolk_lass

Well done! It feels like a tipping point I suspect. For me, the important bit was to pay it off and reduce the cash going out each month, because the interest on the savings was so low, the benefit of having the minimum monthly payment back in my purse meant I pushed it to paying down the mortgage after building up a £10k emergency fund. It is swings and roundabouts and I needed the incentive

KajiKita

It's been quite a while since I did an update. Apologies for that. 

Work has been horrendous and has been making me very stressed to the point where if I hadn't had a week off booked, I think I would have been off sick. I need to find a way to manage this better. 

I've been spending quite a bit on the garden (ahem!) but it's my one indulgence and it being productive and pretty is good for both my soul and my vitamin intake!  Some plants but a lot of compost and mulches - this garden is 'starving'!
Another small (less than £100) OP made to mortgage    Atom's savings rate has gone up twice since I opened my account with them to the now dizzying level of 1%!

I made my vegan lasagne and learned a lot from it. I need to make both the red and white sauces 'wetter' and boost the flavours some more, but they were *so* much better than shop bought!  I am really pleased with how they came out and I have another 4 in the freezer as single portions.   

Conservatory is coming on but it is hard work and very time consuming .....

Ordered the yarn for my mum's blanket (money off voucher and cashback used!) but it hasn't arrived as yet ....(Actually I ought to chase that up!)

I have also managed to clear and wash down the greenhouse inside and out and mulch the beds in there, so that space is ready for the growing season. I have been doing lots of seed sowing too, so have various seedlings and trays of things waving their leaves at me all over the conservatory which is cheering and happy making. Hubby laughs at me regularly when he sees the green tide of little plants, swelling each spring, across every windowsill and through the conservatory at him .....    

Another big but 'free' job is de-weeding the patio so it is more usable this year. I have managed about a third of it but there is a lot left to do!

Delighted to be able to be using the whirly gig drier for our washing again instead of the tumble drier   

KajiKita

I have rummaged and rummaged but I can't find any sign of a receipt or order confirmation for the yarn I thought I had ordered, so I guess i will have to start again ..... sigh.

All dahlias and cannas moved to greenhouse and given a good watering  Potting shed floor (where their pots were) swept and tidied - potting shed looks 4 times bigger! All copper rings retrieved from all over the garden through the winter nested or stacked as needed. I now have space to work my way through some large plastic pots of scented lily bulbs and retrieve the ones I want to keep and bin the weeds and stale compost  

KK 

KajiKita

Hello 👋 
Long time no posts from me! It’s been a bit chaotic….

Had to go to Ossuccio in Italy for work at relatively short notice, work has been tough and of course the garden has just exploded ….

Financially I think it’s fair to say that I have lost some focus over these weeks, but I’m back on it now and have some learnings to ponder on.

1. get a company credit card sorted! I went to Italy at the beginning of May and I still haven’t had my expenses paid back 😢 They got bounced because I had to get some ‘personal items’ (read that as toiletries, underwear and a couple of tops) because my luggage got lost in a transfer and didn’t turn up until late on the second night! Those personal items had to have a second layer of authorisation from my line manager, not that anyone told me that when I submitted them …. <sigh> I will be going to Minden in September for work and I fear that there is every chance that this expenses hassle might happen again ….

2. Just submitted meter readings for gas and electric and hubby and I have agreed to start submitting these every month so we can keep a closer eye on our consumption / how much it’s costing us. I need to add this to my financial tracker to remind me to do this. I’m getting cannier at reading my gas meter - I have to get down on my hands and knees to read it as it’s so low, but I now aim my camera phone at it from shin level and then read it from the comfort of the sofa! 😉

 We are getting better at turning off heating, zombie items, using the tumble dryer less (the heated clothes rail from Lakeland is a game changer - we are airing our towels on it after our showers now, rather than running the whole heating system for an hour or letting them remain damp and get a bit fausty (spelling?)), so that’s a good quality of life thing, still with reduced cost. 

Still need to organise curtains and new curtain rails before the winter ….

3. Food spend is getting away again. Partly because the costs are going up and up, but also because I have been paying less attention. Something to come back to and concentrate on again.

4. Car: my poor car needed a new spring on the driver’s side front - it was deemed unsafe to drive by the time I got it to a garage - and looking at the 3” length of metal the mechanic pulled out from the wheel arch I couldn’t really argue …. They seemed to rather lean on the hours (2, at £56 per hour!) for the job though, so I am going back to a mechanic local to home for my service and MOT in a week or so. Fingers crossed it’s a minor service and nothing significant on the MOT ….. 🤞

5. Savings: trickling up …. (I’ll be honest here and say that I have been spending quite a bit on the garden 🤷‍♀️) and I am starting to see reasonable values of interest coming in each month - never had that before! 😊 £16 across the three months since I opened my Atom account. It will drop when I pay off the virgin credit card next year, but hopefully I should have some more savings to make up that gap by then. 

6. Mortgage: no further progress as we have been spending on the house, energy reduction related things, garden etc. But, I have had a conversation with my husband yesterday about only having a holiday-holiday once every 4 years and then spending the money that would have gone on those, on the house and paying down the mortgage. It’s not an executed plan, but I feel better for having thought it through. I can see we are going to have to make this a focus as my husband is really starting to feel that he is slowing up now and the sooner he can work less or stop, the better. 

A nice thing. It was our 16th wedding anniversary last Friday, so we went out for lunch on Saturday. Not cheap but nice to do. I hope this whole weekend will carry me forward for quite a while without any other major ‘indulgence’ spending iykwim 😊

KK