Money-shuffling towards mortgage freedom

MeandO

Thanks savingholmes x

MeandO

The mortgage and bulk of the bills came out of the bank account today and I've sent a little overpayment of £19.29 to the mortgage to round it down to exactly £74,800. I can't afford to make larger OP's presently but try to just round the numbers down a bit.

savingholmes

Always nice when you can make an OP. Still knocking time off the mortgage for good behaviour.

MeandO

Thank you SH x

MeandO

DS and I got back from a lovely few days at my parents house yesterday so we're both experiencing a bit of the homesick blues at the moment, me in particular but am surprised how much it hit DS this time round. We've made some nice plans for Christmas time though so trying to look forward to that.

Moneywise, I'm not doing too bad considering I was down on income this month. I complained about an M&S order (Christmas gift PJ's for DS and some other children in the family) which has never arrived for store collection and the refund which was promised last week never showed up. I've now received notification of a refund and received a £10 M&S voucher as an apology.
Sky also called me last week and offered a £200 compensatory payment for the damage and issues caused earlier this year. I was shocked as didn't expect anything and they have been good at sorting the issues out too. I'm extremely grateful as it will help pay the credit card down.
I also received £169 in cashback from TCB this month which I used towards DS's Christmas gift - I now have an idea of what he wants as he let slip he was saving for this item. 
My parents paid me for the Christmas gifts I'd picked up for them for others so I can pay that off the card too. They very kindly gave me some money towards diesel so I can send the extra £40 I'd budgeted to the card as well.

I've just received notification of a payrise this year too which will be paid in November, backdated from April. I am hoping that back pay will enable me to pat the card off completely. I'm just going to work out how much more this will equate to a month as I'm still working P/T hours. Hopefully I have sorted out the extra hours saga at work though and from now on will be working the full 7.5 extra hours a week (and getting paid for it!  ).

In other news, my Dad had some spare timber in his garage which he made into a liner for my disused fireplace (with DS's help!). I bought some tile stickers online and last night finished project number two on my list which was to tile my fireplace, albeit this was much easier with the stickers and very hard to tell they're not genuine victorian tiles! I'm so pleased with it and it cost me around £30. It's changed the look of the whole lounge. I'm going to earmark another project soon and see how cheaply I can achieve it...

I also just listed two items on Vinted - first time I've used it so will see how successful I am with it. No interest on the ebay items yet unfortunately.

And I've finally had to admit defeat and put the heating on.  

MeandO

One of the items I listed on vinted has sold already for £20! I’m really pleased! I might even use that as a sneaky mortgage OP as I’m missing making them at the moment. The mortgage is currently at £74800 and I’m so eager to get it down into the £60k’s as quickly as I can. When I first bought a house on my own after divorce (not including buying the ex out) my mortgage was in the sixty thousands. After an horrendous string of bad luck with properties, the mortgage went back up as high as £107k, so to get back down into the 60s again would kind of feel like I’m moving on with everything. 

I’m off to print the vinted label out and see what else I have in my wardrobe I can part with.;)

MeandO

The other Vinted item sold too plus one other additional item I listed, so that's £52.50 made so far. The only annoying thing about it is that they've all selected different postal companies so I have to go to three different locations to post them, one not so convenient either. One item sold on ebay this morning too so I have just over £7 on the way to the bank account from that.
There was interest in a £10 fb item yesterday but not sure if that will go anywhere.

MeandO

I just nipped out and posted 3 of the 4 parcels, the last one I'll try and do this evening as have to head in the same direction to pick up some groceries. I ran out of milk this morning so picked one up in the convenience shop whilst posting a parcel - nearly £2 for 4 pints of milk! Won't be doing that again.

The FB sale has arranged to come in half an hour so that should be another £10 in my purse.

badmemory

The cheapest I can find is £1.55.  Difficult to believe it was under £1 this time last year.

MeandO

It is indeed, badmemory.

£10 was duly received from the fb sale and went towards a groceries shop tonight which I paid for with cash. £47 odd but £7 of that was a Christmas gift I picked up. I hadn’t been shopping for probably nearly two weeks as we were away for a few days and DS was with his Dad for 5 days before that. 

I have started to use up things from my freezers a bit more lately (I have two small freezers) and they are starting to look depleted now, but I still need to make a list of what’s in there soon as I really don’t have a clue what’s left and don’t want to buy duplicates of things we already have. I want to run them down a bit more first before defrosting one of them and then re-stocking, hopefully with some YS goodies for the winter months.
I receive the M&S refund today and also a couple more payments hit the CC account so a nice chunk has gone from that balance. I also rounded up the eBay sale profit and paid off £7.50 to round the balance down neatly.