Five Year Fix, Five Year Plan

savingholmes

Glad you now have the keys

killerpeaty

Keyyyyyysssss!

Woohoo! Party time! 

LadyWithAPlan

How fabulous Enjoy!!

Merlin's_Beard

End of month update for August:

Extra earnings:

£62 in interest - mainly from closing my LISA

£85 in surveys - all prolific this month. This will probably slow down for September as there's a lot of other stuff I need to be doing with my life right now.

£1.33 cashback.

Savings of £427 for this month, so mostly pension contributions and a tiny bit to EF.

Emergency fund stood at £8,500 before August payday, so a bit lower than I thought, but okay.

Floors are going in as we speak - downstairs LVT is in and looks amazing. Carpets in today, upstairs LVT start of next week. Nearly there! It looks like an actual habitable house in places.

Pay issue is sorted - turned down the easy hours in the end in order to maximise pay rise. Even ignoring the financial side, there were a lot of negatives to that deal.

Merlin's_Beard

Looking forwards to September:

Move house! Planned for the end of this week.

Clean and hand back keys to my rented place. Fingers crossed I might get my deposit back, we'll see.

Once the bank has acknowledged my existence, I'll organise an OP of £200 to just come out automatically with my payments. Once my EF is where I want it, my next step will be to add to that ad hoc to repay my mortgage fee (£999) asap.

Get car through its MOT. It's 11 so I'm braced for this to be expensive.

I think it's going to be impossible to guess at costs beyond that. I need to decide what to do with the garden - that's the biggie. But the amount of tiny little bits I need is overwhelming.

With pay rise I also need to look at how much goes into pension as well - workplace pension is the legal minimum 3%them/5% me, so will need to top up SIPP contributions to keep my percentages up. Currently between the two I've got around £40k, which isn't very much for my age. In my head I think by the time the 5 years is up I'd like to have more like £100k in there at least. I'll never work a job with a DB pension unless I start working for DEFRA, so it's all on me.

The other thing I'll be keeping an eye on is my student loan. I'm on a plan 1 (lower interest rate but lower repayment threshold) and down to my last £20,000. This might be something that might also be about paid off in 5 years time, which would free up another good chunk of money to invest somewhere.

The last two obviously are very dependent on things like interest rates and repayment thresholds and markets so I'm not going to stress too much about them, just track them.

savingholmes

Exciting that the flooring going in and that you will soon be able to move in.

Upping your pension is a good goal to have. The sooner you do - the less you have to put in later.

killerpeaty

I'm so pleased for you!

Your ef is incredible. It's taken three years for me to get up to a level that I'm comfortable at, you're already there!

Good idea about the pension. My friend does the method of just increasing her contribution percentage every time she gets a pay increase so she never misses it. She says it's very effective.

Merlin's_Beard

killerpeaty said:

I'm so pleased for you!

Your ef is incredible. It's taken three years for me to get up to a level that I'm comfortable at, you're already there!

Good idea about the pension. My friend does the method of just increasing her contribution percentage every time she gets a pay increase so she never misses it. She says it's very effective.

Thank you!

EF was really just a case of being really disciplined - I took money away from my deposit, called it my EF, and said a) I wouldn't use it for the deposit and b) I wouldn't let it drop under six months living expenses. It meant that some houses were out of reach, and tbh the one I wanted was borderline once I added in what I thought the extras would be, but it does mean that if the car fails its MOT horribly I won't be totally stuffed.

Pension I've tried to just periodically increase my contribution by an extra £50 a month, so it doesn't feel so bad. I was a really late starter - workplace pensions came in when I was around 30 and I had nothing at that point, but I started putting £100 in a SIPP to match the initial 1%/1% which probably totalled an <5% contribution. 5ish years later, I'm up to about 16.5% and I never feel like I've had a "big jump" or really noticed the increases. Part of me is hoping that in a year or so once the initial buying spree is over, I might be able to up that a bit.

New drama - now the carpets are in the doors don't fit!  Couldn't make it up. Will contact the site manager on Monday to see if they can do anything about that, otherwise I'm paying the flooring guys extra to do it (more hidden expenses!)

killerpeaty

That's very smart. I let mine go down to 3 ish months and was like this is fine, I'll build it back up in no time. BANG PANDEMIC. Forced to part time. Things happened which cost money. Standard for a plan to not work right? I should have done what you did.

Eek! Hopefully just a job of planing off a bit. 

savingholmes

Well done on the 16.5% into pension

On the doors it's irritating but normal...