Starting afresh in paradise

ManekiNeko

Well, I've officially put my notice in at work. I'm sad to go, but I know it's the right choice for me. They couldn't have been nicer about it. I'm all emotional.

Money wise, UC told me yesterday they'd 'verified' my service charge on the basis of an email breakdown of its elements that my freeholder kindly provided. I've asked the question, but I think this means they're going to pay it in full, which will really boost my overpayments to the tune of £65 a month. I don't know if that sounds like much, but the calculator tells me that if that continues until the end of my fix, that's worth £4,680 over the six years. That's a big chunk towards affording a larger home for our hopeful family-to-be.

Obviously, they'll stop helping if I return to work, so that's by no means guaranteed, but realistically I think I can count on that help for at least a few years, simply because the NHS are yet to provide me with therapy, which is the treatment I need to improve my MH. Plus, if and when I do return to work, I'll hopefully be earning enough that the drop won't matter as much, although I'll have to run the numbers at the time to know exactly how many hours I need to to strike the right balance between affording to live and taking enough time off to keep my MH in balance.

I also found 1p on Wednesday in the supermarket, which I'm adding to the OPs pot. Ironically this was in Tesco. Every little helps 😉

ManekiNeko

Posting has just prompted me to log in, UC are indeed going to pay my service charge 🎉 thank goodness. That's a big relief in terms of my OPs and therefore my long-term progress towards a larger family home. It makes me feel more able to provide for my family as well, so in that sense it's a reduction in the internal pressure I'm putting on myself. 🤸‍♀️

I'm a bit confused about the date they're starting to pay from, but it looks like from my April payment. I'll probably message or call them later on, or next week at least, to clarify it.

ManekiNeko

WELL. So my partner helped me create a new projector for my mortgage, and it initially disheartened me, but now I'm choosing to think positively about it. Basically, with UC agreeing my service charge and that being a sizeable saving for me, I felt it was time to quantify the 'buying a larger family home' problem, because I felt really positive about this huge windfall, and hoped it would be starting to look a bit more solveable. So I ran some numbers and then called my broker for a quick chat.

I've been a bit taken aback to find out that as things stand today, I'd not be able to get a mortgage at all, 😱 or only one of about £30k or something at the very most. That's because of having resigned from my job though, as apparently lenders will assess your benefits as 100 per cent income, but only when you have a job (it was different when I bought, because even if you're signed off sick you're still classed as employed). But obviously, I'm hoping to get back to work after having had enough therapy to cope with it; even if that ends up being just a local, fairly-easy PT job, at least to start with. (We don't yet know if I'll be buying in my sole name or with my partner, so for now I'm just assuming that I'll do it in my sole name.)

In combination with actually looking in depth at the kind of sums of money we'd need to be socking away to move up a rung on the property ladder (a nice two-bed apartment with garden access, or a fixer-upper terraced house, would be c. £180k today), the spreadsheet was initially quite disheartening and properly took the wind out of my sails. However, like I say I've told myself that I've quantified the problem now, taking it from "goodness knows when we can afford that" to maybe "about 10 years in the future we can move." It's by no means certain; even that date depends a lot on various factors coming together, and the biggest single question is whether I can get NHS therapy in the longer run. It also makes the assumption of my partner contributing in some way, whether that's through child maintenance to help ease my budget, or making a more direct contribution. But it is a date to have in mind, and the accuracy of our predictions will increase over time.

Ultimately, it seems that thanks to my service charge being covered, I am still about £4.5 - 6k nearer our goal than I was this morning, so I'm just going to be happy about that. 🎉 Even just having a spreadsheet is a huge step, 💪 as I've been feeling too .. overwhelmed, maybe? Defeated by the size of the problem I know I don't yet have a solution for? .. to create this before now. At least now I can enter various figures and play with outcomes, so that if there's any increase to my income next year I can more easily work out the impact of putting it towards regular OPs vs. anything else. I've also worked out that if I could up my payments to my DS next year to the tune of £20, I'd repay her at my desired date - exactly when my mortgage fix ends. I suspect I won't have that much spare, but still, it's a figure to have in mind.

ManekiNeko

Oki so, I rang my lender yesterday to get my year end figures, and happened to get through to the most helpful woman at my bank. She told me how to do the sums to actually calculate how my cumulative payments to date affect my MF date. This led to a sudden insight for my partner, as we'd already spent days in the summer trying to work out how to build the kind of spreadsheet I wanted, but weren't successful at the time.

We therefore spent many hours last night making Excel calculate lots of clever things I've wanted to know the answers to, such as how much it costs to buy a week/day/hour/minute of being mortgage free, or if I pay £x I'll be X amount younger by the time I'm mortgage free, and my MF date (which auto-updates) to the exact day. We also calculated how much I'd save in interest for both one-off and regular OPs. Ofc the maths is a bit ferocious so it's done on simple interest just now, not compound, but even so it makes me very happy. We might yet come back to it to try and work out the compounding, but this is what we got stuck on in the summer and the maths is HARD.

If we solved the compounding issue though, then it'll be exactly what I couldn't find online myself in the summer - I'd have happily paid for it. Indeed, I'm very tempted to (after making some improvements to it & poshing it up a bit) sell it online myself for a quid a time, and put it towards OPs. 😝 I'm just not sure how it might affect my UC claim to do that.. I'm waiting on a money advice session anyway with my uni, so I'll ask their benefits specialist if it makes sense for me to do that.

ManekiNeko

Just a quick one to say, UC have rung me back and they're definitely covering my service charge, and they've confirmed they'll start doing this from April onwards. So, that's another job jobbed!

ManekiNeko

So the Budget yesterday has left me feeling quite worried about the proposed changes to the benefits assessment system. It's not clear exactly how the changes would work in practice, and as always with these things, the detail is what matters. I don't cope well with uncertainty, which is part of my mental health, and this has left me feeling very uncertain.

On the plus side, I got a key cut yesterday and the shop gave me a £4 discount (I think because the process involved a lot more work on my part than it ought to have done), and I found 5p on my way home. So, more OPs. I haven't been on my spreadsheet yet, but from remembering the figures and as a rough calculation, that's brought my MF date forward by almost a day.

I've also now resigned from my volunteering role, so I'm officially sans commitments right now. I've been finding myself very stressed for large amounts of the time at the moment, so anything I can do to reduce the pressure on myself is necessary. The plan is to finish up some work at my partner's, then work on my place, and then start back with my studies. It all feels like a lot right now, I want to go back to bed lol.

ManekiNeko

So I didn't go back to bed in the end lol, instead I played on a game for a couple hours and finished up a difficult level I've been repeat failing for ages. 🤸‍♀️ Happiness lol. After that, we basically finished the decluttering at my partner's ready for a tip run. Just got a bit more paper to shred and then we can head up there, hopefully today.

We'll then do a declutter for charity donation at his place too, and after that, there will be nothing left to declutter. Wow how I wish it was like that at mine! Haha. Tbf, I guess mine isn't so bad either, it just looks like it because of the lack of storage rn.

Anyway, after the decluttering is done the next big job here is to buy wood and build some shelving and under-bed drawers. That should give me some nice storage options when I'm staying here, which is needed, particularly as we hope to have a family.

After that, I think it's just buy a few things on Amazon and his place will be sorted. We aren't getting anything baby-related until if and when I'm pregnant, of course. We just need some day-to-day items to help me cook, like a couple decent kitchen knives as his are on their way out now.

In theory, I'd like to think we could do all of that by the end of next week, but I'll see how things go eh, particularly as I ended up having a bit of a meltdown last night. My partner couldn't have been nicer to me. I think having left my job, I'm going through that identity adjustment process (who am I without that job / any job), plus idk now I have less going on mentally I can focus more (good), but also there's less to distract me from negative feelings (less fun). And, planning a family, there's a lot of emotions around that, especially as my relationship with my family is pretty rocky at the moment. Any small thing goes wrong and it feels like a catastrophe. And my OCD really isn't helping me here, because if I fail to do something (say, skip a meal, not manage a walk, get stressed) my brain is constantly telling me: see, you're a bad parent already and you aren't even one yet. So basically, life is a barrel of laughs just now.

Next paragraph is CW for brief description of past domestic abuse:
I got triggered last night as well, which doesn't help. I had told my partner I was upset and was going to bed, and he popped to the other room briefly while I nipped to the bathroom (this was before we had a big chat which made me feel loads better). I heard this noise from the other room and my brain immediately thought that he'd punched something, because it's what my exes used to do. (And yeah, a lot of people punch walls and things at least sometimes in their lives, I'm not judging you if you have - the key difference here is motivation - even I have punched things occasionally, but if memory serves, I've always done it when I was alone and either couldn't cope, or had just received awful news. And I did it very rarely.) My exes used to do it in front of me, fairly frequently, on purpose to intimidate and frighten me so that I'd do what they wanted (e.g. NOT because they'd lost their cool or whatever). Anyway, because of my history, the noise freaked me out, so I asked him about it - and it turned out the noise was a piece of cardboard recycling falling down from the big pile we'd made ready for the tip run. 🤦‍♀️ I wish my brain didn't leap to that conclusion when I hear a sudden noise, though I do recognise it's trying to keep me safe, because it makes me feel stupid and mean for having worried about that with my partner, however briefly.

At some point after we'd had the conversation, and I was feeling better, I also was more aware than usual of some parts of myself at different ages being 'around' in my headspace, as well as feeling like a different part of myself (a younger part) was at least sometimes in executive control e.g. saying things in reply to my partner. It was right before we went to sleep. I think it was because of me getting quite triggered last night by a couple of things (for clarity, nothing bad happened, it was all flash in a pan stuff like the scary loud noise that turned out to be a falling piece of cardboard). So, this is the kind of situation that we're hoping the dissociative disorder assessment will help us to understand. Possible diagnoses include things like OSDD and DID, but we can't be sure without being assessed. We're really lucky my partner knows about us, so we can tell him when we're younger or feeling funny in some way, like very dissociative. It's strange to think of being assessed actually, as most of the time I experience my life as an 'I', and it's only occasionally that I'm conscious of being a 'we'.

It will be interesting to see what diagnosis they might consider, if any. It's not really a change to what I'm already diagnosed with, in a way - you can regard trauma as being on a spectrum, and if I was diagnosed with anything like OSDD/DID, it would effectively just mean I'm further along the trauma spectrum than previously diagnosed (Complex PTSD). The funding request for the assessment is still with the decision makers though, and has been for months. Last month they requested more information, which my GP has now sent across to them. So I just have to keep waiting and keep hoping they'll be willing to fund the assessment. My GP says she's applied for funding for treatment too, so if the assessment is approved and I get a diagnosis, there will be funded therapy coming as well. The support level for this type of therapy sounds amazing tbh, like, I know I'd be a million times more able to cope with my daily life if I was getting that much help and treatment. It's a far cry from languishing on a waiting list. But we see, I've no idea if they'll be willing to fund it and there's no way in hell I could afford it (ironically, that's due to being on disability benefits, which I wouldn't need if I weren't so disabled by my mental health). I'm so anxious about whether or not I'll be given the opportunity to get assessed.

Thanks if you got this far, I needed to vent. I'll see about doing some sums now, to balance out the personal post with some money stuff. 🤓

ManekiNeko

As you can probably guess, the sums were rather overtaken 🤦‍♀️ as my partner decided he'd like to go to the tip a bit early. It was worth it though, we did two car loads and it means we've finished the urgent decluttering (still maybe a bag or two to go to charity, but that can be dealt with later on). So, next week's priority is to buy wood and build some shelves and drawers at his place.

Yesterday I took entirely off as I was very tired. We watched the Six Nations rugby, and I fell asleep by the start of Ireland vs. England (by say, 5pm? Lol). Was spark out for hours lol.

Today is a family day - off to see my partner's family, then when we get back, make a quick dinner and then a video call with my family. My mum's also coming up to visit in a couple of weeks time, so I'll probably suggest we get a coffee and cake together then.

Can't believe it's been another week, the time is flying by. Tomorrow will be writing another scary letter of complaint/requesting to get my meter re-sited with my support worker's help.. you never know, could lead to a little compensation. We shall see.

ManekiNeko

Well my support worker cancelled as she wasn't feeling well, so instead I had a lazy day as visiting family Sunday really took it out of me (I often find social interaction draining). Feeling a bit discouraged actually, I find it difficult when my appointments change around. I've been triggered a few times, and I've been quite dissociative as well. Just like, things often don't feel real.

Today had the new water bill in the post and a little bit of good news, as I'm no longer repaying debt it's actually dropped a little bit in the monthly cost to £24.28 instead of £25.84. That's £1.56 extra each month. I need to check with my partner later on, I'm not sure whether to start some long-term savings for our potential future family, or put it towards OPs, my DS or perhaps some energy efficiency savings. Tbh it feels like a trivial amount, but it's the principle of the thing I guess.

We also don't seem to be going out for a meal with my partner's family any more, so that's £20 back in my pocket. Bit confused whether to put it back into my Fun pot (where it came from) or if it's a windfall and therefore belongs to my mortgage. I'm far too tired to work it out, but maybe later after a coffee it'll be clearer.

ManekiNeko

Right, so the £20 has gone back into the fun budget as it's more of a change of plans than a windfall as such. It's not like I've got masses in that fund to begin with.

On the other hand, having run the numbers, I'm more inclined to OP my mortgage than up my payments to my DS again.

Basically, if I paid it to my DS, I'd have fully repaid her two months earlier than on present plans, but realistically I'm pretty sure that date will be ok anyway, as I'm intending to give her a little bit extra each year, as benefits are (hopefully) uprated.

On the other hand, if I OP'd it, I'd bring my MF date forward by 9 hours each time, and save about double the OP'd amount in interest. Plus, if my WiFi increases in cost later in the year, I can always reallocate it - whereas if I send it to my DS, it's a more fixed commitment to carry on doing that.

Think it's time to go in search of a (rather late) lunch...