Snug & Sorted: Our Race to Mortgage Freedom

kaycastle

April was an expensive month!! For good reasons though:

• £400 on big bed for child, including bedding. The bed transforms as he grows so will last well into teenage years hopefully
• £140 on new running shoes for OH (Its his main fitness hobby and his never had proper shoes to stop blisters etc. )
• Dentist, tickets for a music festival in summer for OH
• Inevitably lots more eating out than usual and more petrol - we had our 4 days away as family, a night away for ourselves child free, and also visited parents/friends 

Total spend £2500...yikes!! I am strangely pleased though because this is close to our monthly spend before decided to be more frugal and focus - but we've been away, whole new bed and other necessaries.

Leftover is £860 - so we have £172 for savings and £688 for overpayments.

I need to get OH to open a savings account and then will organise savings. I've sent the overpayment so that's done.

LadyWithAPlan

kaycastle said:

I've found something to occupy my time a bit/use to learn more technical skills that solves a real life problem for me and naturally I've got started right away 

I think meal planning is great but I find it time consuming and boring and still feel like I waste food as I'm not good enough at making sure I'm picking meals that sharing ingredients - just don't have time/concentration levels.

So I've decided to build my own automatic meal planner using google sheets and python. Crucially I refuse to pay any money to any API or other products that do this anything which pretty much means a lot of data input for me at the beginning. 

Two things I want it to be able to do at first:

• Generate a meal plan that uses up all fresh ingredients on the shopping list, and fulfils other criteria like 2 veg meals, slow cooker meals on certain weekdays etc. etc. and keeping things varied and healthy
• Generate the shopping list
• Keep track of what meals we've done/what ingredients are left/what's in the cupboard etc. 

And I'll benefit from the learning...

This sounds like a great project ! 

Sp great you and OH are on the same page and certainly saving 5 years of mortgage payments is v motivating - well done ! 

That mortgage has no chance 

South_coast

Hey Kay, just checking in for your May/June update?