Frugally paying the mortgage down

save_dog

Hello! 

I’ve decided to start my own thread here to keep myself accountable re: trying to reduce our mortgage. I read somebody’s daily interest calcs on their diary recently (sorry I can’t remember who!) and ours is at £15.03 a day - I can’t stand the thought of all that interest going towards the funding of arms and climate chaos and all the rest of it (as well as it being much better in my pocket than the bank’s!) so I’m making a real effort to get rid.

We are looking to move house and take on a bigger mortgage (expecting baby no2 and need more space) but regardless I need to make a big effort to get rid of it as early as possible. I’m hoping the new mortgage when we move I can take out with a building society as they tend to fare better on Ethical Consumer in terms of where your money gets invested - fingers crossed it’s affordable for us to do that 🤞🏻

Starting balance: £181,639.82
Interest rate: 3.02%
Daily interest: £15.03
Years left: 27 years 7 months

I’m a long time YNAB user so I started off by doing an adapted Tilly tidy and rounding down budget balances on rainy day funds and moving excess money that wasn’t really doing anything (savings for an app subscription that isn’t being taken until October) and I made my first payment of £73.51 yesterday -(this amount isn’t included in the starting balance), which I was pleased with as a start! Any excess funds from my weekly spends/transportation budget etc will go towards it.

We’re lucky in that we have a healthy emergency fund, maternity leave savings and some savings for stamp duty on a future purchase so I’m hoping to really throw anything extra at the mortgage for now - while making sure we’re still living!

Thanks for reading and I’ve been really enjoying seeing everyone’s progress as I’ve been reading, so hopefully this will keep me accountable with my own! ☺️🙌🏻

northwalesd

Good luck on your journey and keeping yourself motivated with your own diary.

Viking_mfw

Happy new diary! Great first OP. 

FtbDreaming

Good luck 😉 

LadyWithAPlan

I am loving your adapted YNAB TT:) 
best of luck and this forum is so welcoming and full of great advice and for me  the more you can post the  more the focus keeps sharp 

save_dog

Thanks for the welcome everyone! @LadyWithAPlan - I love YNAB, we started using it in 2014 and before that budgets had never worked for me and I couldn’t make sense of the figure in my bank account. Giving everything a job has been a game changer - managed to pay off £22k of debt using it and do up our house! Love the idea of a TT though so glad I could adapt it to suit me ☺️

Yesterday I got an unexpected lift to and from work instead of paying for the bus so I’ve moved £4 from my transport budget to my mortgage overpayment budget. I did take my own overnight oats and lunch but third trimester insatiable hunger meant I popped out for a mid afternoon sandwich (only from Sainsbury’s!) and some crisps! This month I’m trying to get a hold on how much we spend on those odd little corner shop spends as our grocery budget sometimes seems huge and I’m convinced it’s all these little spends adding up, so I’m tracking them separately this month. So far we’ve spent £21.44 on these trips to the small shops and it’s only 6th March! 

I finally got around yesterday to swapping over to sim only from O2 where I was out of contract and paying over £45pm to Ecotalk -  £15pm for 30GB data. I never thought that was enough but when I looked at my usage with O2 I never use more than that, so why pay extra just in case? I got the sim in August (!!) and have just not got around to swapping so I’m glad I’ve finally sorted that and I’m no longer wasting £30pm!

I picked up a Vinted parcel yesterday too - a maternity dress and 10 items for the new baby. All from the same seller so I saved on bundle discounts and postage and in total it came to just over £30 which I’m made up with! The clothes are really lovely quality and just need a wash once I finish for maternity leave.

I’m WFH today so planning a NSD. The weather is lovely and spring-like here - put a white wash on today - is it just me who gets joy from hanging out the washing on a spring day? 😂

debtfreewannabe321

Good luck @save_dog ! I use the TT or PAD too and top up the EF and then when I reach my monthly target for that I'm paying it all towards the mortgage now. We also want to move...but I think surely overpaying the mortgage can only be seen as good? I hope 🤞😁 

LadyWithAPlan

save_dog said:

Thanks for the welcome everyone! @LadyWithAPlan - I love YNAB, we started using it in 2014 and before that budgets had never worked for me and I couldn’t make sense of the figure in my bank account. Giving everything a job has been a game changer - managed to pay off £22k of debt using it and do up our house! Love the idea of a TT though so glad I could adapt it to suit me ☺️

Yesterday I got an unexpected lift to and from work instead of paying for the bus so I’ve moved £4 from my transport budget to my mortgage overpayment budget. I did take my own overnight oats and lunch but third trimester insatiable hunger meant I popped out for a mid afternoon sandwich (only from Sainsbury’s!) and some crisps! This month I’m trying to get a hold on how much we spend on those odd little corner shop spends as our grocery budget sometimes seems huge and I’m convinced it’s all these little spends adding up, so I’m tracking them separately this month. So far we’ve spent £21.44 on these trips to the small shops and it’s only 6th March! 

Very impressed with your ynab results  £22k and do up your home - wow .... I was an avid budgeter/s/sheet and virtual pot person before but ynab has definitely allowed me to easilyb track my spending and overspend of categories through the month ... so it keeps me more frugal .. 

The local shop can be a money eater - can you bulk buy crisps and snacks given you know at present you are eating for 2

save_dog

Good morning, happy start of the new week!

@LadyWithAPlan you’re so right - YNAB tells me
we’ve spent £75.91 on “small spends” from the local shop so far this month which is pretty
shocking! Some of that will include necessities like bread/milk etc. but at this point I reckon it could be 40% Monster Munch 😂🫠 time to reign it in!

We had a bit of a spendy weekend over here - it was my little boy’s 2nd birthday so we went on the ferry to a children’s museum, then out for pizza (plus our first takeaway of the month in the evening!) - mostly budgeted for and well worth it as he had a great time and it was largely successful with a well timed nap and only a small meltdown from the littlest person! The takeaway was very underwhelming though - home cooked food almost always tastes better! It’s usually pure disorganisation why we end up getting a takeaway. I don’t *love* cooking but I think I need to find a way of making it more enjoyable - maybe watching a tv show while I get on with it? Any tips from my fellow culinarily challenged MFWs out there? 😂

I also bought some storage (low shelf for DS’s toys) and some of those frames for kids artworks - but tbh they were necessary purchases that I’ve been putting off for ages because they were expensive - but they’re done now and hopefully will help the living room feel less cluttered!

We went to see a potential house on Saturday but recently read about the issues with getting a mortgage for a house with spray foam insulation - the house was really well insulated in general but the roof was full of the stuff! I didn’t get “the feeling” anyway about the house but we’re going to see one this week and I’m hoping it doesn’t have the same issue. I think the one we have lined up to see could be the one - it seems liveable with potential for extension and a garden - and reasonably priced. Fingers crossed as I don’t want to keep our buyers waiting too long! 🤞🏻

I went through the budget yesterday and managed to allocate another £35 to the mortgage overpayment category, but I’m going to keep it there until the end of the month. DH isn’t as regular with his budgeting as me so I often find at month end we’ve spent more than I’ve bargained for! 🫠 

Hoping to keep it as a low spend week this week. Writing my plans here to keep myself accountable:

- Make the meals I have the ingredients for and take my lunch to work on the days I’m in
- Aim for 3 NSDs
- List one item on Vinted per day (I was great at this when I was on maternity leave but I have a load of clothes waiting to be listed in the cupboard of doom!)
- 10 mins of decluttering a day
- Keep on top of The Organised Mum method this week (I live my life by this but recently have been letting it slip!) so I don’t feel overwhelmed by a load of cleaning come the weekend!

I think that’s it. Hope you all had a lovely weekend and have a great week ahead! 

save_dog

Yesterday was a pretty cheap day - I was too tired to go to yoga in the evening so allocated the £3.60 I would have spent on parking to the mortgage overpayment category. I know it’s a tiny amount but I just need to chip away!

DH did get a £35 parking fine which will have to come out of the mortgage overpayment funds but hey ho, no point crying over spilt milk. That leaves our mortgage OP fund at £19.97 (surely I can find an extra 3p from somewhere!) for now. I have £30 fun money allocated to me for this week but unless some wild weekend plans come up (highly unlikely!) I won’t be using all of this, so any left over can go to the mortgage. Same with DH’s! Hoping to make it to £150 overpayment this month 🤞🏻🤞🏻 I’d love to say £200 but that may be a little bit ambitious.

Looking at transferring savings we have set aside for DS and new baby into a 2-year fixed account with Triodos as it’s currently sat in the current account earning nothing in interest!

On the decluttering front, I did half an hour of starting to clear out my personal email account which has about 16,000 emails in it 🫠🫠 so I’m taking a bit of digital decluttering as a win!

It does always feel easier to chip away at the overwhelming stuff than tackle it head on, doesn’t it! I need to carry this mindset over to my work life!

save_dog

Morning MFW friends!

I made a sneaky OP of £40 this morning to bring us just under £181,600 (before interest is applied later in the month). I know I said I wanted to wait until end of the month but I’m too impatient to see progress, however tiny!

I then realised I’m saving £5 on the dog walker today as I’m WFH this morning so I’ve allocated that towards the OP fund.

I need to get on at DH to update YNAB so I know exactly where we’re at and what we’ve got to play with.

I’m failing miserably on the decluttering and Vinted fronts. I only have 5 and a half weeks left in work before I finish for maternity leave and I’m starting to feel very overwhelmed by everything there is to do before then - I’m getting a bit of task paralysis which isn’t helping. When this happens all my good routines go out of the window and I feel like I’m in fight or flight mode at the moment! I just need to crack on and do the difficult tasks while I have most of my energy and save the admin, easy tasks for in front of the tv at night. When I’m overwhelmed I do have a bad habit of busying myself with the easy stuff which doesn’t help in the long run!

Anyway, onwards and upwards! Hope you all have a lovely day ☺️