Frugally paying the mortgage down

savingholmes

Just popping along to say good luck on your journey - and with finding the right house.

save_dog

Happy April everyone! It feels like spring is (tentatively) starting to appear 🤞🏻

Thanks everyone for popping along to my diary and keeping me accountable.

@str@strandedinaber good to know! I think we’re definitely going to go with a building society eventually - our ported mortgage is with NW and that deal doesn’t end until 2027 so to avoid early repayment charges we’re going to have to try and get a 2 or 3 year deal with NW for any new mortgage we take out for a house so we can try and tie the two together. Then, hopefully, come 2027 we can move to a BS. But same here - the amount the bank is willing to lend is way more than I’d feel comfortable with!

Start of month roundup:

Balance at beginning of April is £182,021.75, down from £182,562.17 at the start of March. At least, that’s according to my spreadsheet -
I can’t quite reconcile the balance on the manage my mortgage page as it doesn’t give you a breakdown of interest applied or payments pending!

Total overpayments of £175.05 in March, including regular OP of £40, TT of YNAB categories and Sprive payments of £25.25. Sprive was absolutely my fave discovery of March! I’ve turned off the auto-save feature because I use YNAB and I know all my money is assigned to a job, but the Cashback feature I see as free money! Sprive contributions won’t always be that high but I had to buy a couple of big ticket baby items (isofix base and replacement mattress) so I used it for those which bumped up my numbers.

So far in April I’ve made £77.04 in OPs - including regular OP of £40 and Vinted sales of £23 (i finally got a good chunk of those clothes listed over the weekend!). I’m hoping I’ll have more Vinted sales come in as I have quite a bit listed. I’ve also just earned £14.04 in cashback from Sprive as I’ve booked us a last minute babymoon overnight stay at a spa hotel through Spabreaks, which is 9% cashback. Not very MSE but I’m feeling very pregnant now and I would just love a night away/to sit next to a pool and have a swim before the chaos of two small children starts imminently!

I’ve started playing about with some survey apps, but I’m on a waitlist for Prolific which from other diaries seems to be the highest payer. Eureka seems ok though as does Curious Cat, and I’ve started on Snap My Eats. We’ll see how we get on!

I have 3 weeks left of work until I start for maternity leave and feeling pretty stressed about the mountain of work to get through, and also baby is breech 🙈 so I’m setting some personal goals for the month:

- Try and get through as much work as possible in the next 2 weeks so my last week isn’t a chaotic stressy nightmare like it was last time!
- Yoga and a walk every day
- Keep hydrated!
- Keep on top of the house with TOMM - I’m planning a home birth (if baby moves position!) so I want the house to be fairly well maintained so that’s not something to worry about.

I’ve also recently discovered The Full Freezer a Method and plan to implement that to avoid good waste and make cooking easier as it’s something I really struggle with keeping on top of - hopefully it should save some pennies too!

I’ve applied for a 7% Coop saver and waiting to hear back about that 🤞🏻

We put in an offer on a house with a beautiful garden but unfortunately despite having the higher offer were beaten to it by cash buyers with no chain, so the house hunting is still on. We’ve seen another one we really like so my job today is to try and book a viewing. It’s at the higher end of our budget but would need no renovations - it would require an additional mortgage of just under £185k though 😬😬 

Thats all the updates I think! Hope you all have a lovely week after the long weekend ☺️

LadyWithAPlan

Sorry to hear you got beat out in the house buying - I have to start looking hard again - was super busy the last 2 weeks that stopped the flat hunt 

a mini spa sounds perfect for you ! 

Sprive looks great - but yes with YNAB we don’t need someone to calculate our excess savings  
I didn’t know it did cash back - I have not got a mortgage yet so maybe I need to wait to use it 

Not heard of the full freezer method but I do batch cook so always make excess and freeze so have home made ready meals - loads of recipe ideas and tips  on the monthly grocery challenge thread 

redofromstart

I had a home birth with my second baby, which was much nicer than the high intervention hospital experience with the first. I hope the baby moves and obliges!

I laughed at your Rightmove refreshing as we did that a lot too. I take it you look at Zoopla too - sometimes EA only use that one as cheaper to list apparently.

savingholmes

Good luck with finding the next place. That sounds an uncomfortable jump in mortgage - but the question is how affordable is it for you (rather than me).

save_dog

@LadyWithAPlan - Full Freezer method is basically freezing your ingredients so you’re separating prep from cooking. I would love to be a batch cook but I just can never keep up with it, so I’m hoping having ingredients ready may help with us eating home cooked food regularly ☺️

@redofromstart - that’s exactly what I’m hoping to avoid this time around with a home birth. Always good to hear positive experiences! Constantly on my birth ball to try and move him! Thanks for the heads up about Zoopla too, I didn’t realise that! I’ll definitely check obsessively on there too 😅 seeing 2 today so fingers crossed one of them is suitable 🤞🏻

@savingholmes it does sound like an uncomfortable jump. I’ve crunched the numbers and it is doable for us (and feels a bit unavoidable if we want to stay in the area and have a house with a garden), but I think it will focus my mind onto frugality even more!

Planning on having a productive working day today. My iron is pretty low and annoyingly I’ve been exhausted the past couple of days, with a second wind between 4 and 8pm when my toddler is home from nursery, followed by another crash. Desperately googling tips for fighting fatigue and I’ve realised that coffee isn’t helping, probably - but it feels like a necessity at this point!

Hoping to get out with the dog for a lunchtime walk and a positive podcast which should perk me up and keep me focused for the afternoon.
I tend to work in time blocks so lots of little life admin jobs to attend to in the breaks too (mainly housework related if I’m honest!).

Just over 2 weeks to go until I finish! 

Hope you all have a wonderful day 🤗

debtfreewannabe321

Morning @save_dog sorry to hear the offer wasn't accepted, I bet there is a better one for you round the corner! I've not heard of the full freezer method either but I have used this before, I would buy onions and peppers in bulk and wash, dry, chop and freeze for use. It did help when I was really busy. I also used to make the little ones food for the month and freeze in ice cube trays, that really helped the budget and meant i never had to buy jarred food. 
I haven't heard of that CB site either I am going to look. I was using jam doughnut as my CB it took me a little over a month to get a tenner because I wasn't using it right to begin with But I will check your one out and see how rates compare. Like you say money is being spent in the SMs anyway so why not get some free cash for it! Hope you have a good day

savingholmes

I'd not heard of the full F method either. I did used to buy pre-packaged frozen sliced mushrooms, onions and peppers though which helped a lot - although I accept it would possibly but not always have been cheaper to freeze them myself. I also sometimes bought frozen mash which was also a help with little ones - again they were ice cube size.

save_dog

Well, it's been months and months since I posted here! Since then, DS2 was born (now 6 months!) and we found our dream home, had the offer accepted, and we've been in for about 3 months now. Mortgage now feels astronomical but I'm determined to continue chipping away at it. Combined with our ported mortgage, our new total as at August was £368,000. Including some money we got back from the payments we'd made on our old home (difference between redeemed amount and the balance at date of move), and regular overpayments, today it stands at £363,989.10. Our monthly payment is just under £1,770, and I've been rounding monthly payments up to £2,000. I may do some sums while baby is napping to work out current daily interest etc.

No concrete plans on how to overpay this - I'm just doing it bit by bit. We now have a laptop which makes a) keeping up with my diary and b) doing Prolific surveys a lot easier so I'm hoping I can earn a bit this way to pay it off. 

We have a lease car that is pretty much sat on the drive that I'm just not using. It's a second car that, before we had DS1, I thought I would need a lot more than I do. I have a £75 bus pass that I use all the time - getting on the bus with 2 kids is so much easier than I thought it'd be. I'm obviously saving a lot on petrol but it makes me wince that we're paying almost £350 on a car that we don't use nearly as much as we'd need to to make it worthwhile. I'm just thinking ahead to when the lease ends in Feb 26 and that money can be allocated to the mortgage which should help.

In general, I'm just trying to be as frugal as I can while buying as ethically as I can - which is a difficult balance to strike. Mostly, we're working on fewer takeaways and eating out which has helped, along with some realistic meal planning. YNAB is still a godsend in terms of Christmas savings, and I've bought mostly second hand for the boys which has kept costs down, and I'm trying to stop after doing 'something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read'. I wish I was as confident as buying pre-loved for others as I am for myself and the kids!

Anyway, I'm really going to try and keep on top of the diary to hold myself accountable as I now face this mountain of a mortgage. I'm due to go back to work in March next year which I'm really not looking forward to - I'd love to get the mortgage down to such a manageable level that I could drop another day to spend more time with the kids while they're so little - they're just magical in these early years.

Today, my toddler is at nursery so my rough plan, while he's there and when baby sleeps, is to:
- Deep clean the bathroom
- Clean kitchen up
- YNAB
- Put a nappy wash on
- Wrap some Christmas presents
- Spend half an hour going through the boxes of stuff we brought with us that need to be donated/listed for sale
- Prepare dinner
- Express for the baby

I think that's about enough to be getting on with - I have a terrible habit of overloading my to do list! I hope everyone's well - I've been enjoying reading along with your diaries whilst I haven't been posting on mine. Updates to signature to come!

South_coast

Congratulations on both the new arrival and the new home ❤️! I think an absence from MSE is perfectly acceptable - you've been busy! 

Is there an option to return the car early if you're not using it? They probably won't say so in their literature, but it also says there's no ownership option either and I definitely bought my last car from the lease company (and 4 months before the contract ended as well). You might just need to dig around on their website/call them to find out the options. Or, failing that, ask to reduce the contracted mileage, as that will bring the monthly payments down