2008 MFW newbies

bellsbells

torbrex wrote: »

I have nominated bellsbells for post of the month for January for his help in bringing us all together in our mutual cause.

Please add your comments here.

The thanks button is good but bellsbells deserves more that that.:beer:

Many thanks Torbrex - that is really nice of you! I am really glad this thread has taken off so well - it is much easier sharing things with like minded people! :j Watching the saga unfold with MOT has really made me appreciate my lovely little house all the more - I am not surprised so many people would like to see her get post of the month (me included!)

Well whatever the outcome you have really made my day by nominating me Torbrex :T

BB

violetblue

Well, I made the decision last week to cash in my S&S ISA. The markets have been so up and down lately (and mostly down it seems) and I'd feel much better if the cash was sitting safely in my savings account and earning interest for the next 6 months instead of possibly losing money. At the moment I'm still comfortably ahead - I've paid in £5500 and it's now worth around £7000 - but it's soooo frustrating to see the value go down so dramatically, especially when I'm paying more into it every month!

The money should appear in my account within the next 2 weeks, so I'm going to work out how much I can overpay into the mortgage straight away without penalty, and the rest can sit in savings until I re-mortgage in July. And the monthly amount I would have paid into the ISA and mortgage overpayments can go into the savings account until then too.

emma_nottingham

Hi all, im new here and very exited about the prospect of becoming mortgage free. My current mortgage is with HSBC at a whopping interest rate of 6.29%!! Balance outstanding is £71,358.72. This deal restricts my overpayments so I have sent up a standing order to overpay the maximum until the end of the term in November 08. This will only amount to an overpayment of £600. I hope to try and boost this by saving an additional £1000 in a savings account. I will pay this off at the end of the term and then move provider. Hopefully then I can get really serious about becoming mortgage free.

Current target is to overpay a minimum of £1,600.00 by 2/11/08. Good luck to all you MFW!

LouiseJ

Hello everyone

I have sent another cheque off today for £165, that makes my total for January overpayment £310, which is bang on target for me.

I was just wondering BellsBells what we are going to do for our February totals in the opening thread? Are we going to have a running figure for the year or keep it to monthly overpayment figures? I don't want it to get to be a big pain for you but I know I would love to see my progress so far along with any overpayments made in that particular month.

Thanks again Bellsbells for managing this, you are a STAR!

bellsbells

emma_nottingham wrote: »

Hi all, im new here and very exited about the prospect of becoming mortgage free. My current mortgage is with HSBC at a whopping interest rate of 6.29%!! Balance outstanding is £71,358.72. This deal restricts my overpayments so I have sent up a standing order to overpay the maximum until the end of the term in November 08. This will only amount to an overpayment of £600. I hope to try and boost this by saving an additional £1000 in a savings account. I will pay this off at the end of the term and then move provider. Hopefully then I can get really serious about becoming mortgage free.

Current target is to overpay a minimum of £1,600.00 by 2/11/08. Good luck to all you MFW!

welcome Emma, you are added to the first post:T :j

bellsbells

LouiseJ wrote: »

Hello everyone

I have sent another cheque off today for £165, that makes my total for January overpayment £310, which is bang on target for me.

I was just wondering BellsBells what we are going to do for our February totals in the opening thread? Are we going to have a running figure for the year or keep it to monthly overpayment figures? I don't want it to get to be a big pain for you but I know I would love to see my progress so far along with any overpayments made in that particular month.

Thanks again Bellsbells for managing this, you are a STAR!

hummm... good question LouiseJ, I hadn't thought exactly what to do next month. It should be easy enough to put a third total in for the running total. So if green stayed as the years target, red was the current months overpayment total then a third colour became the running total. If you all wanted me to I could keep each months total so by the end of the year we had a rainbow of figures on the list, or if you think that would be too messy I could limit it to just the three. Let me know please folks......

bellsbells

So in fact here are our two choices - we could go for option 1 that would look something like this:

Name Target March total Overall

Bellsbells - £2500 £156 £996

Or we could go for option 2 which would look something like this:

Name Target Jan Feb March April Overall

Bellsbells - £2500 £490 £150 £156 £200 £996

I am sure there will be fancy ways of doing this on a spreadsheet but trying to master that skill then work out how to transfer it onto a thread would mean that you would not get any totals until about June:rotfl:

elantan

bells bells what ever is easiest for you suits me i just appreciate the fact your doing it so i'm delighted

FLC_3

Di-Dough wrote: »

Very good question My Mortgage instructions say "22 payments at a fixed rate of 5.350% - the mortgage is fixed until 31/05/2009 and so the payment will not change until after this date providing the account is up to date" I suppose I should be happy as long as they go down and not up!!:rolleyes:

I'm a lurker on this site, but having spent so long talking to the man at my bank about this (I'm on a fixed rate too) I thought I'd share the knowledge... Basically, the bank re-evaluates my mortgage account once a year and if I've overpaid they reduce the monthly payment amount so the term stays the same. In my case, if I request for them to increase the payments back to the original amount my term lowers correspondingly. The solution to this (because I don't want to lower the term in case I need to stop overpaying in future) is to set up a standing order into my mortgage account for the difference between what I was paying (original payment + any overpayment) and new payment. The advantage of a standing order is it's in your control - not the banks. Hope that makes sense.

LouiseJ

elantan wrote: »

bells bells what ever is easiest for you suits me i just appreciate the fact your doing it so i'm delighted

Same here bellsbells I think the first option would be easiest for you to manage as it only has 3 columns but its up to you sweetie.

Can you farking believe it!!!

Driving home from evening class tonight and sounds like my exhaust is going on the car, OH says he doesnt think it will last the week. I have just sent all the spare money for Jan off to the mortgage company as I thought I was out of the woods for this month spending wise.

Guess I will have to dip into my just caught up to date savings Grrrrr!!!

Hope it just needs repairing and not a full exhaust which could be about £200 I beleive or am I being optimistic with £200 for a citreon picasso xara?:o