The "Grand Plan" - Phase One well underway!

frazzmunch

wow EH...have just read your thread and am seriously impressed!!!:D

good luck with the rest of phase one...how many phases are there to your grand plan?? sounds like you will be able to move to scotland much sooner than you originally thought....keep up all the hard work :A

EssexHebridean

Hi Frazz - thanks for your kind comments!

We're not entirely sure how many phases to the plan at the moment....phase 1 is to clear the car loan. The next step after that will be to try to save to make sure that the next car purchase (mid 2010) will be a cash one. From then it will be a continued balance between solid attacks on the mortgage, and more savings. Our hope is that we can be in a position to move over to the Hebrides in nine and a half years, and to do so totally free of any mortgage. We may initially have to have enough of a mortgage to buy the land we want and have a house built, but the aim will be for it to be as short as possible and paid off in full with the proceeds of selling our flat here. A lot will depend on the timing of everything but that is hopefully a worst case scenario.

It's going to be an interesting ride, but hopefully an enjoyable one!

frazzmunch

wow...sounds idyllic....i would love to live up in the highlands, but got to admit i really feel the cold so would probably not be able to afford the fuel bills!!!!:rotfl: seriously though, it sounds fabulous and you're getting closer to it every single day...i am keeping my final destination as a picture in my head which i look at every time i think about spending money!! Helps with the cigarette cravings too!! :rolleyes:

I am looking forward to keeping up to date with your journey!:D

EssexHebridean

Well the decluttering continued at the weekend and I managed to get some bits and bobs listed on eBay - I have bids on three of them and watchers on several others so fingers crossed. I'm going to amass other bits as I find them to do the photos and list at the weekend. Amazing what you find when you start looking isn't it.

I got the settlement figure through from NR on the loan today. November probably isn't achievable without really overstretching ourselves, and with Christmas just around the corner I don't want to do that. I shall write again in a while and request a settlement figure for December.

I must remember to keep a closer eye on my email account for surveys - I keep missing out on Lightspeed surveys because they are closed by the time I get to them. If I work at it I reckon I can get to a £10 voucher prior to Christmas relatively easily. I need to focus on some of the other survey sites more too I think - One Poll is annoyingly slow to get anywhere, surveys.com I've pretty much given up on. Ipsos and Lightspeed seem about the best of the bunch but even those two are quite slow and often seem to ask you lots of questions before telling you you're not eligible to take part!

setmefree2

EssexHebridean wrote: »

The corrected readings are in, the DD reduces to £57 per month from November (must remember to add that extra £13 on to the mortgage payments from 1st November onwards) - this is down from £89 per month earlier in the year

Well Done EH:T:T:T

EssexHebridean

Another fairly productive week I think - difficult to stay motivated as the deadline approaches - there is less available cash to shift about at the moment which is quite frustrating. Of the ten items I listed on eBay nine sold - 8 of those were posted today and the last one will go tomorrow. Not a massive amount raised from that but every little helps, as they say! Got to grab it back from OH'd paypal account yet though.

I've now got to my next voucher level with Pigsback so there should be a Boots voucher on its way to me in the next few days. The survey sites are proving a bit irritating at the moment - I'm getting plenty of invites to take part but barely any seem to come to anything so earnings there are ever so slow.

I'm just itching to count the contents of our Good Food show savings pig now - he's feeling lovely and full! We got another result on that front too - as someone over on the OS board mentioned using clubcard deals to get their entry tickets. As we'd not bought our admission yet I checked it out and sure enough, two of us are now going to the show for £10! We're doing well on this as I got cashback when I booked the travelodge as well!

Electricity use was down for last week - it's funny but there's a great motivation to jump out of bed if I wake up early on a weekend morning to pop the water on to heat up on the night rate! In spite of having to do lots of washing up on Sunday as I cooked a full roast I still got away with only having the water on for an hour on Sunday at full rate.

I'm off to Germany for the weekend with a load of friends for the final speedway GP. The travel & Hotel are all paid up and I still had Euros left from a trip earlier in the year so only have to get a few more just to top myself up. :T Should be a good fun weekend!

EssexHebridean

Good food Show tickets have arrived - bargaintastic!

The weekend in Germany was...err, interesting. The speedway that we went for got cancelled because the organisers basically made a total pigs ear of laying the speedway track so the riders couldn't race on it. Unbelievable - we're used to meetings being cancelled through rain but this was in a roofed stadium and the weather was glorious!! We made the best of it though and had a good weekend - we've already had confirmed that our Grand Prix tickets will be refunded in full, and we are very much hoping that as the cancellation was basically down to incometance on the part of the organisers, we'll be able to claim back something at least towards our accomodation and travel too. Time will tell. I did at least sell a handful of photos to people on the trip so that's another few £££'s for the mortgage pig.

Got to get myself back on track now with the final push to the finish. Energy monitoring is still going well - we need to ensure we're making the best use possible of the night rate this week - that slipped a bit last so that needs tom be clawed back on track. My travel expenses from work will pretty much dry up now as our new manager has a car I can actually drive so I will be expected to take that rather than using my own. It's been good whilse it lasted but I always knew it was limited. Hopefully Mr EH has repaired our printer so I will be able to get back to printing my shopping requirements and keeping a good rein on that budget. Once the last speedway GP (the cancelled one will be re-staged this weekend in Poland) is out of the way I shall call Sky and cancel Sky Sports for the winter. Every little helps! LOL!

StuartGMC

EH
Quite a full time recently; interested to see your comments on the survey sites as I mulled if this was worthwhile (I don't have much spare time anyway). As I get about £100-110 per year from Google Adsense from my web site I think I may put more effort into updating it so more people visit and hopefully click-through and generate cash for me. This would seem to give a similar cash result as your surveys and it'll also start to clear the backlog of actions I've listed for myself for the web site.

Keep pushing on through the dark days ahead; just two and half months until the daylight lasts longer!

evab_2

Where abouts in Poland will the speedway be? I haven't been for years it's lovely!

EssexHebridean

Now this is going to tax my spelling - it's being held at Bydgoszcz - don't ask me where in the country that is though as I haven't a clue! It rather adds insult to injury that they've moved it to there actually as it's a track I've always wanted to visit. Oh well -maybe next year.