Getting rid of a London-sized Mortgage

Well! It's almost a year since I started this diary!
In my opening post, I had three goals, but only managed to achieve 1 of these!

The three goals were:
1. Round up mortgage - this was an insta-fail as my bank said no right at the first phone call. I complained as I felt this wasn't what I had been told and then they sent me a load of brochures about how mortgages work.
2. Save £10,000 - goal smashed! We saved it up pretty quickly thanks to the markets doing pretty well last year, some good savings, and rustling up a load of change. Our current savings are around £15,000 not including pensions and some locked up investments.
3. Take in a lodger - we did this, but it was about a year too late! We have had someone for June - July - Aug, and at £600/month, that's a nice £1800.

What else happened in the last year?
My boyfriend became my fiance, and got a nice big raise.
We did up our kitchen which cost a pretty penny.
We made £3,229 of overpayments which is not as much as I wanted but still pretty good.

The bank thing is still confusing, and I think I'm going to hold off overpayments for now, but instead save it in an account. Our mortgage rate is 1.75 % and the Santander account where things are sitting is 1.5 %. So it does result in losing money. So should I not do that?

My MSE credit report says that my mortgage balance is £304,204 and if my mortgage worked in a regular way, then my balance would be £303,604. It makes my spreadsheet so annoying! I want to set minigoals and work to them but I have no idea how to set minigoals when the bank reduces my monthly mortgage payments ever so slightly, with different decreases for each month. It's a little bit demotivating.

E.g. I want to say if I make an OP of £3,640, I will be under £300k! But I can't because I don't know what the actual mortgage balance is at any time. No opportunities for Tilly Tidies either, because no online banking.

The minigoal IS to get under £300k. I also had a goal of getting a 60% LTV when we went to remortgage. I naively said that the house price in London would increase 5% ever year, but it hasn't this year. I have re-done the math to get to 65% LTV to remortgage.

To do that, I think I need about £3.5 k as well, but it's impossible to know.

SO!

The next goal is to get £3,500 ready to either make as one big OP, or do in small chunks. This will bring us to sub-£300k AND by our remortgage date next year we will have a 65 % LTV or better.

I am also pleased that my boyfriend is now super into saving, and is trying to save up £6k for our wedding next year. He is doing a great job, he is putting £200 per month into the Santander Regular Saver at 5% and he is also saving another £200 per month into a Charles Stanley Direct account. He is paying back our joint account after he borrowed a bit during his cash-flow issues. He also didn't save anything for my engagement ring... but he has now paid that off too. Good progress!!

I have participated in some more market research and got my first £50 note ever! I had never had one before!

I have been paid which is great! I have cleared some credit card debt that had managed to build up. Some of it is expenses from work which I hope to receive soon. Some of it is wanton spending.

It's so hard finding a boiler engineer! I shall make do with intermittent hot water for a bit longer.

The lodger wants to stay on but I also want to adopt two older cats. The boyfriend thinks that the lodger is a better idea than the cats but they are so floofy.

I have £60 in my wallet, from a birthday present from my grandma and some left over from the second round of market research. I have a brunch with some of my girlfriends on Saturday, and have a couple of mystery dines this month. I have no other spendy-spends in the diary. Do you think I can survive the whole month on the £60 in my wallet??

Do you think I can maybe survive the week, even??

Our joint account has £4,191 in it. This is our 'easily accessible' emergency fund as some of the other emergency funds are in our separate ISAs. I am sooo tempted to put it towards the mortgage. It would get us below £300k.

The only problem is this cursed wedding!

Ours is next July. Maybe. Early on, I accepted the offer of a contribution from my parents. I want a small and intimate wedding with only my closest friends and family. My parents want an elaborate wedding, and are inviting absolutely every one, e.g. group of work friends from 1995. Apparently, telling my family that I have control of the invitation list is such an affront that my mum burst into tears and called me a 'Bridezilla'. I'm in a spiral because they request elaborate things that my partner and I can't afford, then feel they have more right to request more things because they are paying more. My normally sane parents have gone totally crazy over wedding stuff, accusing me of being disrespectful because I don't want fish on the menu for sustainability reasons.

We basically want entirely different things, I want a small crowd of my loved ones to participate in an intimate moment. My parents want a huge crowd because they love me and are proud of me and my accomplishments (getting married isn't a particularly difficult accomplishment... but that's neither here nor there). They might be paying, but whether they pay 0% or 100%, there is the inescapable fact that the wedding is about me, my partner and our vows of commitment to each other.

We can comfortably afford a £10k wedding and so I'm thinking of requesting our deposit back at the current venue, and booking one we can afford without parental help. It depends on whether I think the backlash of rejecting my parents' money will be worse.

My boyfriend's parents are offering no financial contribution and requesting absolutely nothing.

Our lodger has paid a cool £650 and and we both contribute about £300 extra to the joint account on top of bills. So, we now have £5500 in the joint account and we COULD use this to pay off the mortgage and get down to below £300k, but then if we DO go for a wedding that we can afford on our own, then we will be greatly depleted and I'd be reluctant to have such little funds easily ready.

Onto mortgage business, our mortgage is decreasing by approx. £800 naturally, which means the current balance is about £302,000. £2k overpayment... not unreasonable... do I do it? ahh! I have until the end of the week to decide about wedding business so will wait then.

How have I done with my £60 to last me all month?

£17 spent on brunch with friends I haven't seen in almost a year
£5 spent on a wedding magazine
£2 spent on a croissant from St John's Bakery
£7 spent on a MD, of which £5 will be reimbursed
£5 spent on groceries for the week
£4 spent on two coffees for a park-walk
£7 spent on a Christmas gift, which doesn't really count because I have separate Christmas savings.
£5 spent on a fancy muesli this morning.

£8 left. Hmmm.