We have a week off work next week which should provide some time to get the garden in order and get the garden furniture out for those long summer nights ahead of us here in England. I’m hopeful anyway!
We will also be re doing the budget for the rest of 2008. Things keep changing and we want to know exactly where we are at. We’re looking to overpay by £700 in May, an increase on the normal overpayment of £600, I would love to overpay by this much extra every month but I’m not sure if we can quite achieve this yet. We only have two more months with the Abbey and then we switch to our new mortgage. The monthly payment from July will be more than we are paying now, although it has reduced at the moment as the Bank of England base rate has dropped to 5% and the new fixed rate mortgage is linked to this.
The switch from British Gas to Eon is now complete, we just need to pay the final bills for both the gas and the electric. I’m still waiting for the cash back of £30 from Moneysupermarket, when we get it, it’s going towards the mortgage over payments.
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Hi, looks like you are doing well. Good progress with the over payments. I haven’t been commenting on here for a while (although I have been reading via feedburner) as I’ve taken a contract up in Cambridge and have been REALLY busy.
Well, it does look like times will get harder – this is where those hard-won frugal living skills will really pay dividends IMHO.
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hi tony, good to see you. How are things with you?
Its good that your busy right?
Laura
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Cheers, good to see you are still going strong…
Things here are very well. Just made a 10K overpayment. Not gonna happen too often – I’d been waiting to come off my two-year-fixed in order to make that payment – but of course Nationwide allows up to £500 a month overpayment anyway, so I’ve been taking advantage of that. Kind of ironic that most people DREAD coming off a fixed-rate – I was actually looking forward to it.
It’s pretty interesting economically right now. We are living with pretty high inflation – in terms of real prices – rather than the government’s cooked figures, where interest rates should be going up. The BOE has been cutting rates, but the Banks and BSs aren’t buying it. They need the higher rates to increase liquidity via savers. Plus the credit crunch doesn’t help. I don’t see rates coming down dramatically in the near future.
I’m still hitting my targets to retire abroad at 50 which is the main thing. There’s a chance I may be leaving even earlier – but will tell you about it if it happens.
Busy is good – as long as it’s the right kind of busy i.e. it’s all working towards goals.
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Update: shortly after writing that post a letter came through from Nationwide to say they are dropping the interest rate to 6.49%. Well done Nationwide for passing on some savings!
I had a mortgage briefly with Halifax about 10 years ago. They were so bad I vowed never to deal with them again. I tansferred my mortgage and never have done. I’ve also had bad experiences and incompetence from Nat Pest, Barclays and Abbey.
I have to say Nationwide have been absolutely a breath of fresh air from the start, with excellent service a great online facility and generally the nicest and most helpful staff you will ever find.
They also don’t charge for credit card use abroad – something I appreciate as I tend to take fairly lengthy breaks in Asia.
Nationwide haven’t disappointed at all over the last 4 years I’ve been with them. Originally I only had my mortgage with them, but I now use them for savings and bank account – Flex Account. This year I got £175 interest on my currrent account. I think I earned around 3.54 minus tax at Barclays
In short I’m a Nationwide junky
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