This post contains some referral links. Referral links do not cost you anything if you sign up through them, they simply mean that I get credited with some money back from the companies.
When we bought our first home back in 2016 I knew I wanted to try and overpay the mortgage. Me and my husband had had a good deposit, but it was our first home and it needed plenty of work after years of neglect. The previous owners were landlords and they had done very little to keep the place nice.
This meant that we had a longer mortgage term so that we could have affordable monthly repayments and focus more on doing the place up. We wanted the option of not overpaying in some months if we needed to, rather than having to pay higher monthly payments and being unable to change that.
Our first mortgage overpayment was made in February 2017, and we haven't looked back since!
The target
In theory I like to overpay the mortgage by at least £1000 a year. However, I have only ever managed this once, in 2017. Since then my totals have come very close (£949 in 2018) and well off the mark (£707.82 in 2019).
This is partly because I do lose interest in the target on occasion, especially when other stresses take over. I also changed jobs nearly 3 years ago, which meant that I no longer had expenses claims whose payout I could chuck at the mortgage.
I also dedicate more money to other savings pots nowadays. I'm saving for maternity leave, I have a fund for a new car for when mine dies, I have a Lifetime ISA to help supplement my pension one day, and I'm slowly building up my emergency fund. All this means that I have to find a balance with my money so that I can maintain a variety of targets without letting one get neglected.
The reality
My overpayments for the first half of 2021 have been:
January - £72.15
February - £109.86
March - £41.15
April - £71.64
May - £50.51
June - £59.09
Total - £404.40
As we can see, I'm less than halfway towards my aim this year. If I continue to overpay at my current rate then I'll end the year with around £800 in overpayments and miss my target.
A challenging second half
Overpayments are funded by a combination of a regular amount that me and my husband both contribute. This is topped up with some sidehustle payouts, primarily from cashback sites such as Quidco and survey sites like Prolific. I also do little account sweeps throughout the month, where I round down my current account to the nearest £5 or £10 and then send whatever is over that to the mortgage.
If I want to hit £1000 by the end of the year then I either need to start doing more surveys (and to be fair I haven't been on Prolific much recently), or I need to check my current account more and make sure I'm sweeping it frequently.
Let's see how the next 6 months go!
No comments:
Post a Comment