The end of the month means overpayment time for our mortgage! After April's bumper overpayment I knew that May was going to look measly in comparison, but I've really taken my eye off the ball this month, and haven't found other sources to replace the large Quidco payments that won't be coming in any more.

May's overpayment is £66.97, which although it's not as good as I would like, is still just over my target of overpaying £60 a month. I didn't have a great deal of success with eBay this month, but I did count up my 20p and copper penny jars, which gave me £12 in total.

I also got a tiny payment from Amazon for eBook sales back in March. I published two eBooks on women in history back in 2014, and every so often I get a few sales that give me a little trickle of pennies from Amazon. May's payout was £0.76, which I think mostly came from March as it was Women's History Month and there's always a little spike in activity then.

The rest of the money was made up of our basic overpayment (£30) and my expenses from April, which were paid in the middle of May.

So although it wasn't well over the odds, I'm still pleased that we're just over target, and hopefully in June I'll get back in to my money saving mojo and get a bit closer to the magical £100!

Why we're overpaying our mortgage

You may have noticed from some of my posts that since buying our first home back in December, me and my husband have been overpaying our mortgage. We deliberately built a £30 monthly overpayment in to our budget when we were originally planning a mortgage, and this is then topped up by cashback from Quidco, counting up money from penny jars, setting aside my expenses from work, or selling stuff we don’t use or need on eBay. My aim is to be able to double that £30 every month, and so far I’ve managed to hit that target consistently!

Telling people we’re overpaying generally leads to them going “Oh that’s a good idea!” followed by a pause and then “…but why when interest rates are so low?” It’s a good question, I certainly don’t know anyone offline that’s doing this as regularly, but it’s something we were both keen on doing for a variety of reasons.

1. We both hate debt

I still have a student loan, because like many students who graduated in 2008 I found it very difficult to get a well-paid job straight off the bat. Instead I found myself as the proud owner of two degrees and a job as a cashier in a supermarket, followed by various part-time contracts and an attempt at self-employment until I landed my first full-time role at the age of 24. But I don’t like being in debt, and neither does my husband. Having a debt of £160,000 is quite scary when you think about it, and given the uncertainty in the economy (especially with Brexit) we’d like to pay off extra while we can, before interest rates start going up!

2. Reducing the LTV

We found it difficult to get a mortgage in the first place because my current role is a contract. Admittedly at two years and with guaranteed full-time work it’s better than a zero-hours role, but it’s technically temporary nonetheless. We had a decent deposit saved up by my OH, which gave us an LTV of 85% (LTV is Loan to Value ratio, so how much you’re borrowing compared to the value of the house. We had a 15% deposit, so our LTV was 85%). This really helped us get a good mortgage rate despite my contract situation, and taught us a valuable lesson about how important a decent deposit can be. We have a 5 year fixed rate, by the time we’re due to re-mortgage I’ll probably have a stint of maternity leave which will have affected my earning potential, and given the risks to the economy we suspect that rules about mortgages will be significantly tighter. So reducing our LTV will hopefully help us in the long run, and might also make it easier to move up a step on the ladder when the time comes for us to find a bigger house.

3. It’s seriously addictive

I have a spread sheet that tracks, among other things, the daily amount of interest earned, the total amount we’ve paid per month, and the amount we owe to the bank. It’s set up for the next 5 years with our standard monthly payment, and then I can type in how much we’ve overpaid in a particular month and it will recalculate everything. I’m not going to lie, it’s really addictive. As soon as I send my expenses form in to work I make a note of the total, then when I go home I type it in to the spread sheet to see the effect. Same with filling up a bag of change, or getting a notification from Quidco that we can cashout.

The effect so far has only encouraged me to keep going. When we first got our mortgage we were earning £12.01 a day in interest. We would have hit £155,000 owed in May 2018, and would have dropped under £150,000 in September 2019. You'd think that we would need to be overpaying hundreds of pounds every month to make a difference.

So far (it’s only May after all, and we made our first overpayment in January) we’ve overpaid by £490.88. We’re now due to fall under the £155k mark in February 2018 (although my aim is to hit it by December), and will be below £150k in July 2018. Our daily interest rate is currently £11.88 (still a huge amount per day I know!), and will fall below £11.50 a day in October 2018.

It just goes to show that you don’t need thousands in the bank to pay off your mortgage, just small regular payments can make a big difference!

Mortgage Overpayment - April 2017

Yes, it's true, despite spending April getting married and then going on honeymoon, we managed to make a mortgage overpayment at the end of the month! 

Who lives in a house like this? XD

Actually we managed to hit a new record in April as we overpaid £206.26!! Quite a bit more than I was anticipating, I thought we'd be lucky to hit £100 this month as all our energy and attention was going on the wedding. I was even eyeing up my change jars early in the month as I was sure I'd need to have a count up just to be able to send off a reasonable amount.

However Quidco once again stepped in to save my metaphorical bacon. I received a payout of just over £21 for buying our buildings insurance through them back in November. You need to have buildings insurance when you exchange contracts on your house purchase, this payment had been pending for a while and it was nice to finally get it.

Then out of nowhere I received confirmation that my cashback for signing up with our broadband provider had arrived, a whole £100! I'd nearly forgotten to go through Quidco in the first place. If I'd missed out on this then I would have been quite annoyed. Normally it takes months for cashback to be paid, so getting this in around 6 weeks is extremely quick and was a very pleasant surprise!

I also had a healthy expenses payment of just over £43 from work, I had to buy some special envelopes for some bits we were posting out so that helped bump that up too.

I don't have any big payments left pending in Quidco, just smaller amounts from Argos and Currys from buying bits and pieces for the house, which are mostly due in May and June. I think my next expenses payment will be smaller too as I've been off work for a week. But my penny jar is looking very full, so May might be a good time to count it up and pay it in!

What to do on completion day!

If you’re buying a house then completion day is the most exciting part of the entire process. This is the day when you officially become the owner of the house and get your keys! You can start painting, move your furniture in, and start planning exactly how you want it. But there's a few things you should be prepared to sort out first…

Get the locks changed

How many people did your vendors give their keys to? Both sets of parents so there were plenty of spares available? The decorator who painted the hallway 3 years ago? A lodger that stayed for three months, and their replacement? There could be a dozen copies of your front door, back door, shed padlock and garage keys scattered around, and you have no idea who has them.

Therefore when it comes to completion day you should make sure you have the phone number of a local locksmith who can come round and change the locks for you. I phoned someone who was able to come out for “emergencies”, but I had to wait 2 hours before he could get there. Since this was our first time buying I had no idea what time completion would be sorted by, otherwise I would have booked someone to come out for a specific time.

If you know you can get to the house quite quickly, and you know you’ll have completed by early afternoon, then you can phone around and book for the locks to be changed later that day. We paid around £150 for two locks to be changed, which from what I’d read elsewhere is pretty average in terms of cost, and was well worth it for peace of mind.

Read your meters

Before you start firing up the boiler and switching on all the lights, take meter readings. The main two are gas and electricity, but if your new home has a water meter (they’re becoming increasingly common) then you’ll need to check that as well. The quickest, easiest way to do this is to get your phone out and take a couple of snaps of the meters. That way you have a visible record of the numbers, and you can submit the readings a few days later without feeling like you need to rush.

Your property information form from the vendors should state who the current provider is. You can then phone them, submit the readings, and then you have the option to change supplier over the coming weeks. Our vendors were landlords who’d held the place at arm’s length, so our form didn’t indicate who the energy provider was. “Luckily” for us there was a pile of post waiting on the doorstep, including a collection of demands relating to an unpaid bill from the energy provider, so we instantly knew who to contact with our readings. If you don't know, and don't have an unpaid bill waiting for you, there are phone numbers online that you can call to find out who the supplier is.

Be prepared to clean

Even if your vendors are lovely people and you’ve developed a decent rapport with them, chances are you’ll still want to clean the place when you get in. This could be giving the bathroom a scrub, wiping round the kitchen before you set up the kettle, or running around with a hoover. In our case the house clearance people our vendors had hired had decided to dismantle a wardrobe in the master bedroom, and had left thousands of fragments of MDF scattered across the carpet.

You should also be prepared to clean simply because your vendors don't HAVE to clean before they hand the keys over. As long as they don't cause damage to the house (for example, smashing all the windows or knocking chunks of plaster out of all the walls) you can't legally demand that they leave the place spotless. They'll be in a rush to get to their new place, just as you're in a rush to get in. Make yourself a box of essential cleaning products (washing up liquid, Dettol, toilet cleaner, sponges, cloths and Marigolds) to keep in the car, along with your hoover if you have space. Then if the place isn't quite how you'd like it you have all the things you need on hand and easily accessible.

We hoovered up the MDF fragments. After we'd picked up 12 screws and 5 nails.

Celebrate!

This is the most important part! Get a takeaway and pop open the bubbly, or put the kettle one. You’re in, the house is yours, and you can start doing all that decorating you’ve been planning for the past few months!

Finding Number 3

When you're a first time buyer, looking for a home can be terrifying. Where do you want to move to? Why stare an estate agent's window when everything is on Rightmove? How does house viewing work? It all looks a bit complicated when you're not used to it.

Location, location, it's all the location

We originally looked close to our families, in Hertfordshire and south Essex, where trains are frequent and the service semi-decent. Sadly both areas suffer from the South East Effect, house prices have shot up and are out of range of most people, including us!

So we had to go further down the train lines. I didn't want to live in an enormous town, so that ruled out Chelmsford, and although we looked around Witham I found I just didn't like it. Braintree was a good compromise, and we even viewed a house there, but the train station is only on a branch line, so in the end we reluctantly crossed it off the list. We loved Kelvedon and Feering, but houses were again out of our price range. But moving down the line brought us to Colchester, which was also too big for me, and from there we discovered Wivenhoe.

We also made a list of things we needed (train station, off street parking) and things we didn't (a big garden, more than three bedrooms) so we knew where we would both compromise. Lots of first time buyers are in their early thirties now, there's no point in buying a one bedroom flat if you're planning on starting a family in a year's time!

Once we knew what we wanted in a property and where we wanted to move to, we started the search seriously!

Rightmove, Zoopla or direct to agents?

The two main house buying search engines are Rightmove and Zoopla. Of the two I'd say Rightmove is more well known, there are certainly a lot more houses listed on it, but I found both of them quite easy to use, and I found Zoopla's "Advanced Search" tools to be better than Rightmove. The other bonus to Zoopla being a little less popular is that you have fewer estate agents stuffing search results with inappropriate properties, such as putting a terraced house as "semi detached", which happens on Rightmove and drives me up the wall!

If you sign up for both sites then you can set up email alerts for specific areas. When a property comes up in your preferred area, with specific cost settings, you'll get an email straight to your inbox. This means you don't have to load the website up every evening to see if anything new has cropped up. The price settings are really good as you then don't get spammed with properties that are well out of your price range. Just a few clicks and it's ready to go!

Although a lot of listings tend to go online quiet quickly, it's worth signing up for estate agents too, both the larger chains and the small independents. We mainly just wanted to get ourselves known as looking for a property, so we weren't automatically dismissed as timewasters should we phoned for a viewing. We also at one point got a phone call from one of the larger agencies inviting us to view a house that wasn't on Rightmove yet. This was probably an attempt to get us in to a bidding war, they had multiple appointments throughout the day, but it didn't really matter as after viewing we turned it down. But it does show that not every property makes it online, so signing up to a few agencies can help.

In the end we bought a property that we found through Rightmove, without ever meeting the agents!

Viewings

We had to book viewings at weekends as neither of us wanted to use up annual leave for property

Hopefully your vendors will cut the grass before
your viewing!

viewing. We went to a few open days, quite a few of which were for properties that were empty. Open days are meant to get many people through the door was possible, and hopefully engineer interest from multiple parties. We placed an offer on one house after an open day, the asking price was £220k and we offered £200k, but we were quickly outbid and were informed that our maximum of £205k wouldn't be enough either, so we dropped it.

Due to the types of property we were looking at (in need of a bit of work) we found that we rarely met the owners, and were dealt with purely by estate agents. But if you're a first time buyer looking for a flat, buying off someone who used to be a first timer, then meeting the vendor is more likely. You may even prefer it, you can ask extra questions that the agent wouldn't be able to answer, such as whether they get along with the neighbours.

Whether you're being shown around by the agent or the owner, the first viewing is always a bit odd. You're stepping in to someone's home, trying to picture it with your choice of furniture, and mentally judging their wallpaper-carpet combo. So if you like a place and you're thinking of putting in an offer, ask for a second viewing! A second look, perhaps at a slightly different time of day (is the road outside quieter in the mornings than the afternoon?) or with different weather (does it look just as nice when it's pouring with rain?) can seal the deal in your head. I went for a second viewing with my Mum and Jon's parents, taking along other people can help you spot problems you hadn't noticed!

We found most agents were able to accommodate weekend viewings, and again the only one that was a problem was the one we ended up buying! Ask if you take a few shots as you around, to help refresh your memory later. After the viewing go for a drive around, see what shops are near, and get a feel for the local area. Although the agent may chase you for feedback within a few hours, you may find you prefer to sleep on it before making an offer.

After 6 months of searching we were sick of house hunting and ready to give up. I hope your search goes quicker!