Now that we've waved goodbye to 2022 and can look forward to 2023, it's time to reflect on some of the finances over the past year.

To start with I've had a look back at our mortgage overpayments for 2022! I know there's some debate among personal finance bloggers over whether it's best to overpay the mortgage or invest the money instead. For me and my husband overpaying works for us, but I'm very aware that it's not for everyone.

Last year our total was just over £900. My target had been £1000 a year. And this year we managed it!

Total mortgage overpayments in 2021

Back in July I looked at the mortgage overpayments me and my husband had made in the first half of the year. 

In that post I mentioned that our aim was to overpay £1000 a year. In the past few years we have missed this target.

Halfway there! Mortgage overpayments for 2021

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.

Mortgage Overpayment - August and September 2017

Anyone with an eagle eye would have spotted that I missed my regular post on my mortgage overpayment for August. That was because August became a very expensive month after I needed to get some work on my car, so my overpaying was on the small side. So small in fact that the blog post would have been about 100 words XD

I decided to combine it in with September, which had fewer emergency expenses and therefore let me sweep up some extra pennies when I reviewed my accounts. I also had a bigger expenses claim in September, which helped bump up the payment.

So without further ado - in August I managed to overpay £45.41, which was a lot less than my target of £60 a month :( As I mentioned my car needed some work, and I was loathed to move too much money out of my savings to cover it as I'm trying my best to keep money in my savings account than constantly move more out of it.

But on the plus side in September I overpaid £70.96! I ended up with a £25 expenses claim due to a bunch of things we needed for the office at work, and I was so careful with my money during the month that I was able to do a large sweep at the end of September which added an extra £12 on to my payment.

I haven't been very good about listing things on eBay and Facebook selling pages the past two months as work has been getting very busy. I'm hoping I'll be able to find some time in October and November to get back to listing things and go for some bigger payments towards the end of the year!

Changing your name after your wedding

One of the more common questions you get asked when people find out you’re getting married is “So will you be changing your name then?” Generally it’s directed at women, but more men are hearing it too, and if you’re in a same-sex relationship then double-barrelling is flagged up as an option.

I'm only changing my surname!

But one of the problems is just how much stuff you end up needing to change, and how many different ways there are for doing so. After getting married in April I’m now in the process of getting things updated with my new surname, and frankly I’ve had some mixed results with it!

Work

I’m quite lucky to work for a large employer with lots of HR staff dotted around the place, and they have plenty of experience in updating your details. All I needed to do was show up at the HR office with my marriage certificate, wait for a colour copy to be sorted on the photocopier, and that was it. My colleague in HR sorted out my payroll, HR record and pensions information so it was all swapped over in less than a week! I count myself very lucky to have found it this easy, obviously your work place may be slower or require you to fill out extra forms.

Verdict: 5/5

Banks

My main bank since my student days is Barclays, and through Google I managed to find the page on their website that said I just needed to take my marriage certificate in to a branch and they would sort it from there. So I did exactly that, and spent just over five minutes with a staff member going through the process. Originally it came across as very easy, again they took a colour copy of my marriage certificate, and I was told that a new debit card and chequebook would be in the post shortly.

However when things arrived it became very clear that something had gone wrong. Although they had updated my title, so I was now “Mrs”, they’d left my maiden name as my surname. Cue a certain amount of frustration, especially when I went to a second branch to sort it out (I didn’t want to go back to the first for obvious reasons). They could see that something had gone wrong with the changeover, although they didn’t tell me what, but they couldn’t fix it until I handed over my marriage certificate again. I therefore had to make a third trip, certificate in tow. I ended up with yet another new card and another new chequebook, but thankfully in the correct name.

I also have a mortgage with my husband through Halifax. This time it was closer to ten minutes as the staff member had to fill out what seemed to be an extremely long online form. Not only did they need my previous name, new name, my address and my mortgage account number, but I was also asked about my current wage! I even had to check that they weren’t going to change my mortgage in anyway as some of the questions seemed too personal for what was a change of surname. Once more the marriage certificate was copied, and the online form had to be printed off and the whole thing sent to a head office through Halifax’s postal system.

The disappointing thing with Halifax, apart from the questions, was that I was told it would only take three days to sort out and I would receive a text message to confirm it had gone through. Despite them having my mobile number (I’ve had texts from them in the past) I never received anything to confirm the name change had gone through. We only realised it had been processed a week later when we checked our mortgage account online, and found it was now titled “Mr & Mrs” with one surname.

Verdicts;

Barclays – 3/5

Halifax – 4/5

Electoral register

This got done this week as we received a letter about updating details online. No need to photocopy or send off the marriage certificate, we just logged in with the code we were sent on the letter, and there was an option for me to change my surname on one of the pages. Obviously until I next get a polling card I won’t be certain that it’s gone through fine, but it seemed to be a smooth process.

Being on the electoral register is important for your credit rating, so keeping it up to date with your name and current address should be standard. When you get one of these letters, double check they’ve spelled your details correctly, and amend them online if not.

Verdict: 5/5

Driving licence

I’ve only just sent this off (very naughty I know), so hopefully this will go through fine! I’ve deliberately left this late as it’s the first time I’ve needed to send off my marriage certificate and I’m worried it’ll get lost in the post, or damaged by the DVLA (a friend of mine had a bad experience with hers). I collected a form from the Post Office, filled it in with all the details, and have now posted it off with my driving licence and the marriage certificate. It should take three weeks for the new to make its way back to me, and hopefully my marriage certificate will come back in one piece too!

Verdict: 5/5 for getting the form from the post office, ?/5 for getting it back!

HMRC

I expected them to be the biggest nuisance with this kind of thing, but it appears not! All I had to do was fill in an online form, including the date that we married and some information about my husband, and that was that! But again, I’ve only done it recently so any problems won’t have arisen yet. But for ease of use I’ve found them one of the better ones to deal with, even if it was a little time consuming.

Verdict: 5/5, so far!

I haven’t got around to sorting out our utility bills (energy and broadband are in my name), and I haven’t done my passport as I’ll need to pay £95 for a new one to change my name! But so far I feel I’m making progress, and this doesn’t even include all my shop loyalty cards that have also been swapped over!

Mortgage Overpayment - July 2017

If you'd like to find out more about why we're overpaying our mortgage, the post is here!

July turned out to be a fantastic month for overpaying. It wasn't a record breaking month, that's still held by April. But it was still very good and it's all thanks to my expenses claim, my train ticket to a work conference gave an enormous boost to the payment pot!

So without further ado our overpayment for July was £129.27!!

That was made up of our standard £30, which we budget every month. I received £5.39 from Quidco, which was cashback from buying some house items a few months ago, and then £78.66 was my work expenses claim. I also did a couple of account sweeps, rounding my bank balance down to end in a 5 or a 0, and that netted me an extra £5.56, and then I finally rounded down the mortgage balance at the end of the month to pay off an extra £7.66. 

Since we're now just over halfway through the year, I thought I'd take a little look at the impact our mortgage payments, and the overpayments, have had on some of the numbers!

When we started the mortgage we were having £12.01 added in interest per day! It's now down to £11.82 a day. We were due to go under £11 a day in August 2020, but we've now brought that up to June 2020, and of course that will go down as we continue to overpay. We were due to drop under £155k owed in May 2018, that's now fallen to March 2018. I really want to do it before January, but playing with numbers suggests that that might be a little tricky. I'm really happy with how close we're getting though, it's good motivation for the future.

I have a terramundi pot, which I started to save in when I was living in London. I only add £2 and 50 pence coins to it, and it's starting to get a little heavy. But it's certainly nowhere near full ,so I'm now debating if I want to crack it open in December and use whatever's in it to make one last huge overpayment for the New Year. But on the other hand I'd like to know how much it can hold when it's full, so I should hold out.

We'll see what the coming months bring, and see how many more £2 coins I can stuff in to it in the meantime XD

Mortgage Overpayment - June 2017

If you haven't seen my mortgage overpayment series, you can check out the other posts here.

This month's mortgage overpayment is once again a little small, I've struggled to sell things I've listed on eBay (to be fair they're in a saturated market) and I haven't had much time to dedicate to finding other things to list. My initial optimism didn't pan out unfortunately, but I'm still happy with the overpayment we made this month.

My expenses payment for this month was £22.29, which is fairly average at the moment. I also cashed out £10.28 from Quidco, which was left over from some more house things (including getting our washing machine from Currys and our fridge freezer from AO!).

But in between those two sources, and the standard £30 we have built in to our budget, this month was very slim-pickings. My work had a very big event at the end of the month, and much of my June was mentally occupied with "I need to email some more details to the venue, ask about the choices for the lunch, send out the invoices for the tickets, did I remember to tell my manager about this problem that came up? I don't think I did, I must remember to do that tomorrow", and all around my regular work tasks as well! The day after the event was great as my brain suddenly felt clear!

I was so caught up that I didn't even round down the final mortgage total at the end of the month. Now the final column of my spreadsheet looks uneven XD In total we overpaid £62.57 in June!

But the good thing about the work event is that it was held in London and I'm allowed to claim my (horribly expensive) train ticket back on expenses. This means that next month's expenses form has been very large, and will lead to a very generous overpayment! I also have next week off work, so I'll have a scrabble around for some more things to eBay during the week.

Aims for the rest of 2017!

We're now at June, halfway through the year, and if I'd made New Years Resolutions then now would be the time that I'd be reviewing them and wondering how the wheels managed to fall off so quickly.

I had no energy or thoughts of resolutions on 1 January as we had only bought our house a few weeks earlier, and my brain was filled with plans for bathroom refurbishment, furniture buying, and general decorating. So now seems like a good time to look back at the past six months, and look forward to the next six, and work out what I'd like to do between now and December.

Continue mortgage overpayments

Yes with the year halfway through we’re creeping ever closer to my aim to drop under £155k owed on our house before January. Last month's overpayment was a little on the small side, a week off work at the end of April meant that I didn’t has as many work expenses to claim back in the first week of May. But June’s overpayment is already looking quite healthy, so we might be on target without too much difficulty!

Next time I'm in Rome I might know Italian!

Improve my abysmal Italian

You might have seen from my Twitter feed recently that I’ve become a little bit addicted to radio.garden, a website that lets you tune in to radio stations around the world. I love it because all the green dots scattered across the world are radio stations, with small dots for single radio channels, and larger ones for a cluster of stations that you can tune in to. 

When I started using it I had fun bouncing around the world, listening to stations in France, Denmark, Russia, China, Japan and Malaysia, before finishing up with half an hour of Israeli music. But since then I’ve settled in to listening to Italian radio. I tend to bounce around a few stations based in Rome, but there’s also Radio Day, which is a station based in Frosinone, the province my great-grandfather is from. However my Italian (despite my ancestry) is extremely poor. I can count to ten, ask for a table at a restaurant, and say please and thank you (the absolutely basics when you’re on holiday). I keep finding myself listening to adverts and news sections without knowing what’s going on (although that doesn’t bother me with the adverts quite so much). 

So I’ve decided to try and improve my Italian for the next six months. I’ve signed up to DuoLingo with the aim to practise for ten minutes a day, every day. If I actually manage to maintain this for the next six months then I’ll be shocked but pleased XD

Plan for Christmas better

I know I’m not the only one who thinks about this. My birthday is exactly six weeks before Christmas, so I normally don’t worry about it until my birthday has been and gone. Last year that really didn’t work as we completed our house purchase in early December, so I had to buy a lot of last-minute gifts for family and friends as I just hadn’t had the time or energy to think about it.

This year I’m planning on being at least slightly more organised. I’d like to have a list of what I’m buying people by the end of October, and then I can buy bits and pieces in the following weeks. This is also the first year we’ve been in the house for Christmas and our first year as a married couple, so me and my husband need to work out what we want to do for the day (difficult as he doesn’t celebrate Christmas and doesn’t really see the point of it). 

Walk more

Getting in to the swing of a much longer commute, and all the problems that go with it, has taken me longer than I thought it would. After a week of lots of driving, coupled with my husband having train problems, and the need to dedicate time to the wedding and decorating the house, overall my weekends tend to involve only leaving the house to buy food. A day out over the bank holiday weekend reminded me that it's good to get out of the house for something other than essentials (work and food). I have a book of walks around Essex that I dug out and had a look, and I've now identified a few walks in the area that are three miles or more and will be good to do in the future. Now I just need to get the energy for them, and encourage husband to come with me!

Mortgage Overpayment - May 2017

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!

Mortgage Overpayment - March 2017

Given that we're now well in to April this post is a little late. But that's not because it's bad news! Actually March was very good for overpaying, in total we managed to throw an extra £129.50 at the mortgage!

A big chunk of this was from Quidco as I got a hefty cashback payout from taking out my breakdown cover with the AA through them. Not being particularly technically minded I find it quite reassuring to know that if I lose a tyre then I just have to make one phonecall and competent help will be on the way. The money was actually meant to be confirmed in February but ended up being delayed, so it was nice to get it in March instead.

Another sizable donation was from my work expenses. My OP in April is already going to be be quite large thanks to extra expenses, but in March I had to buy a very large box of teabags as well as a lot of milk, I tend to be the first person getting through the door in the morning so I generally need milk for my tea before anyone else.

I'm already collecting together the figures for April, and let's just say that if the months continues as it started then I'll be very happy with the overpayment at the end of it!

Mortgage Overpayment - Feb 2017

We've only had our mortgage for a few months, but one thing we agreed about early on was that we wanted to overpay it as soon as possible. We started repaying the mortgage in January, and made our first overpayment at the end of the month. Yesterday was the last day in February, so it was the ideal time to make our second overpayment!

Our overpayments consist of a flat £30 payment that we worked in to our budget. To that we add little extras we get over the course of the month. This can include cashback from Quidco, bags of loose change we count up, my monthly expenses claim from work for buying things for the office, money saved from spending less than budgeted, and money from having a clearout on eBay. I also check my current account regularly and round down the amount I have in the bank to the nearest £5 or £10. So if I had £37.20 then I'd move £2.20 to go to overpayments, leaving £35 in my account.

In February our overpayment was £64.14! I have a really great spreadsheet where I can track the impact that our payments are making. This is a great motivational tool, it took a good 40 minutes following very detailed instructions to set up properly, but it was worth the time.

The spreadsheet means that we can set ourselves goals that push us a little further, but which are realistic. For example we realised that if we overpaid by £60 a month (so if we managed to double our baseline £30 a month) then we would have paid off £5000 by February 2018. That was enough to push us to go a bit further and try to hit £5000 by end of 2017. 

On the other hand it's a bit of an eye-opener, we are currently paying over £11 a day in interest! We're on a pretty good rate too, but seeing that number really made us realise how much was going straight back to the bank. No wonder they consider mortgages to be easy money made!

We'll see how much we manage to save in March - my change jar is looking quite heavy!