Angelicscalliwags Frugal Challenge: September sum Up

Welcome to the September sum for our financial goal of paying of our mortgage in five years.  If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you will know that right now we are focusing on increasing our savings rather than paying off our mortgage.  We did this because we had a few bills come in at the end of last year/ beginning of this year for which we were totally unprepared (having thrown all our extra money into the mortgage).  We are currently trying to save up a few months worth of salary as a buffer.  And I am so glad we did manage to save some.

This time of the year tends to be expensive with MOT, insurance and tax as well as everyone’s birthday falling between September and February, and then there is Christmas….  However, this year although the car cost more than we had in our car account (again) and we bought a year’s worth of unplanned curriculum for the children (needed thanks to the doctor sorting out my life long insomnia resulting in less hours in the day to do school planning than before when I had an extra six hours in my day/night), we have not needed to go into debt.  Sure our savings account does not look very, very cheerful at the moment but we are in an infinitely better position than we were this time last year.

I began my squirrel account for squirreling away any extra money.  It’s only got £50 in so far, but it is open which was one of my goals last month.  We have decided this account will be for collecting money for our 0.1% challenge.  Our mortgage is thousands of pounds, and when Gary and I consider those thousands as a bulk amount they are enough to put us off even trying to pay off.  I read somewhere (I think mortgage free in three??) about saving up for just one thousandth of it.  The idea is you work out what one thousandth of your mortgage is (ie – for a mortgage of £50000 a thousandth is £50).  You then challenge yourself to come up with 1000 ways to make or save £50.  Suddenly paying off large amounts become doable.  This works for much, much larger mortgages as well.  Take a mortgage of £200000.  In order to pay the mortgage off in full you would need to find 1000 ways of making/saving £200.  Suddenly paying off the mortgage becomes eminently more doable, because of course £200 is far easier to find than £200000.  So this is what we are going to do.  By choosing not to buy something, or to go without something, or to earn something extra either by work or by selling an item and putting the money in our squirrel account we will be inching our way towards financial freedom.  Little amounts now mean big things to Gary and I.  In the future I will be looking for ways to save or make our very own 1/1000th!

I wrote yesterday about our new group effort towards our garden becoming a veritable hotel for incoming insects and wildlife, but another goal is to grow even more next year than we did this year.

All seven of us are enthusiastically on board and are hoping just a few hours each week will accomplish great things between us.  It’s always good to do things en masse and I think this will encourage the return of our enthusiasm for our Frugal challenge.  The ebb and flow of life dictates somewhat that one can’t be in a constant state of excitement over any given project but that is the state I prefer to be in.  I can’t bear apathy and lethargy in myself, and thrive when feelings and life are running strong!  I have begun a pinterest board of ideas for our garden.  I do find pinterest to be ever so motivating.  Of course I am unable to do about 99% of the things I pin but I enjoy the challenge of redesigning something to fit in our budget or circumstances.  It would be no fun at all if all the ideas were easily attainable.