Archive for: mortgage

Money saving month

This month it seems has been money saving month. No, I haven’t stopped spending, but I have managed to get some of our household bills reduced.

Firstly it was the renewal time for our mortgage. We had previously had a variable rate but it was set in 2006 so the rate we were paying was high compared to todays rates. I know that all the extra money we have paid is reducing our mortgage further which is great, but it still means the money is coming out of our bank account every month!

So I contacted the mortgage company to re-evaluate the terms of our mortgage and after going through the various options such as fixed rates etc we decided to stick with the variable. As the rate is now much much lower – so is our monthly payment. Obviously if the rate does go up, so will our payment but it has to go up a lot to reach the rate it was set at before. SAVING NO 1.

I then contacted our satellite TV company. A friend of mine had recently switched from our supplier to another and had saved some money. I called our supplier explaining this and stating that I did not want to change, but the savings outweighed the hassle etc. Basically she asked what package we would like with them in order that we would stay. Our current package was one of the basic ones with the HD and some extras. In total we paid $75 per month inc taxes.

I said that we used to have the films but at $20 per month extra it wasn’t worth it so we had cancelled and that my husband also missed some of the sports channels. She asked me to hold and when she came back she offered us the same package we currently had, plus movies and sports for $10 per month less. Obviously I grabbed this offer with both hands and now we have loads of channels. SAVING NO 2.

Next I phoned our alarm company – well by now I was on a roll…..

I explained that I had been looking at other security systems and ours seemed old by comparison and that ideally we would like to have a key-fob to activate the alarm and pay less per month. The guy said that although he could not reduce the payment he would upgrade our system, include a key-fob and a warranty – result. SAVING NO 3. Okay, this is not technically a saving, but we are getting a better system for the same price so we are happy.

The moral of this story is that you should not be afraid to ask for better or cheaper service. After all, they can only say no and you won’t have lost anything by trying.

House painting starts

Chris has started painting our garage in the first stages of our house tidy-up in order to sell it. We now have a nice maroon garage door which looks much nicer that it did previously.

As I write this, hubby is in the garden doing some weeding, this is all we really need to do with the back garden as we re-turfed it and re-planted it all last year. We have an area in the front garden in which we are thinking of sewing lots of wild flowers, so that in a couple of months we will have an abundance of wild flowers, which should look lovely.

We are also in the final stages of putting together our business proposal, so that is looking good.

We are also looking at the possibility of obtaining a mortgage guarantee for a Canadian mortgage, so that when we go in April, if we see a property we like we can make an offer on it. Just waiting for the bank to come back to us about that one. The alternative is that we find a house we like and hope that it doesn’t sell before we have sold our UK house and can use the equity to secure it.

Lots of ifs and buts still, but very hopeful of a sucessful conclusion during the coming months.