I fixed the heat and I liked it

[ailbhe]

It's all warm now. I R Genius. The children are warm and I've cooked them breakfast and lunch, done a load of laundry and a load in the dishwasher, added the meat and hot water to the slow-cooker full of veg Rob prepped last night, et cetera et cetera et cetera. I even tidied the kids' room, which will just show you how motivating heat can be.

I'm still trying to decide whether to call the bank and change our mortgage to reduce the payment and extend the term. We did get it with the specific backup plan of extending the term if we ever needed to; I can't decide whether now is that time.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

Are you getting *more* overdrawn? or was there one really bad month that set you back? If you are getting steadily more overdrawn then you need to reduce your mortgage payments, if you aren't then you don't really.

If you do choose to reduce payments now, try to go for something that will let you overpay without penalty the difference between current payments and new payments so that if (when!) your financial circumstances improve you can pay off faster again without going through the pain of remortgaging.

[ailbhe]

I *think* we might be beginning to hold our own after months of getting more and more overdrawn. We have just had Christmas, after all, and the expensive pre-Christmas train travel.

[naath.livejournal.com]

It might be worth trying to cling on then? Perhaps the mortgage people might be happy with you making a reduced payment in one month (especially if you have previously overpaid at all) to allow you to shove the "end of month" balance into the black so you can be more comfortable with it - that would obviously lengthen the mortgage but perhaps by less than agreeing a lower monthly payment for the forseeable future (or perhaps not, depends how much by I suppose).

[ailbhe]

Oh - and I always go for no-penalty overpayments, whenever I juggle the mortgage; we've reduced the term a few years already that way.

[(Anonymous)]

Don't know who your mortgage is with, but can you get back some of the money you've overpaid? We're with the Nationwide, and anything we overpay can be drawn back down if necessary. If you got back a little chunk you could reset your baseline?

Alison