Viber rant

RANT ALERT!

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3, and amongst other things I have an app for Viber.

Viber is like WhatsApp, it lets you send text and picture messages for free over the Internet.

I am sure there is some technical reason for it, but annoyingly if I get a text message from someone, and they have Viber, and I'm connected to the Internet, their message will come through both as an SMS (as intended) and as a Viber message.

If I read the SMS on my mobile, I still need to go into Viber and mark the same message as read.

HOW ANNOYING!

And I can't find a way to stop it.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

/rantover

LOAN OVERPAYMENT TRACKER - OCTOBER 2013

It's time for a quick end-of-month update:

Loan overpayment: £50
Months left until loan is cleared aprox: 23

I may do this every month, if anything it'll keep me accountable. I'll see.

I did post previously that I'd overpay a minimum of £20.00, which in real terms means it will take me about a year to shave off one month from the loan term (I haven't exactly worked this out as I haven't fully taken into consideration what I'll be saving in terms of interest). How gross. This won't do, I will definitely need to step it up somehow!

More on this to follow.

Loans

Bear with me, I'm working this out as I write, so it's convoluted. We took out a loan about 6 months ago, so we could buy a new car.

Today for the first time I have started thinking seriously about overpaying it. I like to think I'm quite savvy when it comes to money, so why have I not been thinking about this sooner?? Well, I need to remind myself that we did have the small matter of our wedding taking up our resources...

Our loan is at quite a good rate (5.9%), and my best savings rate at the moment is  an (excellent) interest rate of 4.8% after tax (6% before tax), so it's really a no brainer. I need to start OPing! (OP= overpayment). Both of these are with the Nationwide by the way.

We have 23 months left before the loan is cleared. That is just under two years away! Isn't that disgusting? I'll be going on 29 by then. Not cool, loan. Not cool.

So, it's CONVOLUTED PoA TIME!
Each month all of my money is pretty much accounted for, but I will need to make some adjustments. I don't want this loan hanging over my head for the next two years.

By the way, this is a joint loan with my husband. I'm sure he'll help out but I'm the main earner so it's easier and more fun if I don't count his potential contributions.

I'm a great believer of squirrelling away small amounts of money each month for various things, and watch my little pile of money grow. I'm therefore going to apply the same train of thought with the loan.

I'm going to try and overpay a minimum of £20 each month. This is the bare minimum. I can't see myself being able to pay any more until after Christmas, but it's a start.

If I can do this for 12 months I'll have shortened the overall loan term by about one month, give or take.

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One month isn't great, is it...

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Well doesn't this go to show how difficult it is to get rid of debt?

At the moment £20.00 is probably all I can afford so I'm not going to cry about it. Better than not overpaying at all.

I'll track my progress on this blog, let's see how it goes!

Pre-work blues!

The title of my posts seem to have a bit of a reoccurring theme, don't they?

In two days' time I'll be back at work, after a whole month off. And despite my best efforts, I'm starting to feel down about the end of my holidays.

In an attempt to prevent this, I decided I'd book us a weekend away somewhere so we'd have something else to look forward to, but the fact of the matter is, I'm broke!

I mean, not really, but we're obviously just back from our honeymoon and don't exactly have a couple hundred pounds to spend on going away somewhere. Sigh...

So we're stuck at home, going back to work very soon, and I am not happy about it!

I love my job, I really do (I work in customer service and social media), but in a match of "work VS holidays", we know which one I'd want to win!

I have one more day of freedom, I better stop moping and just enjoy it I guess. Easier said than done.

/whingeover

To cheer us up, here's a sunrise.

Post-wedding blues

Well, it's certainly been a while, hasn't it?

A lot has changed since my last post. I am now married (just by a few weeks!), I went somewhere far and amazing for our honeymoon, and our wedding day was the best day ever. A cliché, but it's 100% true.

Having all your friends and family, all gathered together in the one place, just for you, was both humbling and somewhat exhilarating. It was a great day, if I could I'd do it all over again! (Well, with the same husband ovb ;) )

I have also learnt that long haul flights are actually fine, so it's definitely something we'll do again in the future. Unfortunately not the too near future, my purse has taken enough of a battering for now!

Now that such a big event is behind us, we can start planning our future together properly.

I have a lot of various things I want to achieve, both financially and otherwise, but that will be for another (probably longwinded) post, to be submitted soon.

Cheerio until then!