Saving / Making Money...

[joshwa]

I've been reading Which Mag with 25 tips on saving / making money and the "Pay off your mortgage in 2 years" program... and basically want to save / make money in order to have money to pay off mortgage earlier than normal in future and for money for fees for buying a new house...

let me know your suggestions of do-able ideas!

Thanks

Josh

PS - I've already looked round the house for spare things I can sell, but most things I've got lying around I couldn't even give away (ie broken 486 laptop etc)

[DR]

Simple things can be followed - question everything you buy twice.

Try and double pay the mortgage - easier if there is 2 incomes.

Aim to have some rewards - eat out twice a month - and don't buy food when in town shopping.

Have an offset mortgage - like Virgin One - Or Abbeys Saver Mortgage - which means you can put your savings in there.

Any spare money - put on the offset you can pull it out if you need to

[Saracen]

One do-able idea is to look quite hard at your expenditure on food. With some care in choice of ingredients, and some fairly simply techniques, it is possible to eat very well and quite cheaply at the same time. And if that includes knocking off the fast food and takeaways, it'll not only save you money but also be good for your health.

Along the same lines, give up smoking, booze and nights out.

One of the principles of being able to pay off your mortgage early seems to me to be pretty single-minded in that task. It's about sacrifice now for benefit later. So if you give up going out in the evenings, to alleviate the boredom of all that extra time you'll have at home, think about getting a second job, if at all possible. A few hours two or three times a week working in a pub, of even shelf-stacking, can make quite a difference to mortgage repayments if you dedicate your entire extra income to the mortgage repayments.

Oh, and instead of that holiday .....

As I said, suffer for a year or two, and gain for years and years after that. But are you single-minded and dedicated enough to do it???

[IBM]

If you really want to do it, listen to DR (nice avatar btw) and Saracan. You're going to have to suffer. My family are currently working hard to save as much cash as possible, and we've knocked a tonne of our outgoings. We used to eat out two or three times a week, more if we went out at weekends. We would go shopping once a week and spend a fortune on food. We spent all our disposable income on stuff we didn't need, and took three holidays a year.

Now we never eat out, only occasionally treat ourselves to takeaway food, get organic food delivered through Abel & Cole (which incredibly works out almost £200 pounds cheaper a month than shopping at the supermarket), go on holiday once a year and even then only when it's free (yay for airmiles), and haven't been shopping in a looooooonnnngggg time (as my wife will tell you...and tell you....and tell you).

We have no social life unless it's having friends round for dinner, we don't drink, don't smoke, and really do watch every penny....it's not a lot of fun, but we can see how much we're saving almost every day, and that makes a lot of difference.

Once we've got enough cash saved we're going to invest in commercial property, then once we've paid off a chunk we're going to remortage it and buy somewhere else, and so on. With any luck, and no crash in the market, in ten years we'll own several places and can retire to the Bahamas...

[Moby-Dick]

josh , have a wander over to the MoneySavingExpert forums , in particular the Old Style Money saving - there are some great tips there

[MurphmanL]

Online surveys and reward sites are usually quite good for a few quid here and there... places like Ciao and Surveys.com often email me and sometimes when I qualify I get the odd quid or two paid into my account for answering some questions.
Depending on how long they take obviously affects how much you're paid, but I often find myself earning on an optimistic month around a tenner from them.

Cant be consistently relied upon though, never can guarantee when surveys will pop up.