Lliira

I need to go check on the cat I'm cat-sitting today - I meant to yesterday but due to the weather warnings going on I didn't get out. I made it up Friday, which considering the branches and trees breaking all over the place, was stupid, and I decided I didn't want to risk that stupidity yesterday as well.

The loan I took out to build my credit history is almost paid off. I'm chucking in an extra X per month but not letting it go lower than the default payment amount, so the extra each month will get greater and greater, paying it down faster.

I thought about taking on a new loan and extending it for five more years - and I think I will - but I'm going to wait until the oil in the tank is near-empty before I try. I think the loan will probably be paid off by then because the amount I bought should last about six months, give or take.

Then I'm basically going to try to take a loan out for as much as possible and burn through the following remedials. They are doing loans up to £32k, so we'd take out the loan together (meaning the payment is halved with each of us covering 50%) and do as much of the works as we can in that budget, paying it off over 5 years.

If we got the full £32k we could actually get quite a lot of the stuff that we'd benefit off of most done. I'll wait until the heat is used up before I pursue it though. We're chucking £500/month each into the account to cover mortgage, rates, utilities, and insurance with some to spare so with any luck some items we'll have saved up enough to do ourselves outright. With any luck we can get a HRU retrofitted into the property, as an example, or the fencing - either one of those would be about £2,000. Or maybe since those are smaller costs we just commit to saving up for those and doing them out of pocket. Same with decorating - I'm not going to take a loan out for flooring or paint or plaster repair, or updating sockets.

But updating the ventilation and insulation of the property. Heat conversion to GFCH or heat-pump. The roof is 50 years old and should probably be replaced - some of Patrick's family are roofers so hopefully that can be done for a bargain, and I figure we can plan that out with installing solar and battery. If we can, convert the burner area into a utility area for stacking a washer and heat-pump dryer.

If there's anything left over, try to update the kitchen to something use-able.


Not that I want to take out loans - but we need to keep our credit history going anyway in case we ever want to buy a second house, and these would all help maintain the property and we'd utilise them a lot. So I think it's worth it not trying to just save money 5-15 years. Especially the kitchen because cooking at home easier means less takeaways.