# Advice Please



## hopefully (10 Oct 2007)

Hi all,

Im new to here and was wondering if yous might help, Myself and hubby plan to start a family soon and are trying to get our finances in order, at the moment our Mortgage is €1350 per month (fixed for 5 years) and we have 2 car loans amounting to €700 per month (5 years on each). We have a house worth approx €620K and a Mortgage worth €295k we were thinking or releasing equity of 40K which will bring our mortgage to €1550 per month, Out of the 40K we plan to clear the 30k car loans and use 7k for hubby to buy a taxi plate as he is in the building game at the moment and is a bit worried he wont have anything to fall back on if it goes boom!! He has also said he will do the taxi part time now to get a bit of savings together as we havent any.

What do yous think of doing it this way???

Thanking you in advance.


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## Merrion (10 Oct 2007)

*Re: Advise Please*

Hi hopefully, Welcome to AAM
Just one thing if you make your heading relevant there is more of a chance people will read it and reply. See .
All posting guidelines can be found .


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## hopefully (10 Oct 2007)

*Re: Advise Please*



loughquinn said:


> Hi hopefully, Welcome to AAM
> Just one thing if you make your heading relevant there is more of a chance people will read it and reply. See .
> All posting guidelines can be found .


 
Thanks for that but I dont know how to edit a heading???? It is allowing me to edit the text but not the heading


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## casiopea (10 Oct 2007)

*Re: Advise Please*

Hi,
Can you give us a bit more information as per : http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=61289

Age:
Spouse’s/Partner's age:

Annual gross income from employment or profession:
Annual gross income spouse:

Type of employment: e.g. Civil Servant, self-employed

Expenditure pattern: In general are you spending more than you earn or are you saving?

Rough estimate of value of home
Mortgage on home
Mortgage provider:
Type of mortgage: Tracker, interest only, fixed rate
Interest rate

Other borrowings – car loans/personal loans etc

Do you pay off your full credit card balance each month?
If not, what is the balance on your credit card?

Savings and investments:

Do you have a pension scheme?

Do you own any investment or other property?

Ages of children:

Life insurance:


What specific question do you have or what issues are of concern to you?

Reply With Quote

This will help people answer you best.


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## hopefully (10 Oct 2007)

*Re: Advise Please*



casiopea said:


> Hi,
> Can you give us a bit more information as per : http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=61289
> 
> Age:29
> ...


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## Trish2006 (11 Oct 2007)

From the figures it looks like you could release a lot of money by cutting down on some of your expenses, e.g. mobile phone, socialising (this will come to an end if you have kids soon anyway), etc. With your salaries I'm at a loss as to why you had to buy a tv on credit and take a loan for a holiday. We jointly earn a very small amount more than you but have never had a loan for anything other than house or cars. Also you obviously have 2 decent cars if the loans are for €30k. Either you could trade down to release some equity or just know that you shouldn't have to change them for quite a few years.
You have no savings at the moment but that would be easily rectified by re-prioritising your spending. As I said you're on a good joint salary so you should be able to pay off the car loans a lot sooner and save for the taxi plate by rejigging your finances, without having to extend the mortgage. That way when the kids arrive you could be loan free and have the taxi plate without having the bigger mortgage to pay. Also, remortgaging to pay for cars means you're paying for those cars over way too many years, unless you pay the car portion off earlier, which is what you should be able to do at the moment anyway. Your mortgage rate is also quite high so I suggest that as soon as your fixed period is over you switch to a LTV<50% rate which should also reduce your repayments.
In your position I wouldn't consider remortgaging and would work with what I have instead. You've definitely got the potential to achieve what you want without having to borrow more. 
One more thing, at a rough estimate you should be netting near to €5k per month but have only listed outgoings of about €4k. Where's the other €1k going?


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## hopefully (11 Oct 2007)

Trish2006, 

Thanks very much for responding to this. 

Firstly the cars: the 30k Loan 22k is on cars and why its even at that is believe it or not both our cars were featured in the Sunday world by dodgey dealers so it ended up both cars were "clocked" so to get rid of them we lost a got bit of money and had to get new (second hand) ones, the other 8k on that loan is for my husbands Credit card, its just became crazy in payment protection, insurance and interest he was paying €110.00 a month so we decided to get a loan to get rid of it instead.
TBH i havent a clue were our money goes, we just seem to be hopeless with it lately, Your right though, we chatted about it last night and decided that we both didnt want to remortgage and if WORST came to the worst we would move to a less expensive house, hopefully that will never happen. After xmas we have decided to up the payments on the loan to over 3 years and hopefully clear them sooner, The loan I said was for the holiday isnt really a loan, let me explain we save €100 a week in a "club" and we get 5k at xmas but this year we owe 2.5k for the telly and the other 2.5k to my mother which we borrowed from her for our holiday. Sorry if im confusing you now!! Thanks for taking time out to reply to me and if you have any more help it would be gratefully received. 

Thanks


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## mell61 (12 Oct 2007)

To be honest I think you need to start tracking your expenses to get a clear idea of where that €1k is going.
I use money manager, a free downloadable programme from www.thezeal.com (recommended by another user here on AAM).     It will take you  a few hours to set up, listing all loans / assets / shares / etc... and you'll need to pull in as much paperwork as you can muster.   But in the end you will find it gives you a very clear idea of where your money goes (i ended up finding out I bought a lot more magazines than i realised!).
then start to note every penny that is spent, be it on coffee or loan payments.
I also think your mortgage rate seems high, as you would seem to benefit from the LTV offered by NIB.... they should offer you 4.5% or thereabouts on variable.    What are the penalties if you moved before fixed period is up?
Have you an option of downgrading one car?   it seems that for the price you've paid you're probably in 2-3 year old cars (i'm assuming), can you downgrade one of them to an older smaller engined one?
Do you have an option of renting out a room in your home, that could  bring in 300-400 a month (dependent of course on your location, daft is a good place to get an idea of the value of the room) under the rent a room scheme?    I know you are talking kids now, but use that 'nursery' to bring in dosh now, after all you'll have 7-8 month advance notice of any new 'tenants' ;-).


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