Mortgage Free by the time I'm 50.

That's my dream, yes.

It's also a realistic dream too, and I'm going for it.

I decided that 2011 would be a year I would start something new, and this year, and for the very first time in my life I've made an overpayment on my mortgage - oh Happy New Year blog readers by the way!

Yes, I spent most of December thinking what could I do new for 2011, and apart from continue blogging and enjoying that, I was determined to come up with something I could do - now there is the old weight loss attempt, which I'll try again, but will probably fail miserably on again, so it needed to be something relatively easy-ish to do, but something that would do some good.

Financially, let's face it, we'r all screwed at the moment aren't we?

Everything goes up apart from it seems, your wage. So you have to be creative, which is why my friends I'm looking for everyone to donate a pound to my mortgage.

No, not really, but if you really want to you can. That comment came from a thing I stumbled across on the internet the other day when I wondered if anyone had ever asked for people to pay their own mortgage for them, and to my surprise there was - here - bizarre or what.

Another example is listed here , so there are actually people out there who have been brace enough to go begging for money to help pay off their mortgage!

What I am doing along with a small weekly payment that will knock 2 years off my mortgage, and any money raised from my blogs (through the usual channels ie adverts etc) will go onto my mortgage as overpayments too, so really the blogging could help me achieve my aim of being mortgage free by the time I'm 50.

So, getting back to the original point of me doing something this year, I've set up my standing order on the mortgage to overpay by £1000 this year, and see where we go from there. I'm sure there are lots of others who would like to do and actually do this kind of thing each month, so if you are one of those people who want to clear their mortgage quicker than expected, come and visit my new blog called Paying Off The Mortgage and we can all monitor our progress together, feel free to comment on there with how much you are intending to clear it by, and how you're doing throughout the year, and hopefully by the end of the year we'll have stuck to our plans.

See you over there!

The Most Depressing Day of the Year!

Happy New Year everybody!

We have finally arrived in 2010, and a new decade, it's all very exciting - for some!

Having enjoyed the festive period with several alcoholic beverages, well more than several actually, the reality has dawned on most us all again today, as we all end up trudging back to work, with faces longer than Tiger Woods' female contacts list!

So why is it so depressing?

I guess it's just the culmination of the last couple of days as we waved farewell to Christmas for yet another year, and then once we pass midnight on New Year's Eve, that's pretty much it, with New Year's Day either spent on the couch nursing a hangover, or resigning yourself to take the decorations down for another year.

Added to this the fact that you had to spend the entire weekend thinking about your return to work, not because you wanted to think about it, but because your subconscious wouldn't let you forget about it!

So, we all got up this morning no doubt full of the joys of that first working day of the new year, if you happen to be an office worker of course, plenty of other job roles would have returned to normality on Saturday, especially in the shops for the masses of sales that drag out the worst of people's rudeness as they converge on the shops - not for me I'm afraid, and thankfully not for my wife either!

Mind you, the fact that we don't have any money at the start of this year has a lot to do with it I have to admit, in fact that's another reason why depression sets in, you just know that it's such a long time til next payday if you happen to be paid monthly, having to endure an extra week following your Christmas pay packet which arrived a week earlier in 2009.

It's all very depressing isn't it?

Now, to avoid anyone heading for the tablets to bring you back up again, let's finish on a high, and think that as bad as today is, there's always tomorrow, and that will never be as bad as today!

I think that's helped, or has it???

Ah well, roll on January 5th!