While budgets are the flavour of the month, ours is shocking at the moment.
One basic problem - our larger CBA loan is interest-only and paid monthly. And by 'monthly', I mean 'somewhere around the 15th of each month, unless there are weekends or public holidays or we just feel like taking it out early or late'.
Compounded by the CBA mastercard they gave us massively delaying transactions, so we get our bank balance two days before the loan payment is due (which may not be the day it comes out), work out what extra is needed based on whatever it says we need (which isn't always accurate depending on how many days after the 15th they bother to take the loan payment out), transfer enough to cover the difference, and during that 2 days it takes the transfer to go across, the petrol we bought 10 days ago on the mastercard and forgot about comes out and the account goes overdrawn, and this invariably happens several days before a scheduled incoming payment to that account. And we've managed to screw this up several months in a row. All the bills come out of my personal account automatically and I have no issues, the problem CBA account just has rent coming into it fortnightly and my partner occasionally uses it for petrol, preening and food if it looks like the balance is high enough, and we manually top it up to make the loan payments.
We're not ahead on any bills at the moment thanks to being foolish enough to pay a full set of subdivision fees cash, a builder's deposit cash and some other fairly large renovation bills cash about 2ish months ago - round about when I stopped working and went onto the pittance that is Newstart and our income has taken a temporary nosedive - so we have no buffer at all. The only easy solution I can think of in the short term is to change this freakin loan from monthly to fortnightly payments slightly larger than the minimum so we can at least predict when and how much of this money is going to come out and set up an AUTOMATIC transfer, but the bank is absolutely adamant there is no conceivable way we can pay fortnightly. That, or we need to completely stop using the nice fee-free CBA mastercard and go back to using our own high-fee ordinary bank accounts that give us barely 4 transactions a month before charging us a fortune - but that don't delay transactions by stupid lengths of time.
Are they serious that we simply cannot manually put down, say, 55% of our average monthly payments as a fortnightly payment? My previous mortgage I just transferred direct from my own account straight into the loan every fortnight, but that was the ANZ.
There's no point refinancing at the moment to get a buffer despite having easily $200k of equity lying around and actually really needing to get some money out so we stop paying for deposits and other large expenses with cash (we need 60m of fence at the moment and we also need some fairly hefty progress payments to the builder soon), because we STILL don't have a title from the LTO.
One basic problem - our larger CBA loan is interest-only and paid monthly. And by 'monthly', I mean 'somewhere around the 15th of each month, unless there are weekends or public holidays or we just feel like taking it out early or late'.
Compounded by the CBA mastercard they gave us massively delaying transactions, so we get our bank balance two days before the loan payment is due (which may not be the day it comes out), work out what extra is needed based on whatever it says we need (which isn't always accurate depending on how many days after the 15th they bother to take the loan payment out), transfer enough to cover the difference, and during that 2 days it takes the transfer to go across, the petrol we bought 10 days ago on the mastercard and forgot about comes out and the account goes overdrawn, and this invariably happens several days before a scheduled incoming payment to that account. And we've managed to screw this up several months in a row. All the bills come out of my personal account automatically and I have no issues, the problem CBA account just has rent coming into it fortnightly and my partner occasionally uses it for petrol, preening and food if it looks like the balance is high enough, and we manually top it up to make the loan payments.
We're not ahead on any bills at the moment thanks to being foolish enough to pay a full set of subdivision fees cash, a builder's deposit cash and some other fairly large renovation bills cash about 2ish months ago - round about when I stopped working and went onto the pittance that is Newstart and our income has taken a temporary nosedive - so we have no buffer at all. The only easy solution I can think of in the short term is to change this freakin loan from monthly to fortnightly payments slightly larger than the minimum so we can at least predict when and how much of this money is going to come out and set up an AUTOMATIC transfer, but the bank is absolutely adamant there is no conceivable way we can pay fortnightly. That, or we need to completely stop using the nice fee-free CBA mastercard and go back to using our own high-fee ordinary bank accounts that give us barely 4 transactions a month before charging us a fortune - but that don't delay transactions by stupid lengths of time.
Are they serious that we simply cannot manually put down, say, 55% of our average monthly payments as a fortnightly payment? My previous mortgage I just transferred direct from my own account straight into the loan every fortnight, but that was the ANZ.
There's no point refinancing at the moment to get a buffer despite having easily $200k of equity lying around and actually really needing to get some money out so we stop paying for deposits and other large expenses with cash (we need 60m of fence at the moment and we also need some fairly hefty progress payments to the builder soon), because we STILL don't have a title from the LTO.