I need a crystal ball

So anyway I started this blog mainly because I have absolutely no idea how well we will ride out this storm that is the credit crunch. Hopefully we will remortgage easily enough and will both keep our jobs. Anything else after our health, home and job is kind of secondary. I'm not bothered about the car or the material things but I must admit I'm worried about the job.

I thought I'd use this post to explain a little more about our situation and the troubles we might experience along the way.

May 2007 we moved house (while house prices were practically at the highest they'd been) and took a high loan-to-value mortgage with Northern Rock - you know.....the ones who went bust. Now this wasn't a completely foolish decision because Northern Rock were highly recommended and nobody had a crystal ball to see that they'd go bust. the other reason is that although it was a high LTV mortgage (and therefore NR was one of only 2 banks who would lend to us) I was in my final year of university with excellent job prospects. So you could say it was a calculated risk. And then of course house prices started dropping which I wouldn't be to bothered about normally (unless I was selling of course) but we got a 2 years fixed rate on the mortgage and this needs renewing/changing next spring. I am guessing that by then we will be in negative equity so I'm concerned what will happen. We could possibly scrape together maybe £3-5K to fill a shortfall but then a fixed deal on top of that would be maybe anouther £1-2K as well. If we fail to remortgage then we end up staying with Northern Rock's standard variable rate - which we know will be hyper-inflated as they've already told us this.

When I left university I left with a £30K student loan (not bad for 5 years out of work) and £15K other credit (car etc). I've managed to shave nearly £10K off that in 18 months. I was hoping to be debt free (not counting the student loan) in the next 12 months but now A has lost his overtime and the mortgage will be going up ALOT in the spring when we remortgage.

And then of course we are worried about the jobs. I guess you could say we have all our eggs in one basket working for the same company. That's a little worrying to say the least, especially as I'm new to the company. The last time the company cut jobs they operated a last-in-first-out scheme. Yesterday I found out our company is having a recruitment freeze - the next step will be voluntary redundancies. The worrying thing is that with only 1 year experience I will find it hard to get another job. Now under normal circumstances we could manage for maybe a year or so with me out of work - we know this because we survived 5 years on A's salary while I was at university full time. The difference now though is that in order to move nearer to work we had to double the mortgage because its so expensive round here.

So God only who knows what will happen. But whatever he does I hope that we can ride the storm.

About me

I usually start off a blog with a quick "about me" post and this one is no different. So who am I? I'm a 33 year old married woman living in Yorkshire (UK). We are childfree and both work full time as engineers. My husband (A) graduated from university over 10 years ago and has been working for the same US-owned global company for about 10 years. I had a career change in 2002 and just graduated from university in 2007. I'm now working for the same company that my husband works for.