How I Manage My Money: University worker, on £2,700 a month, with 40-year mortgage

In our How I Manage My Money series we aim to find out how people in the UK are spending, saving and investing money to meet their costs and achieve their goals. This week we speak to Bryony Clarke, 27, who lives in Leicester, with her boyfriend, Charlie, 27, and their cat, Mylo. Bryony wants to retire in her 50s and has taken out a 40-year mortgage. She is not convinced the state pension will exist when she retires. Monthly budget My monthly income: I take home about £2,300 a month from my job as a student recruitment events officer at a university. I also make around £385 a month from content creator work, but this is variable. Charlie works as a financial advisor. Our monthly outgoings: We share most of the main expenses. Mortgage: £1,015; council tax: £185; groceries: £450; loan and sofa repayments: £296; electric: £65; water: £49; Sky broadband and TV: £60; home insurance: £22; Amazon Prime and Spotify subscriptions: £27. I pay for the following myself: Car insurance: £42; petrol: £60; life insurance: £8; mobile: £47; food and other items for Mylo: £40; money into various savings pots: £450; money into several sinking funds: £375. I set aside around £200 a month for eating out, days out and coffee, but this varies. I also set aside £50 a month to spend on household items. I add money to a workplace and private pension. I wouldn’t change growing up in a household without lots of money. Seeing my mum sometimes grapple with four jobs at a time taught me the value of hard work. I was the first person in my family to go to university, where I studied geography. The balance on my student loan is more than £74,000. I’m not worried about paying it off. I don’t think I ever will, given the amount of interest it’s accruing. I treat it more like a graduate tax than an actual loan, especially as anything owed by April 2051 will be wiped. I’m really glad I went to university. I worked throughout my studies and left with a few thousand pounds in savings, which I added to a Lifetime Isa. I now earn about £2,300 a month after deductions from my job organising recruitment events at a university. I help arrange events for prospective students and can be involved in anything from organising catering to hiring student ambassadors and setting up the event. My day-to-day work involves a lot of planning, spreadsheets and liaising with different teams. I’ve never been an impulse buyer and am always saving for something, whether it’s a house or a holiday. I’m happy to forgo immediate luxuries to enjoy the bigger wins. We purchased our three-bedroom 1960s semi-detached house in Leicester for £247,500 with a 10 per cent deposit in February 2024. We opted for a 40-year mortgage and are on a five-year fix with an interest rate of 4.6 per cent. When we applied for a mortgage, we were only offered a 35-year one or a 40-year one. We’re not planning on staying in our current house forever, but even if we do, when we remortgage we can reduce our term if we’d like to. I really hope we can as I don’t want to be paying my mortgage when I am well into my 60s. In the first couple of years of owning the house, the lower repayments meant we could put more money into doing the house up. Now we’ve done the house up, we plan to start overpaying on the mortgage as much as we can. I talk a lot about mortgages and money on my TikTok channel, @bryonycx. I have £3,000 in emergency cash savings, £600 in holiday savings and £750 in a joint cash savings account. I add about £450 a month to various savings pots and recently opened a stocks and shares ISA with Trading212. The stocks and shares ISA has £100 in it so far. I’m fortunate to have a Universities Superannuation Scheme pension via my work. This will give me a guaranteed annual income for life based on 1/75 of my salary each year, plus a cash lump sum. I add 6.1 per cent of my monthly pay to my work pension, while my employer contributes 14.5 per cent. I’ve also recently transferred all my other old work pensions into a private pension with Aviva, which I’m also adding £50 a month to. I’d love to retire early, so the plan is to be mortgage-free as soon as possible. Ideally, I’d like to retire when I am in my 50s. If there were two of us and we were mortgage-free, then I believe we could survive solely on the state pension in later life. If, however, we were still paying a mortgage or rent, then it would not be possible to live on the state pension alone. I’m not sure the state pension will even exist by the time I retire. I am 100 per cent motivated by money because of the freedom it unlocks. I like being able to treat myself and others without having to worry. I like being able to go on holiday and travel the world, go out for nice dinners and make memories with people. I’m very much a grafter and have an intrinsic inability to relax, so, in terms of my career, I just want to keep going and see what I can achieve in my lifetime. I’ll absolutely have a go at any challenge so I’m excited to see where my career could go in the next 10 to 20 years. Want to take part in How I Manage My Money? Email money@theipaper.com