Bex

I went manual for exactly this reason and it's been better. Weekly CSV export from both banks, drop into the app, ten minutes. No re-auth, no silent gaps, and I read the transactions instead of trusting a chart built on top of them.

Important eligibility point that catches people: recasting is generally a conventional-loan feature. Government-backed loans — FHA, VA and USDA — are not eligible, so if yours is one of those the answer is no regardless of how nicely you ask. You said conventional, so you are in the right category, but it is worth confirming in writing which product you actually have rather than what you remember signing.

Twelve percent to an agent on a single unit is at the high end and it is worth understanding exactly what you are buying. Full management including out-of-hours calls and compliance certificates is a genuine service; tenant-find-plus-rent-collection dressed up as management is not. Ask for the itemised list of what they do, then price a let-only service and doing the rest yourself. That change alone moved me from marginal to comfortable.

Bought a mid-price knife and a cheap double-sided stone in January. The stone changed my cooking more than the knife did. Six months on I sharpen every couple of weeks and it takes four minutes at the sink.

Bike-mounted instead. I ran a helmet camera for a year and switched to a pair mounted on the bike, and for insurance purposes the bike footage is more useful because it's stable and always recording. It doesn't depend on me remembering to press a button before I set off.

Check the policy actually includes liability at all — some of the cheapest contents-only products don't, and those are the ones at £6.