I May Be Worth Less Than I Was Last Month

So this is the first month since I started properly recording my figures that I’m worse off than I was the month before. I might as well get used to this, as I don’t imagine market volatility is going to disappear any time soon. I’ve used a higher Zoopla based house value for the first time this month. I’m not quite sure how good I feel about that, but I guess just keep using my purchase price from two years ago isn’t much better. The higher house value figure has bumped up my total assets figure from the month before. For the net worth excluding the house equity, which is the one that really matters to me, I’m down. I need to learn to deal with that though, and see it as an opportunity to buy shares at a lower price. I’m working on that state of mind, but I wouldn’t say I’m quite there yet.

Debts

Mortgage £87,050.51

Assets

Cash £16,728.33

Money in sharesave £11,304

AVC’s £3,987.82

Shares £32,759.19

House £245,000

Total Assets £309,779.34

Net Worth including house equity

£309,779.34 – £87,050.51 = £222,728.83

Net Worth excluding house equity

£64,779.34 – £87,050.51 = -£22,271.17

So despite things not going in the right direction, I still have almost £65K in my Happy Path fund. I’m actually pretty happy with that. I’ve decided to start trying to appreciate what I’ve already achieved, rather than looking mournfully at my spreadsheets thinking about how long I’ve still got to go till I achieve my freedom. In terms of other people’s figures mine look pretty pitiful. But I’ve never really been one for comparing myself to other people. This is my journey that I’m on. It’s never going to look exactly (or even much at all) like other peoples.

I started late and with not all that much income coming in, so it was always going to be a bit of a struggle for me. When I think back to fourteen years ago when I was newly divorced and moving in to a new house with a two and a four year old, I think I’d be pretty happy with the point that I’ve now reached. I was working part time, only earning about £17K a year and had just taken out a £100K mortgage. I had childcare to pay for, and quite frankly I don’t know how I balanced the books and made it all work. I did though.

I’ve come a long way since then. I’m now working full time and bringing in a bigger salary. I’ve been able to buy a bigger house thanks to overpaying my last mortgage and maxing out my work sharesave schemes. Quite frankly there was never a lot of cash to splash around, and I just kept that same money philosophy when I got a better job. We have our Alton Towers trips away now and the odd meal out, but apart from that our spending hasn’t changed all that much.

At work I’m in the same office as the old department that I used to work in. When I start early in the morning it’s really quiet in there and I can hear the phone calls that I used to have to take. Short servicing calls that suck the life out of your soul. I moan about my job from time to time, but when I hear those colleagues taking those calls and having to deal with those mundane enquiries I count my blessings. I used to be counting down until it was time for my next break. Sometimes I would have to put a post it over the clock to stop me checking it every few minutes. Now don’t get me wrong, I needed that job and the hours that I was able to work to allow me to fit in with my childcare. But honestly it nearly finished me off. I could not go back to that. Luckily, unless something goes badly wrong, I won’t have to.

Now saying that, there are a few people in that department that really seem to love their job. They mostly seem to be slightly older people, probably in their sixties I would think. They seem to get a real kick out of talking to customers. They’ve all been there a long time, but they don’t seem to have got jaded at all. I sometimes try and figure out what their secret is. It’s funny how two people can do the exact same job but experience it completely differently. I guess that’s down to your attitude. I know when I come in to work feeling stressed and not wanting to be there then I have a totally different day to when I come in with my positive head on. It really is all about your mental attitude.

The people I’m thinking about who love their job seem to work part time, so maybe that’s the secret. I know one of them is a carer for his disabled wife, so it may be that work is a change for him and a chance to get out of the house. For the most part I get the impression that work is something they enjoy doing, rather than something they have to do. I might be wrong, but maybe they have FU money.

In my department we’ve had a couple of departures recently. They’re doing shift reviews at the moment to try and standardise our working hours. We’re open till 8.00pm – but quite a few of us are on fixed day time shifts. They’ve now said that everybody will have to do at least 1 week out of 8 with an 8.00 finish. I can live with that, so I’ve agreed to the change. Apparently not everyone felt so accommodating. Within about a week of news coming out about these changes then two people had put their notice in. One of them had managed to find another job to go to, but the other just quit with no back up plan. I know he has plenty of investments stashed away. He’s a pretty private guy, but from what I know about his past I’m pretty sure he’s financially independent or at the very least well on the way. It was great to see FIRE in action.

They’re recruiting for new staff as we’re expanding. We’re bursting at the seams already, so there really is nowhere for any new people to sit. We already hot desk, but they literally have no room for any more bodies. So they are offering home working. We would need to work from home 4 days out of 5. I initially thought this would be great, but on reflection I don’t think it would be good for me. I think I would miss the social interaction. I think I would get a lot more done, but I would miss the banter. I only have a 15 minute each way commute, so that’s not a big deal for me. All the benefits that people talk about for working from home don’t really seem to apply to my job. As I take inbound calls I need to be logged on and all the stats are monitored, so there’s no just popping to the shops to get milk. I’m struggling to think of any big benefits to me in the job that I do.

I’m not sure if I’m just being naïve, but I thought that there would be some expenses covered for home working. The business needs people to work from home as they would have to get another building if we didn’t take them up on this. Now I get that some people would be delighted to work from home, and if you have a long commute then you’re quids in, but at the same time it’s definitely a plus for the company too. So they’re going to provide a laptop, keyboard and mouse. They’ll also put a privacy screen in so that customers can’t tell that you’re at home when you’re doing a video interview with them. Apart from that though we’ve to cover everything else. So we just use our own broadband and pay for electricity and heating. We even have to provide our own desk and chair. Now I don’t imagine I’d be using that much extra electricity, but working at home in Scotland in the winter I would definitely need my heating on all day, and that’s going to get expensive. Is this normal? Or would companies normally compensate you for your increased expenses?

Anyway, either way I don’t think I’m going to put in for it. Especially as I don’t have a partner I think the social part of work is particularly important to me. Which is now making me worry about FIRE. If I don’t think I am going to be able to cope with the social isolation of working for home then how the hell am I going to cope with no work at all? I suppose I won’t be tethered to the house in the same way that I would be if I was working.

I think the key when I do finally pull the plug on working is to make sure I get out of the house enough. I have hermit like tendencies, and have to be dragged kicking and screaming out in to the real world sometimes. I enjoy it when I’m out, and I most definitely need the social interaction, but I don’t always have the inclination to go out and be social. At least I have my running clubs now, which give me a much needed social structure. I just have to hope I don’t get injured, as so much of my socialising revolves around running.

One of the managers was saying that she thought home working would suit me down the ground, and she also said that she thought I’d never retire as I would never want to stop working. My immediate thought was that she’d got me all wrong, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made from her perspective. I can’t be bothered with all the office politics and just want to get on with the job in hand. From that point of view home working would be perfect.

As far as never retiring is concerned, that’s definitely not right, but I know where she’s coming from. Although I want to stop working, I don’t want to sit about the house watching telly and painting my nails. I need to have a purpose to my life and feel that I’m achieving my goals. But those goals don’t need to be provided through the structure of work. I already set myself goals that have absolutely nothing to do with my working life, and that won’t change come FIRE. In fact it just means that I’ll have all the more time to work towards ever more stretching goals.

I’ve already started looking at Open University courses that look really interesting. I always fancied doing a modern languages degree, and FIRE would give me the time and mental energy to work on something like that. I’m already working on improving my Spanish skills, and think I might add German in to the mix at some point. I’m not sure languages are necessarily a natural fit for me, as I find them quite difficult, but I do enjoy the learning process and I enjoy the fact that they have such practical applications. That’s definitely something for me to think about.

So I think now is the time for me to start designing what I want my ideal post FIRE life to look like. My son was saying to me the other day that I shouldn’t wait for FIRE to do all the things that I want to with my life. “You might never reach FIRE mum”. He’s absolutely right. Tomorrow is never guaranteed, and finding what you’re passionate about now means that come FIRE time you’ve got those interests in place and the time to spend on them.

Update on May Goals

I’ve been somewhat dreading writing this post. I think it’s fair to say that yet again things haven’t gone quite according to plan. I’m sure there have been some successes this month, but I’m struggling to think of many of them just now. Sometimes though you have to adapt to what’s going on in your life. Inevitably life throws up some challenges, and things that you thought were going to be a priority for the month end up being relegated to not even getting a look in whilst other things absolutely have to move up the pecking order. May has definitely been a month like that for me.

This month it’s become apparent that things have gone slightly awry in family life. For reasons that I won’t go into it’s been much more important than usual that I spend time with the kids. It’s not that this isn’t usually important, but with two teenagers there’s a lot of shut doors and catching them when they’re in the mood for talking rather than just snarling at you. I’ve now allocated an hour a night with one of the kids where we go out for a walk, get some exercise and have a chance to touch base. It’s working well, but with a busy life already some things have had to give to allow time for this. Of course this now means that I’m feeling guilty (not usually something I believe in) for not spending this same sort of time with the other teenager. I really could do with a good few extra hours in the day.

On the plus side I’m remembering how much I love to walk. When I got back into my running a few years ago I pretty much stopped walking as I felt like I’d had my exercise already. I had forgotten how good walking is for letting you think about things and make plans. Running is great for clearing your mind, but quite frankly when I’m running I’m too busy thinking about how much my body hurts to do any life planning. I always thought that when I reached FIRE I’d spend much more time walking and exploring my local area. Apparently you don’t need to be retired before you do that. Who knew! I’m also finding that as walking is becoming a much more regular thing for me I am using the car a bit less, as I’m walking rather than taking the car on shorter journeys.

So anyway, enough of the excuses. Let’s get down to the serious business of letting you know how I’ve done against my May goals. Here’s a quick reminder of what they were.

Get my local park run time down to 25.50 which would be a PB. FAIL. I came fairly close to this one. I only did my local parkrun once this month, as for the other Saturday where I wasn’t working I was away so did a bit of parkrun tourism. So I managed to get down to 26.10 for my local parkrun, which I was really pleased with, but I didn’t quite have enough to give to get a PB. Not a bad effort though, and shows that I’m getting closer to that elusive PB.

Get my weight down to ten and a half stone, and keep it there till the end of the month. FAIL. Well theoretically I can’t actually say if this was a pass or a fail as I didn’t get on the scales the whole month. I think that probably tells you all you need to know about the rubbish I was/am eating. I’m so annoyed with myself, but quite frankly other things were more important this month. And food is always a comfort thing for me, so I’ve been indulging myself.

Start using my fruit and veg tracker again and have at least five fruit and veg portions a day for at least 20 days out of the month. FAIL. See above. Unless chocolate has suddenly become one of my five a day then there was no point in me using my fruit and veg tracker. This I think I can fix fairly easily. I have lots of good food habits along with my bad ones, so it shouldn’t take too much of a shift in focus to get back to eating five a day.

Get at least seven hours sleep a night during May. FAIL. Bit of a common theme here. I’ve been trying to carve a bit of the day out just for myself, and unfortunately the only time for that was late at night. I’m exhausted all the time, so I really need to fix this pronto.

Continue Matched Betting and make £200 profit by the end of May. PASS. Finally one that I’ve achieved. I’ve made back the money that I lost by messing up my first bet, I’ve covered two month’s worth of Oddsmonkey subscriptions and had a clear profit of £212.76. I got myself in to a nice little habit of coming home from work and going straight on the laptop for a bit of matched betting. The challenge is going to be keeping this going as I move on to the reload offers.

Read at least two books. PASS. I read two Laurie Lee books and a biography of his life.

So I could be generous and say that I had mixed results, but realistically it was pretty disastrous. Saying that, you have to be able to be flexible in life and react to changes in your life. I suppose I could say that as this is a FIRE blog then the one real money related goal I had was a pass. I’m really pleased with getting going with the Matched Betting, and just need to keep the momentum going on that.

I really need to start looking after myself a bit more. I’m not going to worry about my weight for a bit and instead focus on reintroducing some healthy habits back into my life. So sleep and healthy foods are what I’m going to try and bring back into my life. I’m not going to worry too much about the rubbish that I’m still eating at this stage. I can work on that later, but for now sleep and healthy food alongside the rubbish is the way forward.

I’m also getting back into Spanish after a very long break. I’m using Duolingo and am absolutely loving it. The competitive format really suits me, with points being awarded, league tables and challenges. So I want to keep working on this and progress through the different levels, so I’m going to incorporate this into one of my goals.

So for June I’m going to try and keep things simple.

Get 7 hours sleep a night for at least 15 nights. This should be realistic. I’ve made a good start to the month, so let’s hope I can keep this going.
Have 5 portions of fruit or veg a day for at least 15 days. I’ve started using my tracker again, so that is focussing my mind. I was being so good at this earlier in the year I don’t understand how it all went wrong, but this should be a really easy one for me to crack.
Do 15 days of Spanish on Duolingo. I’m on a 14 day streak since I started, so really I want to keep doing it every day, but I’m going to keep this easy and if I do more then that’s all to the good.
Get promoted to the gold league on Duolingo. The top 15 in each league get promoted at the end of every week. You basically just have to put the time in to get the points. This should be easy enough, but again it will depend on how much time I have available to dedicate to it.
Earn £100 on Matched Betting. This seems like a bit of a backward one as I earned £200 last month. But I’ve worked my way through a lot of the relatively lucrative introductory offers, so I’m on to the reload offers now. I’m not sure how time consuming it will be to make much from these, so I’m setting the bar fairly low in the hopes that I can surpass it.

I think that’s enough for June. I’m not putting any running ones in there this time. There’s three months till my next half marathon so I need to start upping the mileage a bit rather than worrying too much about fast times. My knees are a bit niggly too, so I’m going to try and concentrate on staying injury free. There’s lots of other things that I want to be working on, but I need to be realistic. There’s no point setting myself unrealistic goals and getting discouraged when I fail to achieve them. I’m going back to basics and then I’ll build from there.

The same goes for what I’m able to achieve in my time off. I was out walking and talking to one of the kids about the things I had on my To Do list for over the weekend. He asked me if I didn’t think I was maybe being a bit ambitious about the things that I could get done, and that it would actually discourage me from starting anything. He was absolutely right. Now the things on my To Do list all needed doing, but that didn’t mean that I had time to do them all. So I moved some things in my phone calendar to my next day off to stop myself feeling quite so overwhelmed. When I review my weekend I can see that I did get quite a lot done. So the things I completed were

Cleaned the bathrooms
Had two hour long walks
Messaged my friend to support her with man trouble
Volunteered at parkrun and had a great time cheering people on as a marshal
Did my money – checking transactions on my statement and making sure my budgets all balanced
Did some matched betting
Sorted out my paperwork – chucking out a whole load that wasn’t needed and filing what I had to keep
Cleared out my emails and moved them in to the relevant folders
Listened to two podcasts
Renewed my running club membership
Went on a 7 mile run with friends
Watched 2 episodes of Gogglebox (I gave this up a few months ago as I felt I could make better use of my time. Turns out the amount that it makes me laugh makes it a really valuable way to spend my time, so I’ve reintroduced it)
Renewed my working tax credits claim
Phoned my best friend
Cut the grass
Did the washing
Fixed my wirly gig so I could hang out my washing
Made a delicious lasagne
Did a few hours Spanish on Duolingo
Wrote a blog post

Some of the many things I didn’t get done

Phone my sister to find out about the date she was going on
Research activities for our summer road trip
Do as much matched betting as I’d hoped to
Go geocaching with the kids
Go swimming
Play a game with the kids
Watch Gentleman Jack (This will have to be watched on the iplayer as it’s far too good to miss)

So looking at my list it’s actually amazing how much I did get done, but I feel like I’ve been really unproductive. So maybe I need to stop beating myself up so much and give myself some credit for what I do achieve. I like to feel like I’m making progress towards achieving my ambitions, but this can lead to feeling that you can never just relax. Life shouldn’t always be about doing, but also about just being present and enjoying the moment. That’s definitely something for me to work on. Maybe I should set myself a goal around that!

Thrills And Spills

I’m writing this in a budget hotel 15 minutes away from Alton Towers. We’re here for our annual trip that has somehow turned in to a twice a year extravaganza. Well, when it’s the same price to go for two days as it is for the whole season it would be rude not to take advantage. They’ve totally suckered us in with their marketing ploy, but I’m glad to make use of it, even if it does mean a couple of long trips down south. Once your kids get to be teenagers you have to make the most of things that they still want to do with you, and Alton Towers still comes in to that category thank goodness.

Saying that, this trip is most definitely done with a budget in mind. No rip off Alton Towers hotel for us. Let’s be honest, it’s all about the rollercoasters, so by the end of the day we’re totally exhausted and don’t really care where we rest our heads. So every year we book a family room in the same cheap hotel, visit the nearby Aldi to stock up on snacks and have a grand old time together. There’s no avoiding the petrol costs – Scotland to Derbyshire is not the shortest trip in the world. On the way down we fit in a stopover with my folks to break the journey and have a bit of a catch up, so at least the petrol cost is split between seeing the folks and a family trip away. And on the way home we always stop at Tebay – “the service station with the ducks”. This not only gives me as the only driver a break, but gives us a chance to stock up on Kendal mint cake. Another vital family tradition.

I’ve never been the bravest when it comes to height and speed, so a theme park isn’t a natural fit for me. I’ve always managed the majority of the rollercoasters, although partly so the kids didn’t have to go on unaccompanied. I’m finding though that with each trip I’m going on less and less. I just don’t seem to have the same wish to spend the day feeling terrified. I’m not sure if it’s an age thing, but I’m definitely turning into a bit of a baby. Luckily the kids are happy to go on the bigger rides without me, and they’ll keep me company on the tamer coasters.

I sometimes worry that this is a bit of a theme with me getting more cautious about things the older I get. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but I would have thought at not quite 50 I should still be in the bold phase of my life. For that matter I’d like to always be courageous with my choices, but I am a bit of a worrier, and I definitely have a tendency to overthink things. I’m sure when I was younger I worried less and was much more inclined to just go with the flow. When there was something I wanted I figured out how to make it happen and just went for it. Nowadays I think I’m much more likely to consider the negatives. Partly it’s to do with having more to lose I think.

When I was in my early twenties I wanted to move to Spain. I didn’t own a house, I had nobody dependant on me and I was free to do what I wanted. So I hatched a plan and got a job in Spain. Nowadays I don’t think I would be as likely to throw caution to the wind. I’d be thinking about what I would be giving up in terms of my benefits at work and what could go wrong. I was quite sensible and I lined up a job before I moved to Spain, but that ended up falling through at the last minute after I’d given notice on my UK job. So I moved to Spain anyway and found a job out there in a completely different part of Spain to where I’d planned. It was a bit nerve racking landing in Spain with no job or place to live, but it tuned out just great.

Now saying that, I’d been working for BT for two years at the time. I gave up a pension with them and the chance to work my way up a large company. I ended up working for them when I came back from Spain a year later, but by that stage they were no longer recruiting for permanent contracts. So I ended up working through an agency. So I no longer got a pension, share save options, sick pay etc etc. So my work situation sucked for a while. But would I have given up my year in Spain? Not in a million years.

Of course nowadays I have two kids who rely on me to bring home the bacon. The whole single parent thing really makes you conscious that the choices you make can have a major impact on the people who depend on you. Maybe that’s a bit of an excuse though, as honestly I’ve got us in a great position as far as the finances are concerned. I might still have a fair way to go towards FIRE, but I know I could weather a good few financial storms if I needed to.

So maybe what I need to start doing is being a bit braver in the small things in life and then expand that out so that I am being much more courageous when it comes to the bigger picture. I only learned to drive when I was 30 and I wouldn’t say I was a particularly confident driver. I quite like pootling about when I know where I’m going and I have the radio blasting out some good music. Long journeys for a long time filled me with dread. I love being a passenger, but doing the driving was something that I was really scared about. The first time we drove to Alton Towers I was a nervous wreck. When I drove down the other day I really enjoyed the journey. I was chatting away to the kids and the journey flew by. So I guess doing the journey quite a few times over the last few years has got me a bit more comfortable with motorway driving and made me realise that I can follow instructions from my phone about which way to go, and if we do get a wee bit lost and take the slightly scenic route it’s really not the end of the world.

So I figure that I need to do some things that take me out of my comfort zone, and that way I’ll worry less and get used to having new experiences. The thing is that I always feel amazing when I’ve done new things, like I could take on the world. So I need to work on expanding my comfort zone and making myself do things that scare me. Last year was great for that sort of thing for me, with lots going on at work that were outside my usual skill set. I felt really alive and engaged, and when things went back to its normal monotony it was quite difficult to deal with.

At the moment though I seem to be finding change really difficult. I am resisting even the smallest change, and I’m not really sure why. So I think I need to buck up my ideas a bit, realise that not only is change inevitable, but that it’s often a good thing that should be welcomed. I can’t expect or even want things to carry on in the same old way forever. Change just for change’s sake is not great, and I think this is sometimes why I’m so resistant, particularly in a work context. I think maybe though it’s time to shake things up a bit and to see what happens when I stretch myself and look to make some changes.

So I’ll have a bit of a think about how I can challenge myself. After all we only get one shot at this life. I can’t ask for my money back because I didn’t make the most of things. It’s scary to think about how fast time has gone. It really doesn’t seem like five minutes since I was graduating from university, but that was more than a quarter of a century ago. If I’m not careful then life will have passed me by and I’ll be left with regrets about the things that I haven’t done with my life. I don’t think that’s to do with spending money necessarily. Sometimes you need to splash a bit of cash to enjoy experiences that you can have fun looking back on when you’re in the nursing home.

Mostly though it’s about spending your time doing things that you love with the most important people in your life. But it’s also sometimes about doing things that seem difficult at the time. Having an easy life and avoiding discomfort can seem like a great way to organise your life, but in the long run it can be a bit dull and lead to dissatisfaction. Being out of your comfort zone is how you grow, and at the end of the day that’s really what life is all about.