Keeping up appearances.......

Seasidegal58

Great to see you posting again Happy and I do hope you and your family had a very happy Christmas.

I bet the house is looking great now - please keep posting and keep us updated with the calculations!

Many happy returns on the diary anniversary!

SSG x

Seasidegal58

......and here’s to a very happy New Year and prosperous 2018 to you all!

Honey_Bear

I think today might be your birthday, Happy, and if it is - Happy Birthday! I hope you have a lovely one, and many more to come.

joeyjimbles

Ooh another happy birthday from me, if it is today, and happy new year to boot (what does that mean?).
Lovely to hear that Happyland is habitable and more. Looking forward to hearing your updates.

Seasidegal58

....and from me too!

HappyNow

Wowza, excellent remembering there Honey. Today (OK, yesterday) is (was) indeed my birthday! Thanks to you, SSG and Joey for the good wishes. I celebrated my 59th by painting the new bedroom all day and watching carp on TV all night - Big Brother season is here again .

Joey - I've just spent ten minutes researching the phrase 'to boot'. What a good aid to the sleepless, thanks! Google's best/most likely suggestion is that it comes from an Old English word 'bote', meaning 'in addition'. Or else it's German. Or something else. Definitely nothing to do with footwear though. Anyway, Happy New Year!

Honey - so lovely to hear that DC is still thriving and that Kelpie is joining Puppy Club. Happy Dog went to training classes as a youngster - she enjoyed the homework and has an impressive catalogue of tricks, but she's quite 'barky' so I found it all a bit stressful. Donkey Dog only recognises a few commands ('sit', 'come here', 'go away', 'where's your ball?' and 'time to feed the dogs') but as he's a naturally good boy it doesn't really matter.

I need to write a long, whiney financial update, but it's half past three and bed calls, so I'll save that one for tomorrow.

Seasidegal58

Glad Donkey Dog is still going strong. Do you still have Happy Horse?

Look forward as always to your financial updates. Your diary was one of those that pushed me to writing my original diary as you were trying to keep your debt busting a secret like me!

jvr

Hi Happy and everyone,


Just been catching up on diaries and fab to hear all your news x

HappyNow

Well that was quite an absence!

I've been thinking about my diary a lot recently and the reasons why I stopped updating it. There are a few:

1) I completely fell off the debt-busting wagon - actually not so much fell off it, more took a massive running jump from the top of it, landing a very good distance away.

2) Embarrassment re 1 above. Over the years, many people in quite dire financial straits have said this diary helped them realise they can turn things round. My circumstances are now so different to the early days that I don't really belong on the DFW board. Except I've still got the debt of course!

3) My priorities have changed because the debt is weirdly no longer a real biggie to me - we still have debt, but we actually could pay it off immediately if push came to shove using money in a pension. It makes financial sense NOT to use the pension to pay it off.

4) A madly busy, stressful year in which Mr H and I were both working full-time, also doing the manual work on our house refurb, and project managing the entire thing. It took all our time and energy and there wasn't much time for anything else.

5) Heartbreak at my dad suddenly passing away completely unexpectedly. My mum has struggled to cope and has needed a lot of support.

Anyway, the upshot is that our debt is still there. We did inherit enough to pay it off but instead opted to invest the money into our refurb. We now live in a truly lovely old farmhouse where we're starting a wonderful semi-retired life!

The debt is manageable, cheap and affordable but I don't want it dragging on any longer. Sleeves rolled up again, signature updated, I'm off!

Honey_Bear

Flipping through my birthday book earlier this year I spied your name, Happy and wondered if I should send you birthday greetings, but decided it was possibly a little stalkerish having noted down the date in real life and so I didn't. Reading back this page of posts I now realise it was a biggie, too, so - happy belated birthday!

I'm so sorry to hear about your father. I seem to remember you had concerns about older family member but couldn't recall whether it was your or Mr Happy's parents. It's such a shock, losing someone who has always been there and it must be so sad for your mother. (((Hugs))) for all of you.

I'm glad your (both?) semi-retired and enjoying your lovely house. It sounds as though it was quite a gargantuan task but well worthwhile. Is it finished, or do you still have some rooms to do? It seems to me that if we take on anything old as our forever homes we're always going to be dealing with some aspect of maintenance at the very least, but if you love your house anything like as much as I love ours, you'll know it's absolutetly worth it.


You're right to leave the pension exactly as it is and not use it to debt-bust. I have four teensy ones that started paying out when I reached 60. While they won't on their own support me in the style to which I wish to become acccostomed, they're not to be sneezed at. It feels like free money, because I never had it in my spendthrift paws in the first place and it was all so long ago that the money was set aside. On reflection I can remember really, really struggling to even service my debts when I was younger and certainly couldn't have begun to repay them if told to, but I never stopped paying into my private pension when self-employed.

Now might be a judicous time to pay the debt off, actually, given the uncertainty of what's happening in the wider context. It looks as though things might get a little bumpy and interest rates may be used to steady things. If that's the case then what was affordable may become a bit more challenging. I hope not, particularly as I live in the most indebted city in the UK, apparently. I'll look forward to hearing about your progress. Good luck with it!