Onwards to freedom!

Lexi-lu

Hello SSS
Sorry to hear that you and OH were both made redundant, so pleased you have now found new employment at this difficult time.
Your thread kept me motivated and inspired me during our journey to MFW and I really appreciate this post from you recognizing the positives as I am also being made redundant soon. I have been working from home doing many unpaid additional hours to cover for the rest of my department that were furloughed since March so I am planning to take a break for a while before looking for something else. Since paying off our mortgage I have been focusing more on pension & s&s isa, not as far on as you but thanks to you and others on MFW I am so much better prepared for this than I would have been. 
Hope you enjoy the new job and get to a position where you no longer have to trade your time for money in the future
LL

Numbercruncher_mfw

Sorry to hear about your tough time SSS, good luck with your new job. As ever you are a source of inspiration, showing you are able to bounce back from tough times and see the positive  

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hello everyone ☺️ I've been absent for a while, lurking/reading, but not posting. Not really been a very exciting time financially (or otherwise) so not really had much to say... Still, it's time to check in, even if I have little to report... No news can be good news after all!

First off, thanks all for posting ☺️

South_coast, you are right, it feels good having got into a stable position and being able to roll with the punches! ☺️ How goes the job hunt?

crv1963, thanks! How is life these days? Any indication that you're going to be able to really retire anytime soon? I'm guessing a potential vaccine could be key for getting your plans back on track?

Sorry to hear about your upcoming redundancy Lexi-lu, so unfair that you've been going the extra mile to help a struggling department and that's the thanks you get! I imagine it'll be an all too common situation 🙁 I hope it all works out for you. I enjoyed my spring-summer break, even if it was a forced one, and am actually happier in my new job than the old one, so it can be a blessing in disguise ☺️

Numbercruncher_mfw, a source of inspiration, stop it, you're making me blush 😂

I'm happy to say things are bobbing along quite well these days. We've settled into our new circumstances, and are heading in the right direction, albeit at a much slower pace than when we were a dual income household. My short term target for this year was to max out my PB holdings, and I'm on course to achieve that. The plan for the first half of next year is to save up enough to repay my stooze card balance without having to withdraw from PBs or touch the S&S. Then, there should hopefully be enough spare cash in the second half of next year to restart the S&S monthly investment.

Both children will be in school by next autumn. If the vaccine pans out, the economy picks up, and life returns to something approximating normality, there's a chance we'll be back up to two incomes around then, and the pace will pick up again.

As things stand, we're grateful just not to be going backwards anymore! 😃

Good health and rock solid finances to you all! 🍻

South_coast

SuperSecretSquirrel said:

South_coast, you are right, it feels good having got into a stable position and being able to roll with the punches! ☺️ How goes the job hunt?

Good thanks, I started a new job a couple of weeks ago. The pay is a scary amount less than my old job, but it's enough and that's what matters right now!

Great to hear your plans for next year 😀

edinburgher

Haud the bus! We're not allowed to be self-indulgent in our own virtual spaces?

Your positivity does you credit SSS - you have taken two black swans and made lemonade out of them. While you may not see it now, your kids will be learning lessons in resilience from their mum and dad. I have a colleague who is very much like you in some ways, his family have coped on one wage for 6-7 years and they're thriving.

SuperSecretSquirrel

South_coast, wow, you don't mess about! Congrats on the new job! Nail on head there I think - my gross salary is down by 15%, but I'm happy with what I'm paid in return for what is expected of me, and it's plenty for us for now so why worry. Given the option of sticking where I am or going back to where I was, I'd take the pay cut any day of the week! 😀

Hi Ed, good to see you ☺️ At the time I posted that, the death rate was sky high, hospitals were struggling, and my little self-interested worries seemed almost absurd. The outlook seems totally different now, thankfully ☺️ I take your point though, "this is my (online) house" and if I want to whine about a stubbed toe while others are having their legs broken, so be it!

Thanks for everything you said. I agree that the children will no doubt be picking up some useful nuggets of wisdom during this time, but I also have a worry... I'll preface to say -this isn't a comment on how others choose to arrange their family lives and finances, I know it can be an absolute minefield, and each family tries to do what they think is best as circumstances allow...

OH has always been fiercely independent. She has made her own way in the world, earning her own money, paying her own way. There was a time she baulked at the mere suggestion of being a SAHM while we lived off the one wage, and the thought of being given "spending money" to spend as she pleased - forget about it! Sure I paid in a bit more as I earned more, but that's just fair, and was a situation that evolved naturally, it was never an expectation. I was proud of her hard headedness as I knew it wasn't just a matter of her own pride, rather it also served as an excellent example to our children - it's not a man's job to just bring home the bacon, and it's not a woman's job to raise the children and keep house. It was a partnership with us both pulling our weight as much as possible across all aspects of family life, and it was outwardly obvious.

Now, circumstances have forced us down the road of a single earner (although for now the idea of an "allowance" is still abhorrent to OH, so I pay for all home and regular expenses, but any clothes or personal treats etc still come from OHs personal savings, on her insistence). It's intended as a short term measure due to circumstances. Once both children are at school it will make sense to both work, especially if the virus has been tamed. I worry that the context and finer details will be missed by the children though, and they'll be conditioned into thinking the 1950s norm is still the norm.

When they're older we can explain exactly how it panned out and why, but in the meantime I worry that they're just seeing "Dad works, Mum does child and house stuff, that's how things are meant to be". I'm probably worrying about nothing, I still do plenty with the children (though admittedly far less housework - practicalities of being busy with paid work while OH isn't, by the end of the working day there's nothing left for me to do!), and OH has clung onto some independence (though that won't be immediately apparent to the children). I guess it's a temporary shift in dynamic that on the whole we are quite happy with, it's just the unintended messaging being picked up by sponge-like brains that's the worry.

Again I'm indulging myself, but hey, "this is my (online) house" 😀

turtlemoose

hey SSS, sorry to hear of the double redundancy - same boat here (well, just the one, but there is only one of me!). 
I can understand your worries ref role modelling to your children, but I think the very fact you are aware of it says a lot - and I'm quite sure that your attitude is very important in going towards balancing out the "traditional" setup that they see. Although it doesn't feel like it, I think our kids do listen to what we say as parents - so I think them hearing your views will help to counteract any presumptions about gender roles. 

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hey TM, long time no see! ☺️

So sorry to hear about your redundancy, but I'm sure you'll find that silver lining! I see from your diary that you have a part time job and are studying, you could well end up looking back on this as the setback that made you! 😀

I think you're right, those little sponge brains are pretty switched on, they know this isn't our ideal scenario (but at the same time we don't labour the point as we don't want them to worry that it's an unhappy situation either). Hopefully we can steer our way through the next year or so without doing too much harm!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Happy New Year! 2020 is over, and I think the majority of us are happy to see the back of it 😬 Here's to 2021 being a better one!

It was a mixed year for us. Plenty of bad, but quite a lot of good too. We had some of our best ever family times over the spring and summer, we remained healthy and well, we barely spent any money, and I moved to a more satisfying job. It certainly hasn't been all bad ☺️

I always have a traditional totting up of figures at the start of a new year. I compare the figures to previous years, then plan for the upcoming year. I had been dreading this exercise back in spring, but as it turns out this year's figures were a nice surprise... We're down to a single income now, we had near zero income for a large chunk of the year (the downside, if you can call it that, of having substantial savings, is you won't qualify for any state assistance - of course I'd rather be self sufficient than reliant, and it's a scenario we walked into with eyes wide open), and we failed to win big on PBs. We still ended on a positive though ☺️ Not made the kind of strides seen in previous years, but even a tiny step forward beats a loss, and this wasn't such a tiny step - it was really quite respectable. Our total net worth increased by 8.6% this year.

In fact, all category lines other than car and house value ticked upward in 2020. The house probably has appreciated in value, but I can't really estimate it effectively, so I just leave it at 125k. Net worth means less to me than progress towards FI, so the house value doesn't matter all that much. The cars lost 5%, as is expected of them. Pension up by 2.6% - mostly gains, not new money in - the writing was on the wall and pension contributions minimised well before the axe fell. S&S up 7.4%, and that's without a single penny of new money paid in this year. The big one, cash, up 81.8%. I had already started this shift to liquidity before the redundancies hit, but the experience did rattle me a little (probably unnecessarily so, but what can you do, we're emotional creatures when all is said and done!) so I turned it up a notch or two!

Since starting my new job I've spent quite a lot less and saved quite a lot more than I thought would be possible. This has been held in the form of cold hard (PB) cash. I now have the full 50k PB balance, around 7k in traditional savings (and current account floats), and about -8k on my one remaining stooze card. The return on savings accounts is so poor that PBs are an attractive proposition to both the dreamer and the statistician in me these days!

The plan for 2021 was going to be 100% cash savings until I was in a position to pay off the stooze with excess easy access cash, then once that's settled go 100% S&S (a 50k cash cushion is more than enough, even for a frightened little mouse 😂). I might tweak this a little now. There's a 15 month no fee transfer card available to me, I could make use of that, start drip feeding the S&S from this month, and still have enough free cash on hand to pay off the stooze before the 0% ends. We'll see.

The FI equation is a funny one...

A while back I started tracking separate figures as OH's intended life plan is to work part time from now til something near normal redundancy age (if not 67ish maybe 57ish), where mine is to save save save now and semi-retire aggressively early. With that in mind it seemed silly to track only the percentage progress to household FI. Assuming OH covers half the outgoings from ongoing income, the pot doesn't need to be so big before I can take a step back. In that scenario, I'm now 89% of the way to "selfishly FI" as I coined it.

Of course our current situation makes a total mockery of that kind of thinking. OH isn't earning, I'm covering nearly all outgoings. Back to thinking about needing enough in the pot to cover all household expenses x25... We're 49.1% of the way there. This is actually a great figure, and something I'm quite proud of achieving. I was looking forward to 50% being the point where I could leave my job and do something better with my life. That decision was taken from me, and the something better fell into my lap a little early. Things have ended up great, just not followed the path I had anticipated. Sums up life in general really for me 🙂

Then there's the fact that lockdown and a stint of unemployment have given us further insight into how low our expenses really can be. I've not been scientific about it, but I really do think we could live a basic one car no holidays minimal paid entertainment lifestyle for less than 1k a month. It's not what we'd hope for our future to look like (and as always I'm wary of how expensive the children could become later in life) but if this spring is anything to go by, it's still quite an agreeable lifestyle. Using that adjusted expense figure, we're 73.6% of the way there, or I'm already way past selfishly FI 😀

The reality of course sits somewhere in between. OH isn't working now, but will be soon enough. I won't slam on the brakes when I hit 100% selfishly FI, but I won't necessarily wait until we hit 100% team FI either. The closer it gets the more obvious it becomes that FIRE isn't a cold clinical milestone that you reach and then "Bam!" you're done. It feels more like a riverl that you can dip your toe in, wade a little, even dive deep underwater, then, if you like, return to shore, or just keep swimming, it's up to you and it's not all or nothing. All the while as we progress towards our aim we get to shape our lives. Part time work, volunteering, being able to afford a pay cut to do something more naturally rewarding, dabbling in side projects, it all comes with the territory, it doesn't start at 100% FI. I think we'll keep drifting towards FI, and our lives will just naturally morph to fit the new circumstances along the way. I doubt we'll really know when we've actually transitioned from FD to FI, it'll happen without us really noticing.

As we become more secure, I think less and less about the end goal, and finances in general. We've become reasonably content with our lives, and we're quite well shielded from shocks, so the subject doesn't really demand that much attention. That may well change if at some point we decide to move house, or another redundancy focuses the mind, but for now it's pretty much business as usual. As a result, I've decided to scale back my monthly accounts checkup to quarterly. Eventually I'd like to drop to an annual health check, but for now quarterly sounds good. I'll keep posting here, but not a lot, and this time my absence will be for a positive reason ☺️

Best of luck to you all in 2021, stay happy and healthy and wealthy!

SuperSecretSquirrel

I managed to avoid my net worth calculations for a whole three months... The sky didn't fall in! The seas didn't boil! All is well! Who knew!? 😀

In fact, quite the opposite of disaster - totally hands off for a quarter, then I take a peep, and things are going swimmingly ☺️

Stooze balance transferred, and new S&S ISA setup. £500pm now being transferred to a cash savings account (0.4% 🙁) and another £500pm being sent to the S&S ISA (VLS80). Net household income is very close to a round £2000pm, so at the moment we're spending £1000pm or thereabouts. That's roughly half on household bills (council tax, gas, electric, water, phone, internet, tv, home and life insurance, etc) and the other half on food, clothes, car costs, gifting, and fun. The monthly spends would be higher if there were more options available to spend money on fun activities, but the covid restrictions are keeping a lid on that for now!

Pre-2020 calculations saw 18k as a comfortable "normal" annual budget. We carried out a year long spending diary experiment which amounted to around 15k if I remember rightly (edit: it was approximately 17k), then added a bit extra on top to cover lumpy extras (car replacements, home maintenance). Helping the children out is another matter entirely, a potential bottomless pit. I think I'd like a ring fenced amount for university/deposit contribution, and then no doubt extra would come from whatever we could afford dependent on circumstances.

So we have a minimum target of 12kpa, a more realistic target of 18kpa plus a vague five figure slush fund, and no maximum target - overshooting isn't such a terrible prospect, especially if paid work is satisfying.

As I've mentioned before, OH isn't interested in FIRE. She's happy to enjoy some time off now, then work part time (20hrs/wk or so) until a normal retirement age (maybe closer to 57 than 67). So if we assume OH covers half the 12k lean budget from ongoing income, I am already selfishly FI and then some. If OH has a massive rethink and decides to never work another day in her life (extremely unlikely!), we're 77% of the way to a lean team FI figure.

As for the more comfortable 18kpa figure (the slush fund is being ignored for now) I am absolutely elated to be 94% of the (selfish) way there. I am also thrilled to see we have crossed a major milestone and are now sat at 51% of the comfortable team FI figure 😀 50% team FI had long been my trigger point for leaving my old job and seeking something a little more satisfying with potentially fewer working hours per week. Well, thanks to a redundancy focusing the mind last year, mission already accomplished - check and check 😎

We're happy as things stand, so we can just bob along on autopilot for a while, saving half our income and living off the other half. Once OH gets a job in the next few months, our income will go up, and outgoings will probably go up a little, but overall I expect the savings rate to increase. I like to think that by the time I start to get itchy career feet again I'll be past the 18kpa selfishly FI figure and well on my way to building up the slush fund reserve.

Looking further into the future - I like working 4 days a week, maybe 3 days would be better, but that might be a tough sell to an employer. Also, depending on the work I might actually prefer to "get stuck in" and three days a week might not work all that well for me personally. I'm thinking that I might actually prefer working 4, or maybe even *gasp* 5 days a week in the autumn/winter, and maybe taking a solid two or three months off unpaid in the summer. If the work is rewarding, and the money isn't really all that important, it's an option. This could be something my current employer would be open to. Of course, if I were to go it alone, it would definitely be an option. There's also sectors where this is the default (e.g. teaching). Something for me to mull over ☺️

I've come to realise that neither OH or I are particularly bothered about the RE of FIRE. I'd like to have the option of not working, I'd like to have the security of being theoretically self sufficient, but I'd still want to do something interesting with my time... If a business wants to pay me to keep my mind occupied for a few hours a week, who am I to argue 😂 If I stop enjoying it, or it becomes too restrictive, I can walk away and do something else. That kind of empowerment is enough to keep me happy ☺️ I can imagine quite a few more "one more years" in my future... If life is good, why not? 😀 It'll just mean slightly more luxurious holidays and gifts in the future, no real hardship 😎

I think the main difference between me and OH is I want all the basics covered before I take a big step back, whereas she is happy to take it easier earlier and assume there will be enough monthly income dripping in to keep us comfortably ticking over. We're not miles apart in terms of mindset really.