Onwards to freedom!

SuperSecretSquirrel

Another month flown by. It was a good one 😁

I enjoyed 17 consecutive days off work, split fairly evenly between staycationing and practical jobs. Some days were no spend - annual membership visits, hikes, picnics, playing on the beach, decluttering, tip runs etc. Others weren't - non-membership family friendly visitor attractions, craft shop trips, junk food lunches, ice creams, small building material purchases, etc. Some days were very relaxing - reading books in the sun, kicking a ball around a field, relaxing by a stream, etc. Others not so much - hard manual labour, hiking double digit miles, paintballing with friends, etc. A perfect balance as far as I'm concerned, recharging batteries, having fun, getting things done, and just enjoying ourselves in general 😎

Decluttering is pretty much all done now. A few of the bigger outside jobs have been ticked off the list, and a few of the smaller indoor jobs have also been ticked off the list. Plenty more jobs left to be done! I'm happy to do little bits and bobs as and when time and patience allows, if we get into the habit of slow progress it'll all get done eventually 🙂

On to the numbers…

At the end of April I had £36.34 left of the "monthly boring stuff" allowance, had overspent the "monthly fun stuff" allowance by £19.86, and during the month £169.25 was spent from the "annual lumpy spends" sinking fund.

So far this year that's a total of £238.14 "boring stuff" underspend, £100.15 "fun stuff" underspend, and £506.29 "lumpy spends" taken from the sinking fund (£800 paid in).

No word on this month's PBs yet, and I won't be peeking at pensions or S&S until July, so that's all that there is to say for now 🙂

savingholmes

Sounds like a fabulous month with lots of fun and great exercise.

SuperSecretSquirrel

Hello diary! I've not updated in a while...

I've reviewed my last couple of years on here and made some notes, here's a recap:

My thoughts and feelings towards work: I started a new job in August 2020 after four months off. I enjoyed it, it didn't really feel quite so much like work, and I didn't feel the need to be able to stop as soon as possible. My gross salary was reduced by 15% from one job to the next (partly lower pay, partly reduced hours), but I was happier with the new job and terms. I liked working 4 days a week, but thought in the future I might prefer to work 5 days a week and take part of the year off. I was no longer in a rush to retire but I'd have liked the option to stop working if I stopped enjoying it, or it became too restrictive. I realised that short term contracts with long gaps between them would probably pay more than a regular low wage "pocket money job" in early retirement, and a move to the public sector and transferring in my DC pot could make a post fire "pocket money job" quite lucrative.

OH's thoughts and feelings towards work: OH wanted to keep working part time through until pension age (maybe closer to 57 than 67). The main difference between OH and I was that I wanted all the basics covered before I took a big step back, she was happy taking it easier earlier and assuming there would always be enough income dripping in to keep us comfortable. OH started a new job in August 2021 after over a year and a half as a SAHM. Very part time and low wage, but exactly what she was looking for in the short term. The social aspect was appreciated more than anything. OH's pension transfer was generous - 18k DC became 1.6kpa index linked DB. If calculating DB value as 25x the annual amount her pot leapt up from 18k-ish to 40k-ish overnight.

General outlook on life and finances: We had become more and more content with our lives, were reasonably well shielded from shocks, and didn't really think about finances all that much anymore. We had modest aims. Our comfortable lifestyle would be covered by 2xSP, before then we already had enough to cover 57-67 in pensions, and before then we had enough in S&S and PB to cover sometime in 40s-57. There comes a point where too much more "future money" isn't all that interesting, that's why I was happy spending more "fun money", having a large PB holding, and working just 4 days a week. We tended to have lots of free or cheap fun. Free NT days, annual passes to local attractions, playdates, and a lot of outdoor activities. We had some huge shocks March/April 2020, being mortgage free and having savings to fall back on really helped us deal with the financial ones. Shifting to a single income family made a mockery of the artificial individual FI numbers, we kept our separate accounts but at the end of the day it's all one big shared team effort.

Aims: Drop monthly accounts checkup to quarterly, the eventual aim was annually. Get the top three lines of our financial overview table (house, pensions, s&s) into six figures. Minimise the number of financial accounts held. Declutter as much as possible and make some small home and garden improvements (downstairs was pretty much all done already). We were happy to do bits and bobs when time and patience and funds allowed. We needed to start celebrating our wins more, and stop jumping straight from one target to the next.

Budgeting: Separating boring/fun spends helped me spend more on treats. It felt a bit weird actively trying to spend more on fun stuff, but I'd be in danger of only spending on neccessities otherwise and not enjoying the journey as much. Repaid stooze to simplify cash flow and have a clearer view of what's available for frivolous spending each month. I didn't want to touch S&S/PBs/CCs/Loans for home and garden improvements, so intended on a little scrape of money here and there to make slow progress. We were paying about 20% each of our individual income into JA. I was sending a little over 50% of my income to S&S, the rest went on current spends (survival+treats) and short term savings (mundane+fun). OH's budgeting/saving was not my concern once the JA was funded.. Electricity was at the cap in April, based on the previous 12 months a £40pm or so increase. I intended to run some calculations once the revised lpg figures were on hand. We electrically heated single rooms last winter, I thought it might make sense to switch to central heating throughout in the coming winter.

SuperSecretSquirrel

And now for a bit of an update...

Career and pay progression has been great in my new job. I'm working four fewer hours per week than I was in the old job, but my annual gross is now a little higher than it was in the old job. So that's more pay in return for less hours worked. The work itself is much more satisfying, and my employer is vastly more flexible. I can't believe my luck if I'm honest! I know inflation needs to be considered, but a 14% increase in hourly rate over my previous less enjoyable role leaves me feeling happy and appreciated.

OH is also progressing well. Her original intention was to work 20 hours a week at minimum wage for a couple of years, striking a happy work life balance. Her efforts at work have been recognised and her employer has managed to tie her into a 37 hour contract with a 5% per hour pay bump. The work life balance is still good, OH enjoys the social aspect of work, and with the children both at school full time there's still plenty of family time in the evenings and weekends.

Just as well that we are happy in our work, and I’m not obsessive about FIRE these days… Rocketing and embedded inflation hurts a FIRE wannabe. There is no way we can earn interest that in any way competes with 10%+ official inflation figures. My investments have all been loss making recently, so the stock market is no panacea. I know we are fortunate, and we are grateful that the rising cost of living isn’t causing us immediate harm. We see the grocery bills creeping up, and the utility bills leaping up, but we do have plenty of slack available to deal with that, I know it’s not so easy for others. I don’t track all our spends closely, so I can’t really say what impact inflation is having on our true household spend, but it’s fair to say that what was a reasonable estimate of comfortable household annual spend would probably no longer cut the mustard. Not really knowing what we’ll need makes a mockery of working out our percentage progress towards FI (which was already a bit of guesswork involving a 25x multiplier). I’ve decided to stop tracking the progress to FI metrics, at least until things settle down, and just monitor pound and pence values for now.

I’ve dropped the monthly accounts checkup to quarterly, and since we’re pretty much driftwood at the mercy of the thundering ocean that is the financial markets I don’t see much point posting the values here anymore. We can’t really make a noticable difference to our situation from one month (or quarter) to the next. I’ll probably still post a big New Year update in January just so I have some kind of history on here. Another difficulty I have is that OH’s pension is pretty opaque, rare sporadic updates, and with it being a DB it doesn’t really fit in neatly with the rest of our finances. Including a snapshot valuation once a year probably makes sense as far as that’s concerned. Account streamlining is still going well, and the small home improvements are coming along slowly but surely.

Budgeting is still super simple. At the start of each month I send nearly half my net pay to S&S (FIRE), a sixth to short term savings (mundane+fun lumpy annual spends), a seventh to the joint account (household bills), which leaves just over a fifth in my current account (survival+treats). I expect to reduce the short term savings and increase current/joint account funding soon due to inflation, I just needed somewhere to keep excess monthly funds in the short term so bumped the short term savings standing order up a little temporarily. OH sends about an eighth of her salary to the joint account and I keep my nose out of the rest. I know she does always save something each month, and she is not a massive spender, so things are bobbing along in the right direction for her, and the pace probably suits her normal retirement aims quite well.

We now know what we’ll be paying per unit for electricity over the next six months, and we know what we’ll be paying per litre for lpg until the next time our supplier decides to gouge us, which could be at any time they like. So I now have the figures needed to do some comparisons and analysis. I also got carried away with some riveting electricity monitoring threads on here recently and invested in a little plug in monitor to get some juicy numbers to crunch. I’ll definitely be posting about our energy use soon. Happy to say we’ve not needed any form of heating yet this autumn, the house has been at a very comfortable ambient temperature for us so far - long may that continue!

Karmacat

SSS, it sounds like things are generally very comfortable for you, and you're carrying on in the right direction, while tweaking to get more fun stuff into your lives.  That's a lovely problem to face!  Very pleased for you.

savingholmes

Great news on your OH's pension

Good to read things are progressing in the right direction despite turbulent times 

SuperSecretSquirrel

Thank you both for posting, and to anyone else reading along!

I've been going around the house listing all our electrical items and sloooowly working my way through them, monitoring electricity consumption. I haven't got very far with it yet.

Fridge and freezers first. We do a weekly shop, and there is a clear increase in their electricity consumption for a day or two after the fridge/freezers have been topped up. Happy to say that the results are pretty great though: Fridge 1.2kwh a week, inside freezer 2kwh a week, outside freezer 1.3kwh a week. I'll probably test them again when the temperature drops as I think the heat exchanger on the shed freezer might have to work harder in lower temperatures and I'd be interested to see what kind of difference it makes. If consumption remains steady though we're looking at around 235kwh per year in total for the fridge and two freezers, or a little over £1.50 a week at current prices to keep all our food fresh, which I'm more than happy with! It's just a small under counter fridge and two small undercounter freezers, but I was expecting far worse figures.

I've also been noting any items that use electricity but can't be monitored via a three pin plug. There's the electric hobs, the kitchen and bathroom extractor fans, and all our lighting. The lighting is easily dealt with - I ran around the house noting the wattage of all our bulbs, estimated the hours use per year for each one (overestimating to be on the safe side), and was amazed to find that it amounts to a grand total of 55kwh for all our lighting for a whole year, that's under £20 a year at current prices - nice to know! 😁

We've been slowly replacing our bulbs with LEDs over time, and now only have two incandescent light bulbs left. Those two incandescent bulbs (that are hardly ever used) amount to a combined 100w. All the other bulbs throughout the house amount to a combined 101.9w! It wasn't that long ago that a single normal bulb used more electricity than a whole house worth of modern ones does now 😲

I'm obviously expecting the big heat producing appliances (oven, kettle, toaster, dryer, heaters, iron, etc) to be the really expensive beasts, but it's interesting to see how much (or how little) electricity the other things use. I'll get round to all those greedy appliances eventually.

I've just noted down a meter reading too, I'm going to try taking daily readings for a while, not just the usual once a month reading. Might as well gather all I can while the interest levels are high, I know it'll stop being a novelty at some point so I may as well strike while the iron's hot! 🤣

South_coast

I thought you hadn't done the iron yet....🤔🤣? 

Lovely to hear your life update SSS

SuperSecretSquirrel

Touché! 🤣  

savingholmes

Well done on the leccy monitoring it all helps. I think this energy crisis is the things that came like a bolt out the blue - the sheer scale of it. It's making a lot of us far more conscious energy users.