Only freedom will do

choccielover

All ok Eds?

Not like you to be quiet for so long.

Chocs

A_Frayed_Knot

Another post Ed and you will have 4 x (that's - 0000's at the end of your posts :rotfl::rotfl:

choccielover

That's probably why he's gone quiet, planning the big party to celebrate the big 10,000 takes time....

Not to mention the thought that's required behind the post itself.....it has to be memorable, sage, poignant.

SuperSecretSquirrel

No pressure then... :rotfl:

choccielover

At what point do we send out the search teams...

I didn't see a request for time off come in

A_Frayed_Knot

It was the holiday weekend here, with Friday (schools) and Monday holiday. Good time for a long weekend away.

edinburgher

It would have been nice to have a triumphal post to mark 10,000 bursts of consciousness, but it never quite came together. Truth be told, I'm feeling somewhat scunnered!

Work continues to worry me and while I'm trying to explore options to improve my employability, it takes time, nothing is certain and I've been coasting for so long that the self doubt that I can make myself 'useful' is like wading through molasses. Trying not to burden Mrs E with it, but it is affecting my sleep and peace of mind.

It's not all doom and gloom - for the first time in years I have some concrete ideas of things I'd like to learn, which is good. But like all people who have atrophied doing the same thing for a long time, I'm afraid to start in case I waste time/fail? Ironic really, feels like I've done nothing but waste time for the last 5 years

On the positive front, we've had a few lovely family days out, DD is now toddling like a champ and if we could only break her addiction to Paw P@trol, I suspect her IQ would go through the ceiling! :rotfl: Her sleep hasn't been the best, but we'll start training her to settle better again.

Money things are scary but controlled. We have a big list of everything that needs done to the house, probably another £11,000 or so. Have broken jobs down into simple steps, with realistic price ranges for each item. A fair bit of it will need to be done by contractors, our first booked in job is getting a new fence put in at the end of October. We cut down our gigantic leylandii and the garden looks huge (and bare).

Like a lot of other people on these forums, we're trying to figure out what to do with our money in a low return world. We have £6,000 of regular saver money that most definitely won't be getting renewed at the rate of 2% that we have been offered! We also have £2-3,000 of P2P money that will be getting drawn down as soon as possible as the platform appears to be very unreliable (don't worry fellow forumites, not anything that I've referred anyone to).

My current thinking is to finish the house (bar the kitchen) this year and frontload our S&S ISAs up to the end of March. From April we'll be putting our pension contributions up quite a bit, possibly as high as 27%.

Still adding to P2P accounts, but being a lot pickier. Rate cuts have led to a lot of new money and the best days are probably behind a lot of the more popular platforms.

Other than that? Probably pay down the 0% credit cards very slooooowly.

AlexLK

If you've found something you're interested in doing, get on with it. Having (and then maintaining) interest is a lot of the battle. Life is far too short to be doing a full time job you don't enjoy for the majority of time. Whilst there are always going to be aspects about any part of life that you don't enjoy, it shouldn't be the majority of any one aspect. The uncertainty in your current job may be concerning you but from what you've said in the past about not enjoying work I'd say it's more an opportunity to give you a push to do something about it.

Learning opportunities are not just found in work or formal education settings. You are processing and learning new things all the time to suit your current environment. I'm sure that over the last five years you've likely improved your knowledge of (some) investments (through investing) and found yourself learning lots of new skills through becoming a parent and taking on a larger property that needs work.

Karmacat

edinburgher wrote: »

It's not all doom and gloom - for the first time in years I have some concrete ideas of things I'd like to learn, which is good. But like all people who have atrophied doing the same thing for a long time, I'm afraid to start in case I waste time/fail? Ironic really, feels like I've done nothing but waste time for the last 5 years

:eek: you wasting time over the last 5 years? Er, no, no, a thousand times no! Certainly not on the personal and financial levels. And as for the work - well, you have to have an idea of what you're going *to*, because if you just run *from*, things can get quite dodgy quite quickly, though it does work out sometimes, of course.

Totally agree with Alex that life is too short to do a full time job you don't like - I liked the job I've just retired from, but I didn't notice the toll it was taking until it was too late, and then I was too ill to have the energy to change, so I was stuck for a few years. I'm already nearly all the way back to health, but if I'd noticed the signs earlier, I could've avoided all that fatigue stuff.

On the positive front, we've had a few lovely family days out, DD is now toddling like a champ and if we could only break her addiction to Paw P@trol, I suspect her IQ would go through the ceiling! :rotfl: Her sleep hasn't been the best, but we'll start training her to settle better again.

Awwww! :happylove

You want her to have fun, she has to learn her own ways - in about 10 years time, you're going to be complaining about her music choices, you know that, don't you :rotfl:

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edinburgher

Who said that I was trying to move to a job I thought that I'd like? My current thinking is better the devil you know - I'd like to grow some skills for the job that I'm supposed to be doing - computers and stuff. I am not happy, but I don't think that a Gatsbyesqye quest for work fulfillment will resolve that. I want out, retaining a reasonable white collar wage makes that possible.

That and some books on stoicism

Pretty sure DD will be slagging off my taste in music in 10 years, not the other way round "you're too old to listen to post hardcore Dad!"