The Piano Diary

South_coast

Wonderful to hear your update, sounds like things are really positive for you all at the moment

savingholmes

Congratulations on your new role. Sounds like it will give you a new lease of life in every sense. Lovely you've been able to help family out and get the house how you'd like it. Things are going very well...

misslolu

Congrats on your new role!

AgathaSquirrel

I always enjoy your updates.

Congratulations on the new role!

glass_half_full

Dear diary and all,

Well we have made it to the holidays, we now have a break until we start back in January. Last weekend we went for a getaway to a hotel at one of our favourite places. To be honest, when the time came to go on Friday night we were both a bit frazzled, but managed to throw a few things in a couple of bags and headed off. I’m really glad we did, it was exactly what we needed. Had a lovely couple of days, did some Christmas shopping and even sat and wrote Christmas cards together. We have decided that this area (the Welsh Marches) is top of our list as a destination for semi-retirement when the time comes. We are going to start scouting out the area and plan to go back and start figuring out where we might want to live.

For the first time recently I included OH’s pension into the calculations. We spoke about our dream to do this and settled on the idea that maybe in three years we would stop work or go semi-retired. So I added OHs pension into the spreadsheet based on the projections in her scheme and it seems that it is possible for us to do this. So now we have a target and I can monitor it on here. Its not a MFW target, but I hope I can remain as an honorary member of the MFW club for the time being.

So the goal I want to achieve is to save a total of £400,000 into the DC pension fund. This is an amount which if we reach it I think would allow us to semi-retire / retire from full time work.

Currently I have a total of £245,000 in three funds.

savingholmes

Sounds an exciting goal. If anyone can do it you can - aided of course by tax relief.

Glad you managed to get away and have some fun. I love the Welsh borderlands too.

Orangetoes

Just read your diary. A great read and then the roller coaster at the end! Many congratulations! 

glass_half_full

End of 2021 review          

Dear diary and all,

Its that time again for an end of year review. One of the good things about using YNAB is that I can see exactly what we have spent on each category. I have tracked every transaction since December 2018, so that is 3 years. I did a comparison this time last year, so choosing the same categories, here is my analysis over 2019-2020-2021.

Category                            2019      2020      2021      Delta      Comments

Rent/Mortgage                 £13k       £18.8k    £13.6k    -£5.1k    Mortgage paid off.

Gas and Electricity             £1800    £1615    £1754    £139      This will go up in 2022.

Supporting DS                    £1900    £2116    £8286    £6170    Bought DS a car and £100 per month.

Broadband, TV and Phone £1600    £1419    £1755    £336

Groceries                           £6945    £8772    £9077    £305      Need to rein this back in.

Eating out                          £1800    £1345    £2063    £718      Can’t see this going down!

Holidays                             £5000    £903      £2859    £1956    2022 probably similar to 2021

Petrol                                 £1000    £610      £700      £90        ok

Pet related                         £1000    £610      £700      £2000    New kitten plus related stuff.

Car loan                             £10k       £7k         £0          -£7k       Car loan paid off.

Some areas to focus on in 2021 are

Groceries

-          We spend quite a lot here but we do cook quite a lot from scratch and quite a lot of fruit and fresh veg. We are vegetarian and very little alcohol.

Gas and electricity

-          Seen some scary numbers on what will happen to the cost of energy when our current deal expires in March. It may be reducing usage rather than negotiating a better deal.

Pension

This is just my DC pension which is the one I am tracking with a target of £400K.

Pension in December 2020 was £170,000

Pension in December 2021 is £244,000

Increase is £74,000 of which extra contributions was £18,816 and capital growth was £55,184. Pension fell quite a lot in 2021 but recovered in 2021.

Aim for December 2022 will be approx. £285,000.

Savings

Currently £40K. We are about to get a bathroom and the downstairs cloakroom renovated which is going to cost us £12-14K in total. Aim is to pay for this from savings but try to rebuild back up to £40k in the year.

 

savingholmes

A great round up. Congratulations on your achievements and good luck for the coming year

AgathaSquirrel

Sounds like a good plan. Good luck getting to your target.