Lifestyle Change

C_Mababejive

Of course there would have to be rules that all in the commune sign on to..

DigForVictory

Go for the dream, just be prepared for it all to go sideways on the arrival of offspring.
Says she who even with "child labour" can't grow enough to feed three hungry teens, but them I am working an office job as well to keep them fed.
There's no harm in trying, just be ready to adapt (hard) to the other realities life may throw you.

pile-o-stone

PennyBun wrote: »

I am very lucky to be earning disproportionately good money working in a warm and safe office environment. Our careers have allowed myself and my wife to purchase the house our dream house at the age of 28 and still find ourselves with disposable income.

Whilst we are ploughing all the money we can into our mortgage we are a good 20 years off paying it off based on our current salaries.

The problem is that neither of us are happy in our jobs or the feeling of being imprisoned in office jobs by societal norms.

Somehow I have come to the conclusion in my head that we need to stop "working" and start actually sustaining ourselves.

Your main problem is the mortgage. If you can pay that off then you're a lot further down the road to getting out of the rat race. Even then, you will need a reasonable income to pay household bills like life insurance, property insurance, council tax, utility bills, etc. If you stop working, then you will need investments to pay these bills. So if these bills all came to £250pm (£3000 per annum) and using the sensible 4% rule, you'd need to have a £75,000 lump sum invested. I'd suggest saving in ISAs as you're way too young to access pension savings.

You'd also need money for food and clothing. While you could reduce your food bill by having an allotment or smallholding, It wouldn't be reasonable to expect to grow enough to be completely self sufficient, especially over the winter months. So add in an additional £100 pm to feed and clothe yourselves, so that's £1200 per annum, which pushes your lump sum up to £105,000.

Those figures are quite low (My council tax bill on its own is £180pm), but you get the idea. I'd suggest you add up your own bills, excluding the mortgage as this will be paid off then multiply by 100 and divide by 4. This gives you the figure you need to have invested if you're not going to work again.

The alternative is to continue to work, but if you're going to do that then it undermines your aims to be self sufficient, plus it'd be difficult to tend to your land and animals with a full time job. A compromise would be a flexible job where you work longer hours in winter and shorter, or perhaps part-time in summer. These are difficult to obtain as seasonal jobs tend to involve working in the summer months, which is the opposite of what you need.

I think what you need to do is look at why you want to live this sort of a life? Reading between the lines, it sounds like you're both not enjoying your office jobs? Perhaps a change of careers to something you would enjoy would be the best approach?

Otherwise you'll have to just plod on, scrape by and pay off the £150k mortgage, build up a further £100k to £150k (bare minimum) in savings to cover expenses and perhaps also an emergency fund of £10k for any unexpected issues like broken white goods, house repairs, central heating systems and the like).

So, years and years of grinding away in a job you don't seem to enjoy in order to give it up or just give it up now and do something you do enjoy. Once you have a more enjoyable job, and if you still feel that you want a more sustainable lifestyle then you can start moving in that direction.