Simple living in the country - back to basics

themadvix

Always satisfying to get these jobs done, even if you can’t tick them off yourself (and sometimes organising is just as hard, if not harder, as you well know!).

 Glad you got your wish not to go anywhere and had a lovely time last night.

slm6002

I agree it is great to tick another thing off the list and know that the house is all sorted for the winter months - or summer as it has been very wet

KajiKita

Good news about the rendering and near miraculous correct locating of the gutter clip! 👏 That tradesman is a keeper 😊 Sounds like it is worth every penny of £900.

Glad you had your lovely chilled evening too 🍹😊

KK 

Cheery_Daff

Thanks all 😊 Had a lazy afternoon rest, and now Mr Cheery has just gone out for a few hours so I am going to make a snack and write an extensive, over ambitious list for the evening 😂

Cheery_Daff

OK, food scoffed, and I've done a bit of lopping of some of the bush outside the front door, and scrubbed a couple of potential windowsill stones.

Flagging seriously now though... So here's a list of things I'd like to do - with the understanding that I reserve the right to abandon ship at any point and curl up on the sofa with a film 😁

* banks & YNAB
* blog post
* video editing
* change sheets
* sew elastic onto bedroom blinds
* happy wheel
* duolingo homework

That'll do. Want to be nicely well rested for my last proper day off tomorrow - I'm off on Tuesday too but we've got visitors, so that doesn't count in the same way 😂

KajiKita

That’s quite a list! What’s the video about? 😊

KK

Cheery_Daff

I'm just making a daft video about the local well dressings for our friends in Germany. He's a documentary film maker, and we watched a video he'd made as part of a project about himself - so we made one about us in response This won't be ever seen by anyone else, but it's a fun little project - I just need to get on with it!

Banks and YNAB done - £100 premium bonds win has arrived and been allocated to savings pots. Happy wheel done - spent quite a while on it today, but ended up £15.90 down. Yawn. Nothing doing on Prolific this evening either. Also yawn. 

Now I'm going to curl up on the sofa, everything else can be done tomorrow! (Oh, I'll do my duolingo homework but that's it!)

Cheery_Daff

OK, ended up having a chat with my sister, and finishing the blog post (and I've vaguely remembered someone asked me for my blog address and I forgot because it was just as I started my month off the Internet- I do apologise, will find your message tomorrow!)

Went looking for the mortgage overpayment spreadsheet, and found the FIRE planning one. Really interesting. It wasn't anything complicated, just looking at monthly income each year for both of us, and doing four different scenarios (eg me working full time, dropping to 4 days, 3 days etc). 

Looks like I did it in 2021, trying to figure out whether I should drop to 4 days, which, of course, I did in the September of that year. With this pay increment due this month I'll be back up to roughly the same as my full time wage then (of course it doesn't feel like it, because everything has gone up so darn much, but I'm not complaining, and it's good to see the spreadsheet).

We're not making any overpayment at the minute - mortgage is at 2.26% fixed til Oct next year, and our savings were decimated by the building work, so priority is building them back up to what feels like a safe/sensible level. 

Mr Cheery's state pension kicks in in 6 years, and that should be roughly when our next five year mortgage fix ends (if we do another five year fix, that is). Hopefully at that point we'll be able to throw the equivalent of the state pension as overpayment, which will make a massive difference, and should mean it's paid off about 7 years after that, when I'm 55, even with no other overpayment.

Of course, we'll likely fix at a far higher rate than we're at now, which will make a difference, but it's starting to feel not too far off now. I could potentially take my works pension about 3 years after that too (so about 15 years from now 🙄) if necessary/desirable at that point.

Cheery_Daff

OK, more pondering. 

Current best 5 year fix with our current provider is 6.35% 😱 which for the amount we'll have left when the fix is due (Oct 2024, about £158k) would be £1195 a month - an increase of £275 a month. 

Obviously there are better rates than that - MSE mortgage calculator thing is currently showing just over 5% as the best, but we are restricted by needing somewhere that 

(a) will lend on a residential properly with 10 acres of land - a surprising number limit it to 1 acre
(b) will lend until Mr Cheery is 80 - many have a blanket cut off at 70 or 75

I will check of course when the time comes - it may be that people are willing to be more flexible now he's at least claiming works pension and state pension is within reach, but all that was taken into account before. I'm earning more now and obviously the amount we'd be borrowing is far less in comparison to income so we may have more option, we'll see.

Anyway - if we took a five year fix at 6.35%, and then threw all of Mr Cheery's state pension at it when that arrives, with no other overpayment before or after, we'd still pay it off by the time I'm 56, so 13 years from now. 

Lots of things are likely to change in the next 6 years - my salary being one of them - so I hope this is a fairly bad scenario, and we'd actually be able to overpay far more before then and get rid sooner.

Anyway, waffling (as usual) but it's focusing my mind. No overpayment now, but if I don't get a new job in the next year, an increase of £275 a month is going to put a significant dent in our savings goals - not a dire emergency by any rate, I'm well aware we're fortunate to be saving anything - but I do want to be well prepared with a decent cushion by then...

Cheery_Daff

Afternoon MSE chums, a soggy one today! 

My last 'proper' day off today, so we started with a cafe breakfast - £11.95 spent between us on toast and drinks.

Nipped to the builders merchants to check out wood for book shelves for the study, but they didn't have what we were looking for. Wickes have exactly the thing, but there isn't one here - Mr Cheery is going to pick it up when he takes the car for a service next week (we don't get wood delivered any more - they seem to pick the most ludicrously bendy pieces 🙄 Timber merchants will deliver the exact pieces you pick out though, which is why we tried there first).

Picked up some brick acid which we've been told is the very thing to clean these stones for the windowsills. Not for a rainy day though, and need to NOT get it on clothes or hands... a job for next weekend I think, but will hopefully save any more of my ineffective scrubbing 🙄 £7.99 for a 5 litre tub, so a nice bargain (if it works...)

Also nipped to Aldi - £51.99 spent there.

Home now, Mr Cheery is having a nap, and I'm going to plough on with video editing - I'd like to finish my audio book but not sure I'll be able to edit video at the same, it may all get confused 😂