It’s raining outside, so its much easier to focus on writing, hence two posts in fairly quick succession. We are recovering from a month full of visitors. May is always a busy month for friends and family wanting to visit. I suppose I can’t blame them, May has always been my favourite month for flora and fauna, and in our beautiful little corner of Scotland it is very special indeed. May is when the need for heating peters out, the days stretch out into long evenings, all around the birds and bees are busy and the wetsuit boots are exchanged for summer swimming shoes. Oh yes, and the infamous Scottish midge starts its reign of terror as soon as the temperature rises and the wind drops.
Having friends and family to stay means getting to enjoy our local area and visiting some of the sights rather than being too focussed on DIY. I spent quite a lot of time in the kitchen and made both gorse flower and kefir ice creams for the first time. The former worked well, but the flavour wasn’t my favourite, whilst the latter I really liked the flavour, but it needed full fat milk and / or cream to improve the texture. We enjoyed a few meals out, which we don’t often do, and we have a full couple of days visiting some of the 111 artist and makers studios that opened for the annual Spring Fling event at the end of the month. The creative vibe in this area is one of the reasons we chose to settle here, so getting to visit artists in their home studios and chat about the inspiration and process is such a great opportunity. Normally you just get to see the finished work in a gallery. Many of the people taking part are part time creatives, so very down to earth and keen to chat to visitors.
We did squeeze in a few jobs around the house, getting the new batteries wired in before we had a house full. I don’t think we’ve quite got it optimized yet, as now our capacity has increased and usage reduced with the warmer weather, we could probably be selling from the battery rather than just excess solar. That excess solar did bank us £37.18 in May and I expect we’ll optimize it with time.
I had a go at updating a light fitting made of antlers that was here when we moved in. It had 3 awful plastic 80s fittings on it, so I rewired it and updated it with 6 modern LED bulbs and I think it looks OK. I forgot to take a ‘before’ picture, and we haven’t decorated the living room yet, so I’ve just painted a patch of the ceiling where the fixings go.
It is now warm enough to use lime mortar outside again, but now the large hole in the wall where the heat pump was connected through to the hot water cylinder inside still can’t be fully repaired. Now it has great tits nesting in the cavity I made my partially filling the 50cm depth in the autumn. There are loose rocks filling the hole, so we can hear rather than see the young. Mum and dad were very vocal from nearby trees every time we went near it – which was quite often as it’s right by the back door. We are also aware of 2 active wrens nests, a swallows nest, and a coal tit nest. Who knows how many others there are in the garden.
Freedom fund value – £1,589,673 (up £58k on last month)
Expenditure – £3567.93 (or a 2.69% withdrawal rate) including renovation costs, or £3,528.60 (or a 2.66% withdrawal rate) without renovation costs
Earned income – £0
It was an expensive month in May. Eating out contributed, but it was more about vehicle costs. The van tax was due (£360), as was the sports car insurance (£274.30) and we had a few minor issues with the EV. The boot latch had been intermittently faulty for a while, but it finally failed shut at the same time that the air con stopped working and the rear windscreen washer also refused to function. We replaced the mechanical boot latch and that didn’t fix the issue. We suspected that there might be some kind of electrical fault causing multiple issues, so took it to a local auto electrician for help diagnosing what was going on. It turns out we should have replaced the switch on the boot before jumping to conclusions. In fact, it was just a coincidence that multiple faults showed up at the same time (6 months after the warranty ran out……). We paid £282 for the privilege of finding that out, but we would probably have been chasing issues round for weeks if we hadn’t. On top of that there was a new battery for the sports car and the costs of the boot latch and switch parts. (£57.65 + 51.92). In total we spent over £1000 on vehicles in May. The air con in the car is looking like a new compressor. The part is £1000+, so we’re not looking forward to that bill as it probably isn’t something we’d do ourselves. We’ll probably look up how accessible it is before paying someone else to do it.
Other than all that, the only big expense was £220 for the 4 x ton bags of top soil we had delivered in March. It took me until this month to realise they had never invoiced us.
I invoiced a small amount of ongoing consultancy work (a few hours), but it won’t be paid until June or July. We didn’t get round to selling anything else in May, so as usual, there was no income from any source other than the freedom fund.
Another new record high for the freedom fund started me thinking about the growth trajectory and when it’ll feel ‘safe’. Maybe I’m being over-cautious, but it doesn’t feel bulletproof yet, so when will it? Maybe never? I like to think maybe when we double our original FIRE target, I’ll feel more secure that whatever the market throws our way we can just keep calm and carry on. Whether I’ll feel that way when we actually get there, remains to be seen. When we left our old lives behind in 2022, if you’d told me we would be in the financial position we now find ourselves in less than 4 years later – with only withdrawals and no additional savings – I would have been delighted.
It’s not like I constantly worry about the money running out, but I’m not yet in a place where I’d blow a large amount on a big trip or getting trades in to do jobs we could do ourselves. Maybe I never will, even if there was £10M in the bank. I guess old habits die hard. I have seen a resurgence of FIRE = deprivation type articles around recently. I don’t know if the subjects of the story really feel like that, or if it’s just the way the article is skewed, but I have never felt that way. We didn’t have kids, which has made a huge difference to our FIRE journey compared with many others, but I have only ever felt that we’ve cut out the unnecessary expenditure that didn’t actually make us any happier. We prioritised what brought us joy and had some amazing holidays (in nice, but not extravagant accommodation). I have been known to spend a good amount on original artwork from time to time, and we do still have a very silly and impractical classic sports car. I think the power of the FIRE philosophy is more in making the money you save, work for you, rather than making ridiculous sacrifices to turbo charge that savings rate. Making a little extra effort to make small savings across the board adds up to an amount worth investing, which over time becomes an amount which gives you choices. I guess it needs belief in delayed gratification to ever get started though.
Several gardeners I have spoken to this year, have never grown asparagus and were envious of my crop. When asked why they don’t do it themselves, the answer was always the same “it takes 3 or 4 years to get a crop, so we never bothered”. I guess it’s the same mind set. If you can’t fathom waiting 3 years for something that is a relatively small investment of time an effort, what chance is there of looking 10, 20, 30 years down the line?
I also read this month that to have a comfortable retirement, you should now be aiming for £45k for a single person and £60k for a couple. We spent £47k last year between us and that included £13k in one off costs on the house. We spent a month in California, a week in the Lake District and a week in Transylvania, run 3 vehicles and eat well. I can only assume the quoted figures must include housing costs after retirement, or we are really missing something somewhere!
Who knows what the future will bring, but for now I think we’ve found a good balance for us.
Other May activities included building our first bee hive and putting it and a bait box out as bait hives (just in case we can catch a wild swarm for free), a swim at Girvan beach with a view of Ailsa Craig, finally filling the channelled out floor for the new radiators in the living room, learning to weave a raffia lampshade, an apiary visit – and lots of enjoying where we now call home.
Finding Enough 