I can’t believe it is a month already since my last post, it seems to have passed in a flash. November brought the first frosts in East Anglia and some lovely crisp mornings for pre-work walks at the start of the month. The second half of the month was pretty much all travelling round the country for family birthday celebrations and catching up with some school friends who I hadn’t seen for over 2 years, because of, well, you know why…….
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October has felt like a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. We started the month on a high coming back from our first van adventure, but shortly after getting back
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Electrickery is very much not my area of expertise, so as well as my vague descriptions for the systems we decided to install in our van conversion project, I have also asked Mr. Wombat to draw out a circuit diagram. This is included at the end.
When we scoped out how we would use the van, a few things stood out as being necessary to make it work for us when it came to electrics:
After much research and weighing up of options, this translated into a shopping list that looks something like this:
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If you are a collared dove, apparently September is nesting season. The collared doves in our garden always seem to spend most of the year working out how to build a nest and then finally work it out about 5 months after every other species, and 2021 was no exception. If you are a collared dove, it is apparently perfectly reasonable to expect a few sticks balanced in a tree to support an egg. We notice these hair-brained attempts at home-building when sticks start appearing on the patio in the same spot under a tree for a few days in a row. I suppose if you look at the size of the bird’s head, the brain to body size ratio can’t be large. After 3 or 4 failed attempts at nest making, we managed to take the above photo at the start of the month in a rather wobbly rose arch.
I am now 5 months into semi-retirement and September saw the start of my first consecutive 4 non-working week period. When I renegotiated my contract at work, one of the stipulations was that I was able to take 4 consecutive non-working weeks at least once per year.
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As the month progressed, August shaped up to be a good pressure test for whether the monthly income from our investments at a 4% withdrawal rate would hold up to an ‘expensive’ month. It seemed like every day there was a new expense, so I was wondering how it would balance out when I came to write this post. We have been comfortably within our hypothetical income from investments every month so far this year. So, how did we finish up…..?
Continue readingThis month brought a tragic reminder of why we embarked on this FIRE journey in the first place; why we wanted to make time for the things we want to do, rather than the things we have to do to earn money, while we are still healthy enough to enjoy them.
Continue readingWe have chosen to convert an H1 (low roof) van to ensure we have access to all the places we might want to go in it – from carparks to small country lanes etc . This means that there is not a lot of height to play with inside the van and we want to maintain as much of that height as possible during the conversion. This also means that a lot of thought has gone in to how best to insulate and fit the floor and ceiling.
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Two months into semi-retirement and I have only worked one week in June! The weather has been decidedly changeable, so it has been great to have the flexibility to get out and enjoy the sunshine between showers.
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The next instalment in the tale of the van conversion involved cutting more holes. After the nerve-wracking experience of making that first cut in a perfectly sound panel in order to fit the window, we were a bit more confident this time. There was still a lot of measuring and cardboard template making involved though!
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My first full month of semi retirement went by incredibly quickly, despite only half of it being spent working. It is far too early to tell how this version of semi-retirement will work for me, as right now it just feels like I’ve had a 2 week holiday, with the month being divided with the first 2 weeks working and the second two being ‘non-working’ weeks. The first of those non-working weeks was spent in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, and it did feel great to get outside of a 30 minute radius of home for the first time in months. We even ventured out to a local pub for dinner for the first time since last October.
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Finding Enough 