Steel Kitten

A day for soup

It's absolutely freezing today! I'm working in the spare room that has the airing cupboard to try and keep warm so I don't have to turn the heating on. Every little helps :)

Even though it is the last day of the month, I'm not that busy at the moment and have opted to take a few hours break in the middle of day and work later. There's usually always a last minute flurry around 4:30pm and my work colleague, who works an hour later than me, always cops that flack. My turn this month.

Because of the temperature my mind became fixated on soup all morning, so I rummaged around the kitchen and found a head of broccoli just about the go yellow, an onion, a sprouted potato, some leftover single cream and a couple of strong stock cubes. Excellent basics for a soup. Unfortunately, the single cream was just that little too much beyond using (damn) so I had to get rid of it and the final result was a bit thin. To try and thicken it up, I added some chopped up gluten-free spaghetti, which usually has a ton of starch in it, and that helped thicken it up nicely. After processing and a bit of last minute seasoning with salt and pepper, it was ready for scoffing.

Martin is out in the rain doing his delivery and he'll be soaked to the skin when he comes in. He will appreciate a hot bath and some hot soup.  

The goals fell by the wayside

Random photo from the archive: close up of parsley!

Yesterday, I had a look at my post back in January where I set myself some goals to keep myself occupied and overcome some challenges.

How am I doing?

Ahem. Let's be honest, eight days after I read that post we decided to move and since then my time hasn't been my own. 

No spending for three months - let's face it, after my last post there's no point digging this grave over.

Walk 500 miles - not done. Just not got out there at all. I've dragged myself to work and dragged myself home to sleep. Food was in there somewhere, rarely planned and often eaten on the hoof. Since I've moved to mother-in-law's, I've been sleeping a lot better, but I still feel like the best thing I can do for myself is sleep rather than knacker myself out with exercise. My stress levels are very high while I sort out the paperwork for buying the new house, and I'm quite unsettled not living in my own space. I'm not going to compound that with a new exercise routine.

When I'm on my own in Lincolnshire in a few weeks I'll address it then. The stress will be gone, I'll be even more rested, as I won't have so much housework to do, and I'll be settled and more motivated. There are plenty of new places to explore in the new area, so I'll get back to the walking then.

Reading - I've only just got back to reading. Again, tiredness and a lack of time just meant I didn't go near one until very recently. However, last week I did read one on my list - 'When Bubbles Burst: Surviving the Financial Fallout' by John Calverley. It's about how financial bubbles develop, such as the property and IT boom, and how and why they suddenly burst and the bottom falls out of the market. I can't pretend to understand everything that was in there, as my knowledge of how the financial markets work is not deep, but I like the way he lays out the evidence for doom as each bubble develops. You can see the events unfold and realise they are a train wreck waiting to happen, but of course everything is with hindsight.

The one thing that stuck in my mind was when he talked about how you know the top of a bubble has been reached. Paraphrasing, suddenly even your grandmother knows about this 'new' fad (be that IT shares, property) because it is being written about in the news media, and thinks she should get in because there's money to be made. That's an indication that the market for that product is saturated and will run out of buyers soon, then start the slide downwards until the bottom falls out of it. 

Have a complete nutrition plan - this fell by the wayside slightly over the last few month, as I began to rely on gluten-free carb-heavy food again for speed. It was easy and quick to fling together a cheese sandwich or bowl of pasta made from gluten-free products, than a meal based on the autoimmune diet protocol. I have suffered for it and was feeling bloated and unwell again. About five days ago I gave up all grains in any form and came off almost all sugar. I say almost, I allow myself something once a day, be that two sugars in a coffee or small lolly, to ensure I don't feel too deprived during the transition phase and go back to eating it again in large quantities. I know from experience this will happen, so I'm trying to head it off. 

No more than 30 minutes on the internet a day - I just can't make this work. Admittedly we've been searching for a house and doing a lot of the buying and selling process by email, but even so I use the internet for so much it just isn't feasible. I spent at least 4 hours last Sunday catching up with financial blogs and articles from various sites, let alone the other blogs and sites I like to read, and each day I'm searching out pictures and inspiration for the new house and garden. However, I'll admit I've been on non-financial forums a lot over the last few months, almost as a sort of release valve for stress, so over the last week I've tried to cut that back a bit. I don't post, so technically I am rubbernecking other people's lives and using it as entertainment, which is unpleasant and has to stop. There are better ways to use my time.

I'll come back and update on my goals in a month. By then I should be getting close to completing on the new house and preparing to move in.

Screwing down the frugal hatches

Moving house has to be the biggest expense I have ever experienced. Even going to university to do my degree and Ph.D for six years wasn't this expensive. 

Despite my best efforts, my budget sprang leaks everywhere. In fact towards the end we were throwing money at problems to make them go away. Thank god for us being so frugal over the years, because we could have been financially crushed by all of this. 

• We had to pay for an unexpected insurance policy for our buyers at £205.
• We ended up paying for a gas and electrical safety check, which we didn't expect, and that cost us about £150.
• Martin hired a van to move his workshop, which was a budgeted expense, but he thinks it was a very old uneconomical model as he spent over £80 more on petrol than anticipated.
• Then our removals firm let us down and we ended up having to get another one at very short notice and £400 more expensive.
• We didn't move out on the same day as the removals, and that six day gap resulted in us having to hire a van as we misjudged the amount of belongings we left behind. That should have cost us £62 for a 24 hour hire, but we ran out of room at the shipping container and it took us two days to find an empty one, so the cost became £186 plus £40 petrol.
• The extra shipping container set us back £102 a month.
• As we were buying something that had once been an agricultural farm we had to have extra searches and legal work done. £300 and rising by the day. 

The only saving grace is that we temporarily no longer have a mortgage and living at Mother-in-law's for a couple of months will help us save some money before the next stage of the journey is complete

At the moment we pay for three shipping containers, all of the food for the three of us, petrol, and an amount of money towards household bills. I am still paying the life insurance policies, and £5 a month to keep our email addresses. Everything else is, fingers crossed, cancelled so I can once again begin screwing down the frugal hatches and start saving some money. 

This is just the beginning though. Because Audrey is coming to live with us, she is gifting us some money from the sale of her house so our large mortgage will decrease in time to a much more manageable level. But no matter when she sells, for the first two years we are on a fixed mortgage deal so cannot pay off any of it using her lump sum. We have to wait until it expires before doing it, then try and get another fixed deal jut as good straight after.

I've already worked out that we could overpay the mortgage every month if we are quite careful with our expenses. In fact, I've worked out that we could get the term from 19 years to 6 years 10 month if we overpay by the maximum £500 our mortgage product allows.

Ideally I want that down to 5 years so Martin can retire at 60, which means I'll have to put some money aside above the £500 in a separate account ready to pay down extra chunks on the two occasions we come off a fixed deal. That will be a big squeeze, so I'm going to have to be a bit cunning with the budgets. 

Spending all this money has not been in the slightest bit fun and I'm desperate to settle down and get back to the frugal ways I am used to.

Hidden Histories of A Million Wartime Women project - support the RVS

I came across an amazing project this morning - Hidden Histories of A Million Wartime Women - while scanning through the Guardian website. 

The Royal Voluntary Services (RVS), formerly the Women's Voluntary Services, were the army of volunteers who supported our communities during the second world war. They were always on hand to help out in any way that they could, from fundraising and running workshops, to operating mobile canteens after bombing raids, and feeding and clothing the bomb victims.

There are currently 30,000 documents in boxes that need archiving, all diaries and reports from volunteers across the 2,000 centres that were up and running during the war, and the RVS needs £25,000 in donations to start digitising them to preserve their contents and release them to the public. 

Although mentioned, the Guardian couldn't have drawn less attention to this project if it tried, so if you can please donate and then spread the word. There are just 15 days left for the RVS to try and reach its target. 

Morning campers!

Finally! I've got back here to blog.

I had to take a break as the process of moving out of our house and into my mother-in-law's was fairly fraught and punctuated by illness, injury and just plain old-fashioned exhaustion.

We moved in on 4th May, and to be honest I'm only just now feeling better about everything. I don't miss the house at all. For the first time in 10 years I'm sleeping right through the night without waking and feel 'unburdened'. I had no idea how much that house affected my health. 

The chickens, however, were in uproar at being taken from a large pen and garden to a small pen and patch of grass, and started eating their own eggs and screaming in frustration, but now they have settled a little more. They found all the cosy little corners of the garden to hang out in, and are 'allowing' us to have one egg a day.  Fleagle doesn't care a jot. She sleeps on the windowsill in the sun and eats her food and seems quite content. Georgie, however, is not a happy camper, having been taken away from his beloved hunting fields to sit in a house looking out of the window, but it is for his own protection. The house is on a main road and he will be squished like countless cats before him have been on that road. He will remain a house cat until we move up to Lincolnshire.

Talking of Lincolnshire, we've found somewhere to buy. I genuinely thought we were never going to find something.

Originally, we had decided on three criteria: to find somewhere that we could all live in happily together but separately, that had enough storage for Martin's cars, and some land for me to raise a couple of sheep and pigs for the freezer. Crucially, Martin's mother would be putting money into the house and that meant we would go without a mortgage. We would be mortgage free. 

Only one problem. We could not find anything in that price bracket that met all of our requirements. For two of us yes but not three. We've been looking for a couple of years on and off and hadn't seen anything, and after 12 weeks of scouring all of the East Anglia, Suffolk, Norfolk, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire every single day and not seeing anything, we were pretty sure that the property did not exist. The problem was to compromise on two of the three criteria meant that one of us wouldn't be getting what we wanted. 

We decided that we had to go out and view some of the properties that fulfilled two of the three criteria, reasoning that in the flesh the houses might show how they could be adapted in time to meet all three. But it was no good, nothing grabbed us at all. Nothing worked or could be adapted. Most of them were better looking in the photos than in real life and we left viewings deflated at the unworkable dirt, mess and flooding expertly 'hidden' by estate agent's photos.

Then by chance, when we giving some feedback on a viewing to one agent, she mentioned there was something that might suit but it was a lot above our budget. It had been on the market for over a year and the owners were not too keen to sell for some reason. What the hell, pop it over, I said.

OMG. There it was. Yes, we'd have to have a mortgage, but there it was. We viewed the next evening, and it clicked immediately. It felt like coming home. Enough room for all of us to live without getting under each other's feet, a set of dry barns for Martin to do his cars and a half acre paddock with fruit trees for me to serve as grazing ground. 

Buoyed up, I scoured the property ads for other houses in this new price bracket, we even viewed a few, but again nothing was suitable. It seems we found the only house that we could have found for us. We did the 'offer' dance back and forth with the owners for a few days and finally they accepted us. They were not reticent to sell, they had just had a lot of unsuitable offers and people wanting the barns to develop and not the house. They wanted someone to respect the entire property and use it as a family home.

So, at the moment we are doing the searches and the survey has been done, and hopefully in the next six weeks or so we will complete.

And then a new chapter of our life can begin.