Easy to Do, and Easy Not to Do

This blog post was originally written in February 2014 for our sister website – The Money Muppet. We set that site up in January 2014 as we embarked on our journey to financial freedom. The Money Muppet site no loner exists, so we’ve incorporated our financial journey into our travel blog.

Easy to Do, and East Not to Do

We just got back from a weekend away, invited by some fabulous friends to one of the holiday lets they have in Cornwall, which they’ve just finished renovating. The Smart car happily made the trip down there and back. I love that thing. A force 11 gale was blowing by the time we rolled in to the village on Friday evening. The sea had broken loose of the bounds of gravity, washing around the floors of the sea-front shops and restaurants, ripping the tarmac up and frazzling a pay and display machine, to the local’s delight. Our friends were upbeat as usual, helping rescue gas heaters before they were washed off for a life at sea.

We met these guys in southern France, as they travelled in an ex London ambulance bought from eBay. They’d fitted a bed in the back, with storage courtesy of an old sideboard, cooking from a camping stove bolted to said sideboard, and food chilling in an electric cool box. The shower consisted of a large bucket, and the loo was the wilds! They could have easily bought a big shiny Hymer, and since then they have, but they wanted to test whether they’d enjoy the life first before sinking so much money. Since coming back and meeting them again, they’ve become homeless. Odd I guess this might seem, but this state of affairs is a deliberate tactic.

They both retired from their high-stress careers while in their 40’s, the result of decades of careful planning, goal setting and taking action to invest in their futures. Now they’re free. They have a small group of gorgeous holiday lets, which they plan to live in and do repairs on in winter, before heading off to travel in the summer. I’m inspired by them. They live the life I’d love to live (and one day I will). They’re not rich, but they are careful not to waste money, buying cleverly and investing wisely. They’re unafraid of risk and hard work. Through becoming homeless they have freed themselves of the single biggest expense of maintaining their own house in the UK. Sure they own holiday lets, but these all work for them, paying their own way, rather than greedily eating thousands or even tens of thousands of their hard-earned pounds a year.

As we drove, we listed to Jeff Olson’s The Slight Edge. I’ve read the book before, and really enjoyed having someone read it back to me as we nipped long, turned up to block out the gale and Charlie snoring at my feel. The uplifting thing about this book, the thing which has me breathing in a lungful of air and believing we can truly meet our goal of freedom by 50, is the simplicity of the message:

You can change your life for the better, by making small, seemingly insignificant decisions. Equally, you can change it for the worse, again by action or inaction, which seems insignificant at the time, but over time it becomes significant. Basically: becoming financially free is both easy to do, and easy not to do.

Everything that I’m reading at the moment, books and blogs, plus looking at the way our friends have achieved freedom, points to the same thing: we don’t need some blindingly brilliant business plan. We don’t need to be expert investors. We don’t need to win the lottery. We just need to be careful with our money, to read, to invest as much as we can in a reasonably educated way, and we will be free. Through slowly building our knowledge, reading and absorbing a few pages of a live-changing book like The Slight Edge every day, researching the local property market, reading the emails people send me about this blog, we’ll gradually alter ourselves, and surely the nest egg will come.

Our next action is to investigate mortgages. We’re both working as contractors for at least the next 2 or 3 months, which is making it hard for us to find mortgages (we’ve a broker, who found a sum total of zero offerings), unsurprisingly. We need to get a place to live in rather than blowing £6k a year on rent, plus another buy to let as we’re currently under-leveraged. One option is available to us though (a ‘real’ option, not money lenders, sharks or massive credit cards!), and once we’ve had chance to check it out I’ll report back on our overall property strategy, such that it is! I’ve also ordered a copy of The Financial Times Guide to Investing from the local library (cost: 25p reservation charge), to start creating some more knowledge and ideas outside the property market. Again, I’ll report back on this once I’ve had chance to read it.

Cheers, Jay

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