Keeping Sight of the Blinding Light

This blog post was originally written in June 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.

Hi folks. I’ve just checked the last post and it went up over two months ago. We’ve made a few things happen in our financial lives since then:

• We’ve sold our old roaming home, the motorhome formerly know as Dave. Why? After two years of adventures, nipping out to campsites in the UK wasn’t holding the same appeal it used to. Dave was sitting idle, costing us hundreds of £s in servicing, tax and insurance fees. It was time to let go.
• We’ve watched our shares with interest, seeing one company dropping almost 25% in a matter of days. The Vanguard ETFs have all performed well though, rising around 3% in capital value over an 80 day period. Our overall strategy is to buy and hold, so we’ll not really know how well our shares are doing until a few years have passed.
• We’ve tracked our day to day spending, and are currently getting through £20k a year, everything in, including rent and one-off costs, £1700 a month.
• And we bought a butchers shop.

Yep. After spending months hunting through home.co.uk and zoopla, and putting in offers on two other houses, we fell in love with a disused butchers shop in the nearby town of Kimberley. The story in short:

• The shop was a butchers for maybe 40 years, closing when one of the owners retired in 2013.
• It was sold at auction to an investor who put in planning permission to change use to a take-away, which was turned down by the council (it’s in a conservation area, so not too surprising).
• The new owner decided to cut his losses and resell at auction but it didn’t sell.
• We then arrived on the scene, only going to look at it on a whim. It’s a mixed-use property and marketed as commercial, which really wasn’t our thing.
• We fell in love with the place and after a few days of sleepless nights bought it under auction conditions for £87,000. We exchanged contracts the day we agreed the price, and completed a month later. With the re-mortgage money from the bungalow (which now has 40% of our capital in it, so not too highly leveraged), and cash from Dave and work, we bought it without a mortgage.

A couple of pictures of our new home.

It’s basically a Victorian semi, small shop with cellar, three bedrooms, shower room, kitchen, lounge, workshop and car port. The place comes with some ‘problems’, but in life in general we’ve come to recognise problems as places of serious opportunity:

• There’s a whole load of chiller equipment to be rid of, including 3 walk-in cold rooms!
• There’s no garden as such, but it has an open yard space which gets sun during the day
• It’s in a conservation zone, so changing use might prove difficult
• The boiler is in a bedroom
• The bathroom is compact (very small!), and off one of the bedrooms with no option to easily pop in a corridor or move it

On the plus side:

• The rooms are a good size
• It’s in solid condition (external walls and chimneys well re-pointed, good double-glazing in most of the building, newish combi-boiler, roof in good condition)
• It’s very close (a minute’s walk) to local shops, library, post office, restaurants, pubs and the main bus and road routes to central Nottingham
• It’s maybe 5 minutes walk out to countryside

The development plan’s up in the air at the moment, whether we go for conversion to a house, to two flats or to leave it as a combined shop/house. We dunno. A commercial letting agent’s coming round tomorrow for a chat; hopefully this will be enough to guide our next move. Whatever happens, we move in in a week and will renovate while we live in there (mess for months, but saving us £500 a month in rent which can go into the works).

Right, time to get some tea, cheers, Jay

P.S. while me tea cools enough to eat. The post title came from this book about a lady who literally ran around the world, taking 5 years, telling everyone who would listen to get early cancer checks after her beloved husband died of the disease. Our cause has none of this nobility of course, but we’re working hard to keep sight of our goal to be financially free, and I love the mantra: don’t lose sight of your blinding light.

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