Hello Dear Reader,

Spend day - went out for coffee, I was treated but did buy some utility china in a junk shop - spend £6.

Many of us will have a lot less pension than we’d signed up for and we’ll have paid a lot more and worked a lot longer for it. I certainly do not want to die in harness and need to think about retirement by the time I am sixty and certainly not sixty eight. I’ve had a joyous day with an old friend and both of us were discussing our pensions and how much we will live on. I have the advantage that we’ll have two pensions but we’ll certainly have to be careful and stretch every penny. For a lot of us, thoughts in middle age are often about coping in old age and how we prepare for that.

I think Dearly Beloved will have collected a life time of pallets, added to his saw collection and will be collecting drift wood real soon. I will have accumulated enough fabric to keep me quilt making until I can’t sew any longer. You see, we’re squirrelling away everything we can now. We can’t add to our retirement funds just yet as we’ve decided to pay off our mortgage. I reduce my mortgage capital by a good percentage in the first year and as I pay each month, that percentage of ownership rises every year. It’s slow going but it means I will have paid off a twenty year mortgage in ten years. At this moment in time, when I would like a new sofa and have to go without; it just seems like forever.

We’ve had a rough time with our pensions and the treatment we’ve received from our banks. We couldn’t remortage, we couldn’t move house and now having a house worth less than I paid for it, I have to face up to the reality of serving the term of the mortgage to get my money’s worth.(If you buy a car and drive it for twenty years, the depreciation really doesn’t matter - I will have had my money’s worth out of the house) The future seems so far away and the gratification is very much delayed. We have to pay up and wait.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels like this. When we were in debt and the world seemed to be in debt around us; it felt like we were the only people paying back every penny. Now we are living carefully to pay off our own home, again, it feels like we are the only people doing so. We certainly are not the only people with smaller pensions to look forward to and the uncertainty of when we’ll actually get them. We are certainly not the only people shopping with a list and calculator and cash in our purse. To cheer myself up, I’ve written a ‘one day’ list so I can remind myself of what I’m going without for.

Here goes: sell big house, buy little house, invest money from property (if there is any!)into the pension fund whilst still working. Retire at sixty, take our work pensions (if there are any and we’re allowed) and buy a small motor home or camper van and travel around Europe and the UK. If the butter stops melting, drive further south. Live simply and within our means but hopefully have saved enough into a pension that we can live off it!

I hope home looks like this for the warmer months of every year!

I know it’s a long long way off before I can do this, but I have to remind myself that I will get there one day!

Love Froogs xxxxxxxxxxxx