The USD has weakened compared to GBP this month which meant a £15k change has only materialized as a £6k change to total (GBP denominated) net worth.

This month we filled the remainder of my ISA, so both mine and Mrs SavingNinja’s ISA’s are filled for the year.

I’ve also upped my salary sacrifice pension contributions to 58%, this will mean that I hit the £60k annual SIPP allowance by April - who knows if this will be around for another tax year. This will be our only contribution to savings for a while, I would prefer not to add more money to our GIA, so anything extra will stay in company stocks or go into a high interest savings account until April.

I had to do a lot of maths to figure out how much I needed to contribute to max my annual allowance. Why don’t pension companies make this easier to do?

I’ve now realized while writing this blog post that I didn’t account for the single month of SIPP contributions from my former employer as well, so I did the maths wrong and will have to lower the contribution amount a little bit.

Damn.

Other News

One more month left of not being in the baby-could-arrive-any-minute panic month. Mrs SavingNinja is getting bigger each day even more so than last month. We’ve been washing his clothes this month and preparing more of his room. It’s starting to get way more real that we’re going to have a new arrival in our party of 2 and for the first time, I’m starting to get more excited about meeting him. Hanging his little socks on the line really brought the excitement and made it more real.

I can only take 2 weeks off work as I didn’t accrue full holidays from ‘joining’ my former employer part-way through the year. We also don’t have any parental benefits as we haven’t been living in the UK for the prior tax years. I’m going to try and apply for extended paid parental leave at work if I’m still there after Christmas, but I’m not sure if this will go through.

This would have been 6 months if I didn’t get laid off.

I’m trying to not feel bitter about it, though, and be happy that I’ve got a job that pays well (or even one at all.)

Mrs SavingNinja - Novelist

Mrs SavingNinja’s book sales are going well for her first duet. We ran a free book deal along with paid promotions and this really got the sales and kindle page reads going. Since then she has around 75 reviews on each book and she’s averaged between $5 and $10 net profit each day. The revenue since May for the two books is now sitting at $1200, but we’ve spent almost all of that with advertising and subscriptions to services that help with ARC (advanced reader copy) teams and publishing (BookSirens and BookFunnel for those interested.)

We’re very happy that we are in the green, though! And she has gained a substantial amount of presence in the community with Amazon follows and newsletter subscribers. Most first time authors lose more than they make for their first books.

We know this is a long game. With self publishing, the more books you have in your backlog, the more profitable a new book becomes, and advertising becomes better.

She’s already 7 chapters into writing her second novel series which will be a contemporary romance and is going a lot smoother with all of her learnings from the first.

Mrs SavingNinja has also taken a break from writing recently to complete her seasonal work of marking GCSE English papers. She managed to mark over 1000 papers this year and has netted around £5000 for doing so.

This, along with her technical editing gig (which is now averaging at over £500 per month), and ramping up book sales, we think will be able to fill her personal allowance going forward each year. She hopes that as she writes more novels, this income will eventually replace the GCSE marking, and hopefully much more!

This makes us both really happy as it means we can stay being a fully remote working couple. We enjoy working together and getting all of this extra free time with no commutes. She is also enjoying building something for herself and has the artistic outlet that she never had as a secondary school teacher.

This is also great timing for having a baby as we can both look after him more easily and as her work schedule is her own, she can still continue with writing and editing and doesn’t have to stop work all together.

Life in the UK

We’re missing America so much. The wild mountains that were on our doorstep, swimming in the warm lakes in the summer, the beautiful trees in the autumn and the snowboarding in the winter. It was our perfect home. Being back has made us realize it even more.

We’re trying to remain optimistic that maybe Scotland will be able to replace some of these things, but it is hard to not think that we will never again be in a place as good as that.

15 minutes from our American home:

The UK seems grey, the British people here are less happy, there are no (real) mountains to climb, the lakes are muddy and cold, and we can’t snowboard each winter without traveling. The tax burden is climbing and the economy is getting worse.

Maybe I should continue working just to try and get us back to the US?