Savings Report #87 - Moved to The North

Very late with this update as I’ve had a very hectic start of the month moving to the north of England. We opted to do it all ourselves again - renting the van, loading, and driving 6h with no help and a 1 year old is a stressful experience - but we’re experts at it now. A lot of prep and using nap time well is what got us through it.

The house and place is much nicer than we thought it would be (we hadn’t seen it in person beforehand.) Life feels a little more similar here to what we had in America, albeit a bit more grey and windy.

There are so many new places to explore now we’re here. We are only 1h away from the Lake District and 1h 15m away from the Scottish border. Not had much chance to get out yet as we’ve been focusing on getting the house unpacked.

Now that Baby SavingNinja is exploring more, baby proofing has been top of our mind. We’ve just had to buy 3 different baby gates totalling £170! The staircase here is very dodgy and open plan, so we had to get a more expensive wrap-around gate for the bottom. This is probably the most we’ve spent on the baby since he was born as almost everything else has been second hand and refurbished.

Our house sale is still progressing but contracts haven’t been signed yet. We had some hiccups along the way with missing building regs, but everything worked out in the end. I have my fingers crossed that by the time the next Savings Report is out, the contracts will be signed. Selling will free up a lot of our capital and monthly expenditure which will be a big relief - I have to pay off those 0% credit cards early next year!

I’m feeling a post-idea coming along investigating the financials of our 8 years of house ownership when it sells. I have a feeling it will be a big financial loss, and I haven’t made a non-Savings Report post in a while.

Finances have done very well again this month as I took the snapshot on the 1st of October. As this post is late, stocks have tumbled since, but may be back up again by the end of the month. I’ve also taken out another £3.6k in company stock. I’m going to continue taking out company stock whenever I can as I’m too overexposed currently, but this has been tricky to do while staying under the capital gains thresholds.

All of the talks about being in a bubble has got me a bit jumpy - especially as we’re almost entirely in US index funds. Right now, I’m going to stay willfully ignorant, at least until the house sale has gone through and we need to decide what to do with the capital.

Until then, see you next month.