Parents, recently graduated mature students, we want more financial freedom, and are gladly out of consumer debt. Now trying to use value investing and sensible budgeting to help us along my way.
We are T & M, a couple trying to do right by our finances. This blog is mostly written by M… So here goes M now:
In 2005, I was made redundant from a job that I was sort of headhunted for. I didn’t really know what to do next, as I was a bit bored. The redundancy paid me a bit of money, but I was left with a (smallish) debt for my car. So, I had to think about my future for once. This is the first time I really made any financial goals and general goals for myself. I got a part time job to tide me over and decided it was time I went back into education.
In the meantime, my spouse and I were not married, but had started to save to get married. “Wait!” I hear you say: “Didn’t you have a debt against your car?” Yes I did, but I managed to arrange with the bank that it would be interest free as long as I paid a certain amount per month, and that I would try to increase my payments once or twice per year. So, rather than pay it off, we saved the cash. However, my spouse’s Dad gave us money towards the wedding, so we suddenly had more than enough, yay! So, I called the bank. By this point, I owed them almost £2000, but we only had something like £1100-1200, but I was determined to haggle. I managed to haggle them to £1500, then £1350, then (I felt like an idiot by now) I asked the person at the other end to please please see if they could do it any lower, as I had almost that amount of money. It ended up that he agreed, and we paid, I think, £1248 in total.
From then on, we have been looking to save where we could, we were pretty frugal as we were both studying by this point, I as a full-time mature student, and my spouse as a full-time employee AND full-time student!!! We didn’t have much time to spend money!
We have come a long way since then, with our little son, house, car, and completed degrees and postgrad degrees behind us, and ahead of us a hopefully better future based on making valuable and purposeful decisions in every area of our life. This blog is our way of helping us focus on our goals and journal our progress towards them.
I am not a financial advisor. The information in this blog is therefore only to be construed as entertainment or just information, not a recommendation to buy/sell/do anything in particular. This blog is merely to share my own goal-setting and reflections upon my journey to a better financial position. I hope you will enjoy it as such.
