Life Update

Howdy folks! It’s been yet another mad month lifestyle wise. We’ve made a new recruit at work to help out with the front-end website development projects we have on-going. It’s a remote working position and he’s taken to it like ‘duck to water’. The business keeps chugging on and we’re continuing to grow and expand. The vegetable plot is coming on really well, but I’m having a bit of a disaster with my cucumbers! I will soon need to rename myself to ‘Master Cucumber Destroyer’ as I’ve somehow killed about 5 plants now. I have found out though that it might be due to a lack of nitrogen in my soil, so going to give some feed a go and report back!

Keto Lifestyle

I’ve lost a total of 27kg on our lifestyle change so far. I’m genuinely feeling fantastic and noticing little niggles and aches are disappearing. I’m completely sold on the lifestyle as the benefits of cutting out carbohydrates for me far outweighs the enjoyment of consuming them. 

I did recently though experience a drop / lack of electrolytes, which can be a common symptom because your body expels much more water than usual and so does potassium, magnesium, calcium and so on. 

A quick Lemon based electrolyte drink though soon fixed that. 

House Improvements

Our air conditioning in our Home Office is now installed and functioning well. What a complete god send this piece of kit is – given our upstairs is essentially in the rafters of the roof, it gets incredibly hot here in the summer.

The good thing is that it doesn’t require any water (simply just a 3 pin electrical plug for power). The radiator pipes are still there (but they aren’t connected) and it cools and heats. You mainly see them in Hotel rooms as it saves you having the huge condenser unit on the outside of your house.

Garden Update

The vegetable plot is coming on really well at the moment. My celery, which I decided to just leave in the ground and see if it would cope with winter has shot up and generally everything is starting to come out and grow at speed! You can see some progress pictures from my previous post.

Financial Update | May 2021

So how have those financials been looking for the month of May?

Income | £11,451

Income has dropped somewhat compared to the crazy April 2021, but still incredibly grateful of the position I’m in.

Expenses | £2,848

My expenses were slightly higher than usual, working towards keeping them below £3,000 – £2,500 at the moment. At the moment my expenses are coming out at around £30,000 – £34,000 p/a, but that is including my mortgage, which by the time when I’m ready to down the tools, I’ll end up selling the business.

Savings | £7,150

I managed to fill up my ISA (see post) which has been a new record for me! I don’t know if I’ll be able to fill up the ISA come the next tax year in 1 month, but I don’t think I’d be able to achieve this. I’ve started to put a little extra into my pension to start bringing this up to speed – in total I now put in £500 p/m into my pension whilst everything else is going into my ISA / General Investment account. The reason for this is because I’m going to looking to start withdrawing before retirement age. Therefore if I can build up a decent pot of money into my pension and then use my investment account as drawdown to ‘bridge the gap’ between 40 and retirement age, then that seems like the most sensible option to me?

Investment Graph

Ending

Unfortunately nothing too exciting to report this month. Once the bathrooms have been finished we’ll do some before and after pictures. Life is plodding on this end and we continue to just keep calm and carry on saving!

Thanks all.