In this weeks blog we look at how we are doing on our journey towards early retirement, the important things to consider when selling a house, a whole host of things about work related worries and the importance of getting out into the great outdoors and exploring the areas that you might think that you know really well.
Our early retirement progress
Minimise the house. Jackie has done an amazing job this week of starting to gut the house of clutter and begin the deep clean ready for the point we put the house on the market. The combination of a clutter free house and spring evenings brings simple joy to life, and we both truly appreciate coming home to this environment each night.
Put the house up for sale. We have an appointment with an estate agent next week! Oh this shit is getting really real!
Decide our May half term travel plans to keep us sane. We are still waiting for our youngest to see if he can secure any accommodation for the Haye book festival. We have decided that we are going to give him a final couple of days, and then we will have to go to plan B...
Summer plans for travel. No movement on this as it will be dependent on the timeline of the house sale.
Deal with the paperwork relating to Mark. Never easy and frustratingly slow to deal with. We are currently awaiting probate to be approved, so nothing can happen until that judgement is made. If we worried too much about this, it would really upset us, but it is a thing that is currently out of our control.
Start to keep a much closer eye on property availability in our area of choice in the Yorkshire Dales. Ohh sooooo exciting, but also a rather anxious time as the property market is currently scorching hot, and properties are sold in a matter of days. We just need to bide our time, sell our house and then be patient to hold out for our forever home in the Dales.
Top advice for selling a house.
Even though we have kept on top of our house, when you look at it with a critical buyers eye, it shows the inevitable signs of wear and tear that we need to sort out.
Cleaning up the exterior
Best advice says that first impressions still ALWAYS matter. One of the major benefits of lockdown was that we had loads of time to really sort out the exterior of the house. We painted it, gutted the gardens and generally spruced the exterior up. More regular activities that we know we must attend to are:
Mowing the lawn
Cleaning the windows from the inside
Getting front of the house as clear and attractive as possible
Sort out the interior
A home free of clutter feels more spacious. A major declutter and clean will ensure our home looks, feels and smells its best for potential viewings. We have been through the task of tidying and decluttering for the past few months since we made the initial decision to retire early, but advice states that we still need to:
Make our home less personal to encourage potential viewers to see themselves living here.
Let rooms clearly show their purpose by dressing the dining room, study, spare rooms, patio , etc.
Use mirrors to add light and the illusion of space in key rooms.
Return to work anxiety.
Whether it is a sign of a good holiday, or something that I alone suffer from, the return to work is always hard. I love my job, and I know that I am good at it, but I always suffer from heavy feeling of imposter syndrome at the start of each new term. Am I good enough? Do I really know what I am doing?
Perhaps it is the enormity of the task in hand, not being able to see the wood from the trees or simply not knowing where to start at the beginning of every term that causes the feeling of overwhelm.
In reality, I guess that it is a combination of having a good break away from the job, the mind slowing down over the holiday that causes the uncertainty, the lack of self confidence and ultimately the anxiety about returning to a job that I know and love. After nearly 30 years of these feelings, I reluctantly have to accept that it is something that is part of me and I just need to get on with the new term…my final term of employment!
Garmin observations and the impact of working life.
This week I have seen a marked change in some of my Garmin health measures that have illustrated to me the impact of work on my health. My sleep hours have declined, my stress levels have increased (without me actually perceiving that I have been more stressed), my body battery has steadily declined and my activity levels have dropped. How about that for a glowing reference for reasons not to work?
In relation to my lack of awareness about my rising stress measures, it makes me think of a number of explanations for this that I have listened to recently on various podcasts. One particular discussion used fish as an example:
Two fish swim past each other. One fish says to the other fish “Morning, great day isn’t it? How’s the water?”.
The other fish replies “What’s water?”.
The environment that we exist in becomes our norm and we become entirely unaware of it’s effect on us. One suggestion is that we are so used to the elevating levels of stress in our modern lives, that we are simply no longer aware of it’s presence. I think that this is where I was up to this week. The elevated stress levels of work have become so normalised in my life, I no longer recognise any physical changes in my body. It is my trusty Garmin that uses simplistic sensors of heart rate, sleep pattern and activity tracking that highlights the physical changes to me. Surely I should be able to register the same conclusions from being aware of these simple physical changes myself?
Get out and explore...even the places you thought you already knew.
We were at the point on Friday night where we really didn't know where to go or what to do this weekend. We initially thought about bagging some Wainwright's in the Lakes, but we are up there next weekend so decided that would be greedy (and also expensive on the diesel!). We plumped for the Dales, but to be quite honest, we could have easily left it as the forecast for Friday night was pretty cold. How wrong could we have been. Yes we woke up to a grey Saturday morning, but the forecast was set to change by lunch. By lunch, we had made a booking at Howgill Lodge Campsite for the night, got our shorts on and were half way up to Simon's Seat in Wharfdale! A further extension to the walk to find Trollers Gill and the disused mines and the walk was complete. We really did feel that we knew this area really well, and yet still discovered some hidden gems that we had no awareness of. The UK is so vast and varied in its geography that there is always something new to find or to explore, we just need the motivation to get up and get out there.
Have a fantastic week,
Richard & Jackie
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