Conserving my Life Savings
As a self-employed freelance website designer I don’t have a company pension plan so have been constantly squirrelling money away in a cash ISA which acts as my retirement fund. Keeping ourselves true to the name of this weblog and living a ‘Simple Life of Luxury’ where we work to live rather then live to work means that there isn’t huge amounts of money in my retirement fund, but it’s been better than nothing and always provides a security net should we need it.
We always thought that having this as money we could access was a good idea. Anna has a company pension fund, I had money we could access so we had a good balance between accessibility and performance from our savings. Recently though, with interest rates so low and inflation so high my retirement fund has been effectively loosing money.
So, the time has come to blow it all on a conservatory. Maybe ‘blow’ is a little strong, ‘spend’ will do, but it certainly can’t be classed as an investment, not financially anyway. Although it will be an investment in our quality of life.
The conservatory will extend our ‘Beach Room’, giving us an additional room on the house and hopefully a little more space. It will also extend our use of the garden as it’ll be a garden room as well, allowing us to enjoy the (ever improving) garden from the warmth and comfort of a conservatory. We’re quite looking forward to the new room and the home improvements that will come with it. We’re also having the soffits and fascia boards replaced and hopefully a new garden shed too.
But what of my retirement fund? Well, we fully intend to pay myself back over the next 4-5 years. We’ll pay myself back enough to cover the interest I would have earned as well, so hopefully within 5 years, my fund will be back to what it would have been and we will have been enjoying our new conservatory too. Borrowing from ourselves in this way has got to be the best way to do things. The interest rates are low and the at the end of the day we don’t give any money to a bank or building society by borrowing money from them.
Of course, if we don’t manage to pay it back for some reason, then I’ll at least have a nice conservatory in which to sit and ponder on how to earn some money.
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Oooh… Looks as though they are going to be starting on the conservatory tomorrow – exciting stuff!
Al.