gryffron wrote:LBYM is about Living too. I recall one of TMF LBYM regulars collected vintage cars. Many others of us also have expensive hobbies. It isn't about not spending money, it is about not wasting money unnecessarily.
Guilt wiped
Gryff
I'd like, if I may please, to augment this post. It's quite difficult to know where to start, so please bear with me. I am sure that, like us, every other household has been through lean times. Times when interest rates were 14%. A three day week. Blackouts. Paradigm changes as we have moved from an industrial to a service based economy. Job losses. Job insecurity. Increases in retirement age support. In the last 22 years we have seen the problems caused by the collapse of Dot.com companies, the collapse of the banks, Brexit, Covid 19 and the illegal and abhorrent invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine. We have watched in horror as Iraq invaded Kuwait and terrorists attacked the USA on 9/11 and subsequently the UK and France.
In my opinion the UK has a disease that is costing its economy billions in lost productivity. Sad middle management bullies. Sucked into positions with little or no training on how to manage people without resorting to the standard toolbox of intimidation, micro-management, ridicule, impossible workloads and all the other negative techniques that, as I've said, in my opinion are endemic in UK's middle management resource.
Living below your means has been something we have embraced from an early age. We purchased our first detached home when I was 24 and my good lady was 19. It cost £37K and we needed a £30K mortgage. We hadn't been in long when interest rates hit 13.9%. Fortunately we had protected ourselves from interest rate rises so the impact wasn't as great. For 18 months we lived in our new home without carpets. We couldn't afford them. We had little or no furniture. We opened up four separate building society accounts and on the front of each savings book added a label. Gas, electric, water and phone. And we put money into each account monthly to pay our bills as they appeared. We had about £100 month left over for decorating our home, furnishing it and contingencies such as vet bills. So we saved a little each month.
We never went overdrawn in our account and we didn't borrow money. The only debt we had was our mortgage.
Over the next two years my salary rose dramatically as I was promoted at work. We were able to start buying carpets and decorating each room of the house.
As we did so, my Dad died. We decided to sell and move into town, 2 miles from my Mum, to support her. We sold our home for (iirc) £67K and moved into a new home built by the company that employed me. Obviously the mortgage rose. My good lady was now 2 miles from work. We sold her car as we couldn't justify the insurance and tax costs.
My Mum helped in her way. She paid for a new carpet in our lounge and dining room. It wasn't cheap. Bless her.
We lived in our first brand new home for just over two years. My job entailed raising appraisals and revising them for the companies construction sites. The site I lived on was marked for some heavy discounts. Long story, short version, we sold our home at a loss but purchased a larger one on the same site. We had a £66k mortgage on a £100k house. I was 32 and my good lady 27.
And, yes, we had no carpets for the first two years we lived in it.
We're still in that home. It's a good size and has served us well for 28 years.
I've had consistent problems with my health and that's reflected in my income not being consistent. Indeed from 2011 to 2014 my income was virtually non existent and the household finances were trashed.
We've learned to live below our means. I've not earned for a year now. We've over £40k in cash as a reserve. This will allow, if needed, me to never have to work again. But that would mean no holidays ... nothing really other than paying the bills.
My personal pension fund isn't great. A direct reflection of inconsistent health.
We've gone without. We've been patient. We've improvised. We've been our own decorators. We've laid our own footpaths in the garden. We've prepared ourselves for a rainy day, indeed a hurricane. We've even turned our heating down this year and we already have a credit that will pay for this years heating bill, regardless of the temperatures.
On Christmas day we will give our daughter some gifts. We haven't borrowed to buy them. We've bought many of them at discounted prices as we purchased earlier this year.
She has recently sat her GCSE mocks. Not all the results are back yet. But the results she's had so far are strong. She's a little work to do on her Astronomy as she's more capable than a B. I'd like to say she's a straight A student. She's not though. She's had to work hard to obtain these results and, yes, I'm aware she still has to get the same results in her exams next year.
She's in Rangers, is a Police Cadet and volunteers to support her local Brownie pack. Once a year we are able to reward her hard work and say thank you. We want to reward her as, like it or not, that's the society we live in and we want her to understand that closely.
We can do this this because we have remained loyal to living below our means. And I know we're not alone in this discipline. I know many denizens of the Fool also do the same.
We don't live below our means because we're poor. We live below our means because we value the gift that is independence from debt's, sad middle managers, ill health, hurricanes, inflation and all the other nasties that pervade capitalism in the UK.
I want my daughter, not only to embrace such values, but have a head start. Maybe she may just do the same for her family.
Gryff managed to sum up what living below your means is in a few words. I couldn't resist the opportunity of making a Fool of myself and adding one or two more
Take care
AiY(D)
