Hi everyone, I wanted to get some thoughts on my situation/plans. English is not my native language so sorry for the mistakes!
For starters, I live in France where there is cheap healthcare, social support, and basic retirement for everybody. Due to my job I have build up an OK retirement that will kick in at 62. If we keep our COL low that should cover us.
I am 34, married to DH 39, and together we have 3 kids (7, 4, 2). We both come from pretty well off families and even though I'm not counting on them giving us anything it's nice to know somebody has our backs just in case.
We are both not very ambitious and we dont like to work (we like to be busy and learn, but not to hold a job). What we do want is to watch our kids grow up, be there for them. Be outside and move around most of the day. Grow food. Learn new things. start projects not with money at the centre, but with our interests and our heart.
We are in the position where we can buy a bit of land with a house on it for a small price (35.000). After that we would have another 75.000 euros in savings left.
After I quit my job we would have an income of about 700 euros a month due to an appartment that we rent (worth about 100.000 euros, it's paid off) and the child support that we receive.
We figure that to have a nice lifestyle (or continue our current lifestyle, where we mostly swap almost never buy, but we do spend money on good food (we cook all of our food but we want to eat only responsibly grown food and animals), and we spend money on visiting family that lives in another country), we will need about 2500 euros a month of income. That would mean that we each have to bring in about 1000 euros a month. Like stated above we would be covered for health insurance.
Now here's our plan:
We buy the house cash. We keep the 75.000 euros in savings.
We each work where we can. Most likely I would work freelance on projects while my OH would be more involved with keeping up the house /garden/kids. When we dont earn enough we use our savings. In the worst case scenario where we make 0 money, we can live like this for 3 years before we would have to find 'real jobs' or sell the appartment that we rent out now. In the best case scenario we could keep our savings and work only a few hours a week, or a few months a year. And we could keep up this life untill the kids move out and then we could do whatever.
worries:
- we would have to move about 2 hours away from where we are now. we would have to build a whole new network of people, we might find ourself surrounded by old people who are very poor. the kids would be further away from schools
- we would be working a lot to get that money together maybe even worrying a lot about it, afraid to touch our savings
- the house would be hard to sell, so it's not easy to move on unless we had a good income and then could keep the house as a countryside house
- being far away from a big city so difficult to find jobs
excited about:
- being free of workhours/job that i dislike
- spending more time with the kids
- being more in nature/outside
- trying to get my own business going with something that I am excited about
- I always love starting over
So I guess that is most of what I can tell you. Oh by the way I currently work in publishing, but my main skills are in proofreading, copyediting, copywriting, lay-out/bookdesign. I am not allowed to make money on the side otherwise I would give this freelance thing a go before quitting. Also we cant move after I quit my job because we'll need my job to be able to rent a place in the period between selling our house and buying the new one. My OH is basically a SAHD but he is also doing his PHD research (funding ended).
Any comments or advice are welcome. Did I miss anything? Are there any risks I didnt think of? What would you do in our situation? Writing it out like this really helps to organise my thoughts and reading your comments will help me to think differently about the situation.
Thanks!
