fixing things oak-tree low carbon farm: engineering germinaton heat mat horticulture propagator temperature control
by ermine
6 comments
A rare dodgy piece of German engineering in this propagator heat mat
Germany has got itself a reputation for top quality engineering, so I was somewhat surprised to come across a pretty poor example of German engineering in terms of the Bio-Green Sahara heating mat. The mat itself is fine, and continues to do sterling service. It is foil with heating wire run through it, the aim is to stick this under seeds being propagated.
It addresses the fundamental problem that the UK is too far north for most of our vegetables, which were used to the more balmy climates of lower latitudes. So the seeds don’t really get the feeling that it is time to grow until too late in the year, when the temperature reaches what they expected in the Spring, but we get in Summer.
The heat mat comes with a thermostat with a remote probe
which DGF reasonably assumed to be connected with a wire. I had noticed that this damn thing was adding a pretty outrageous extra load to our daily power usage – it is a 65W heater, so if it were on continuously, then it would draw the same amount as the fridge, namely 24×65/1000=1.5kWh.
It was time to break this out again this year, and I took a look at it. The probe reminded me of the sort of thing used on a gas valve to stop the main gas valve opening until the pilot light is lit. These are often thermopiles driving solenoids these days but in the past they were a copper tube with a volatile fluid in it which vaporised on heating to increase the pressure. A capillary tube takes this to the gas valve and opens the valve under pressure.
True enough, this appeared to be the case here, and the device was associated with a disturbing smell of chloroform, which is presumably the active ingredient.
Now in a gas cooker you don’t expect to move the sensor, so having a rigid copper capillary tube is okay. But a heating mat that is described by some retailers as
These all new aluminium encapsulated versatile heatmats easily roll up when not in use.
should not be supplied with a device that is designed to be deployed to a fixed installation. Flex that sensor tube too often and the bugger will crack, releasing the chemical into the atmosphere so that the thermostat will never turn off. The manual really ought to tell you that this is extremely delicate and should not be flexed repeatedly.
The next thing that is painfully wrong is that they tell you to whack the sensor into the soil. Stands to reason, right, that’s what you are trying to control? Not so fast – there is a problem in that the delay between the heat getting to the sensor means there is a large overshoot, as the sensor tells the heater “turn it up, turn it up, turn it UP WHOA THERE turn it DOWN you’ve gone far too much turn it DOWN”.
For the mathematically inclined this is a control system and the lag mucks about with the poles on your Bode plot. I think that’s what I recall from uni. As an engineer it was a lot easier, the mantra was always get your sensor right next to the heater. Which is counter-intuitive because you are measuring not at the point of delivery, but it gets the delay down. You will get a static error due to the thermal resistance from the heater to the soil, but that’s better than ending up with large temperature swings. Industrial control systems use proportional control and may add rate-of-change and integrating loops to go for greater accuracy but these are seeds, they just want to feel they’ve been shifted southwards about 20 degrees of latitude.
The instructions should also have included the practical stuff to make an efficient plant mat, as well as how to avoid knackering the device. The heat only needs to go upto the seeds, rather than downwards, so the heat mat should be placed on an insulating substrate, otherwise energy will be used worthlessly in heating the potting bench. Celotex is probably ideal, but I used a couple of sheets of expanded polystyrene foam covered with aluminium foil. You obviously want to consider what happens under fault conditions with the heater on permanently and dimension accordingly 
The heat mat then sandwiches the heating cable in two sheets of thick aluminium foil, spreading the heat better.
For those looking to do this on a budget, this can be made using standard heating cable such as used for keeping pipes frost-free, with thick aluminium foil either side. If you are doing that using mains power, you should know the difference between class I and class II insulation and how that pertains to your construction. For UK / Northern Europe you’re looking at about a maximum power input of 150W per square metre, the thermostat will kick that back as required.
The thermostat probe then needs to be placed above the foil, rather than in the soil, and the whole lot covered in a thin layer of builder’s sand, on which the plastic modular trays with the seeds are placed. Since I am using this in a conservatory and don’t want the floor covered in sand I constructed a tray from some plywood and bits of pallets to contain the sand. The disadvantage of using wood from pallets is all the pieces are different widths which makes you look a rotten carpenter if you don’t have access to power tools to trim them to size, or the patience to do it with a jack plane. You can’t argue with the price, however!
tray with heater mat and sand
I was still left with a defective thermostat, so I replaced this sucker with a Dallas DS1820 digital temperature sensor and a 16F628 PIC microcontroller to drive a triac controlling the mains powered heating mat. It ended up looking more like a piece of laboratory equipment than a cuddly Bio-Green growing device, but is a lot more accurate. That system was originally part of a project to propagate sweet potatoes but the development time was a couple of weeks too long so I missed the start time and the tubers rotted 
My device had a second sensor and serial output because those sweet potatoes are finicky, this was something that originally grew in Mexico and South America. You are seriously taking the mickey trying to persuade them to think about growing in a chilly British March…
Temperature controller. It doesn't have the friendly curves of the Bio-Green devices so it looks like a piece of lab equipment but it is far more accurate.
For a propagator I don’t need 0.5C accuracy, so if we end up needing more of this sort of thing I may just use an analogue system using thermistors. I also had a Sankey propagator base I used to use for tomatoes, this is thermally balanced and could do with temperature control to save power and get more reliable, it can easily drift up beyond 30°C, which isn’t that great and makes the contents a sod to keep watered.
To save anyone who may come across this having to look the germination temperatures up, here are the values I swiped from a Plant Propagation lecture by the Organic Growers Alliance:
28°C Cucumber
25°C Aubergine, Pepper, Tomato
15°C Celery, Celeriac, Calabrese, Early Cabbbage, Brussels Sprouts
12°C Sweet Corn
10°C All others
All a fair amount of rant from a poor piece of engineering, though it says something for German engineering in general that the odd dodgy one stands out so much. Bio Green do make the electronic version of the device I constructed for about £50.
living intentionally simple living: early retirement frugality
by ermine
4 comments
frugality – akin to living like a celibate monk in a brothel
Todd at financialmentor.com summarised the challenge of what you have to do to become financially independent in 10 years. The thrust of his argument is you need to live on a lot less than you earn, and he described how that isn’t so easy
It takes the self-discipline of a celibate monk living in a brothel to survive on 20-30% of what most people earn in our current culture.
It’s why most people fail, with the exception of odd, extremely focused individual like Jacob (ERE) who finds this all a breeze.
I’m with Todd there. I achieve a greater savings rate than 70%, but then I cheat by having a paid-off house and cycling to work a lot of the time, which takes down two big fixed costs for most people.
Not paying a mortgage isn’t hard, what is hard was paying all the instalments and overpayments over the last 20 years to get to that stage. Reducing other costs was hard. It is particularly hard for the first one or two months of going cold turkey on consumerism.
It was difficult because I had to overcome the norms of a lifetime. For most of my working life I was okay with work, and indeed even now what I do is fine and has regular moments of being interesting. It is the management environment that gets me down. So I had got used to spending a little bit less than I earned, so I was both a consumer of boys toys and of fine wines and eating and drinking out.
Losing the gadget addiction was a harsh switch but easier to hold on to, compared with losing the eating and drinking out. In the end I didn’t want to be working longer to sustain that lifestyle of having the toys, once I had come to that conclusion I could execute the decision, job done. I still have the gadgets I bought up to April 2009, there’s no point in flogging stuff like that on Ebay for the time/return point of view and most of them still work, and surprisingly enough I’m happy with their slowly ageing functionality. Stuff, therefore, was not the problem, and indeed sitting on Stuff accumulated over nearly thirty years of working life means Stuff wants have mostly been addressed anyway.
Hardly watching TV and web-surfing with the power of ad-block plus on my side means I am exposed to far fewer ads than most people, and I adopt a30-day embargo to sterilise any residual power of advertising. If I had a desire for some consumer item, stick it on a list and park it. After thirty days if it still seems like a good idea, go for it. 30 days gives enough time to reflect, and eliminates 95% of my purchases – by then I’ve usually found a way round it or it simply didn’t matter that much to me anyway.
It’s where my world intersects with other people that contrasts and difficulty lie. This is where Todd’s comment rings true for me. Before April 2009 I lived in a way that wasn’t particularly different from how my colleagues and friends lived. The biggest obvious difference is probably being child-free, though even that isn’t hugely unusual in the people I know.
Now, there is a big difference. Most of the people I know from work spend a lot more than I do, and they get nice stuff for it. One guy I know has an audio system that’s worth more than my house. Many have more than one foreign holiday a year; I haven’t used my passport for the last three years.
You have to be more internally referenced than usual to live so differently from the people around you, just like the monk holding to his own values despite the whorehouse around him reflecting contrasting ways of living. ERE observed that early retirement tends to draw personality types INTJ. I would say it is the independence of thought that is the most valuable aspect of that personality type for executing the frugality needed to achieve early retirement, where all around me things urge me to spend! spend! spend!
Trying to spend less means I sometime pass on social opportunities. So there is a cost to living differently, and I choose to pay that cost in the interest of being able to stop working a lot earlier than most people I know. Compared to the quality of life I lose by not buying Stuff, the quality of life I lose by cost-cutting in experiences and socialising is more of a downside to going for early retirement.
Although I am probably personality type INTJ, I’m not as strongly that way as say Jacob, and by going for early retirement rather than extreme early retirement the frugality challenge isn’t such a big ask. Being older than the typical extreme early retirement planner helps too, as SG observed in this comment.
Half the trouble with extreme early retirement for most people is that the first two decades of your working life contain the biggest costs – getting somewhere to live and buying the stuff to set up a household, and just when you are clear of that, most people then have children. That sets you back again because they costs some extra money but more importantly restrict the household’s capacity to earn money.
If I had time and energy on my side I would go the route of the entrepreneur, I wouldn’t choose saving as a means to financial independence. Although taking a long hard look at spending and cutting waste is worthwhile, at the moment I have reduced spending on things that would enhance my life.
So unlike ERE, and Monevator, the attractions of the Spending whorehouse are real for me. It is just that the attractions of financial freedom are greater.
Imbolc – as the light lengthens, so the cold strengthens
It’s the first of February, the ancient festival of Imbolc, the beginning of the natural world bursting into life in the UK. I got on my bike to cycle into work for the first time this year, and as I travelled along I enjoyed the sound of robins singing, sparrows chirping all around, chaffinches calling and great tits singing.
Nutters, the lot of them – February is also one of the coldest months of the year, and yet there are buds appearing on the trees and the birds are up for it. It doesn’t feel like it due to the cold, but perhaps Spring is really on her way 
It is halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, and the beginning of the farming year.
living intentionally simple living: fuel cost katy perry log burner louboutin specialisation
by ermine
7 comments
On living differently
Often it’s easier to see something reflected through other people’s eyes than it is to see it in oneself. A couple of PF posts that resonated with some of what I am doing.
Both of them were by Philip Brewer, whose review of Jacob’s book Early Retirement Extreme brought out this key nugget:
Don’t specialize.
Instead, develop the skills to do many ordinary things yourself. It doesn’t take nearly as much effort to develop and maintain a basic level of competence as it does to become good enough at something that you can do it professionally.
Now I’m a great fan of ERE, but I hadn’t spotted that in reading his blog, intellectually at least. And I’m far too tight to buy the book, since my library doesn’t carry US PF books. Practically, I was already following the lower specialisation path.
I am an serviceable carpenter, but not a cabinet-maker, and entirely self-taught to boot, apart from what I observed from my Dad many decades ago. That’s enough to save a few hundred pounds on making cold frames, though they’re hardly good enough to sell. And yes, I know every half-competent allotment holder does something similar, though I venture that even my substandard handiwork is better than about half of what’s out there However, my requirements were on a much larger scale.
That leads to one of the key things about living simpler, or differently, or extreme early retirement. It was reduce external dependencies, or put another way, increase self reliance.
The modern world is one where there is a high degree of specialisation and inter-dependency. It gains richness and variety in doing that. For instance, making Christian Louboutin high-heeled shoes is a seriously specialised job and you probably need a marketplace of hundreds of millions to be able to get enough demand, far more than the catchment area for a village cobbler.
You need market scale for niche products like Christian Louboutin shoes, worn by Katy Perry
Now it’s clear that Louboutins are in a different league from the functional products of a village cobbler, but all that specialisation does have its downside too. It sets us in a rat-race by definition, because all this dependency means that you have to persuade others to do things for you. Most of us aren’t beautiful enough or persuasive enough to do that without money, so we have to suck it up to The Man to get the money. Robert Heinlein wouldn’t have approved – specialisation is for insects.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Much of the battle here is to reduce consumption. The obvious implication is a reduced standard of living, well it stands to reason, duh. And yet funnily enough, yes, one’s standard of living does fall, but in no way does it drop in proportion to the difference in the cost of the excess consumption. The aim is to consume smarter at the same time – buy much less, but buy better. We’re talking scaling down and trimming the excesses, not living in communes or doing a 1970s Felicity Kendal. I choose my excesses rather that simply following the herd to go for excess in all things as instructed by those nice advertising people.
Buy secondhand rather than new – much of advertising is aimed at the “you need it now” brigade. There’s very little that you need now – you need the air for your next breath now, but some consumer item will probably be cheaper and better next year. If you can wait for the item to come on ebay at the right price, you’ll get far more bang for your buck. Obviously, if fashion, or things like the latest iPhone matter to you, then this won’t be a recipe for a happy life. I don’t get to see a movie until a few years after its out and it is on terrestrial (non-pay) TV. It doesn’t really matter to me – if it did, I could pay, but I choose not to. I spent some of this afternoon shifting about 20 rounds of wood from where a tree-surgeon had cut down a pine tree. Why? because I’d like to do the same for my gas bill as I did to my electricity bill.
The Rational Optimist
If I buy my cold frames from a store, I have to pay 20% VAT on the product, plus 20% tax (I have driven my income below the 40% tax rate using AVC contributions, otherwise I would be paying 70% tax on purchases) plus 11% National Insurance on PAYE on earning the money to buy this. Thus I have to earn twice as much as the product costs. So for everything you see in a store, double the price to account for the tax you pay on the money to buy it.
That is why doing something for yourself often pays well – your hourly rate is double what it is when you earn money to buy the same thing, for the simple reason you aren’t taxed working for yourself. That’s where the basic level of competence works – I am sure I take longer to construct something out of wood than a craftsman, but as long as I am having a good time doing it then typically it costs less than half as much to do it in raw materials than it would be to buy. Plus I know how to service it. When I installed my Freesat dish out of scrounged bits it took me longer than an aerial installer would take, because he does it every day and has the workflow perfected. But it was a lot cheaper; though it should be noted I had the specialised knowledge from work.
As a society we have learned incompetence in doing things for ourselves – this Popular Mechanics from the 1930s shows how much has changed – I wouldn’t know how to go about half of this, and I am reasonably practical.
Some of the skills have been made redundant by increasing reliability and performance. I don’t need to know how to change piston rings, for instance – my car is coming up for 110,000 miles and still gets away with the annual service and MOT, something that was unheard of 20, 30 years ago. That is good. But some of the craft projects showed just how much people did for themselves, compared to now.
Some things that are obviously going to eat up money in future are energy costs, simply because we have only so much fossil fuel energy available and the demand is going up due to the increasing number of people wanting to live a Western lifestyle. I’ve already seen that – I have forced my electricity consumption down by more than half over the last six years but the total price I pay is still the same. Anticipating the same effect with gas, I aim to use this piece of equipment
multifuel log burner
to reduce my heating costs. It is a seriously low-tech piece of gear, a cast-iron box with a pipe out the back, into which you stuff wood and set fire to it. Compared to the gas central heating it’s a right PITA to use. But you can’t argue with the price of fuel – basically the cost of petrol for the chainsaw, though eventually we will be using biomass willow growing on a local authority allotment they couldn’t rent out because it regularly gets flooded with runoff from a road. You wouldn’t want to eat veg from there, but the willow likes water. If you keep your eyes open though, there is plenty of wood to be had for the asking as long as you are prepared for the grunt on carting it off and sawing it/axeing it up.
Now it’s obvious to me that fuel is going to go up in future. And in the general theme of becoming less dependent, not wanting to be taxed at 50% on needs and preferring to spend my money on stuff I really can’t do for myself, I want to get out of the money economy as much as possible for this necessity. That means some capital expenditure (log burner, chainsaw, chainsaw PPE) in return for reducing my long-term financial risks of being fleeced for power. My gas and electricity bills are about £800 together. I had to earn £1600 to be able to pay that. Some of that should be going to my retirement savings, not equally split between EDF and George Osborne’s war chest, thanks all the same.
The second post that tickled me was Change Your Life with Storytelling. I haven’t actually got to grips with this one yet, and this post highlighted that maybe I ought to. The narrative of what I am doing in life has an awful lot of what I am trying to get rid of, and arguably it doesn’t have enough of what I am trying to get more of. If I put my mind to it, it is still hard to picture where I want to be, and that may well incapacitate my ability to make that happen, because I can’t picture it. I feel I am in a mapless territory, and perhaps that needs to be addressed before I can unleash the power of saving to create and image a different, better, life.
Of course that may all be a load of metaphysical bollocks – such is the human condition that it is hard to separate the variables at times
simple living: all hallows day chaffinches goldfinches halloween samhain winter finch flocks
by ermine
2 comments
Samhain and All Hallows Day, the beginning of the ancient year
Yesterday was Samhain, the beginning of the dark half of the year. It is the time of retrenchment, of communal pursuits rather than individual enterprises, as the land gets colder with the waning Sun. It was the time of harvest, the last of the plenty of summer.
Though the air hasn’t yet picked up the winter crispness, the first frosts have improved the sprouts and parsnips. Birds are feeding communally, finch flocks are massing in the countryside. Yesterday I was near Grundisburgh and a huge flock of chaffinches worked their way over a hawthorn hedge. The arrow-shaped blaze of white in their tail feathers, only visible in flight, flickered daintily against the green and red of the remaining leaves and berries.
Closer to home the goldfinches are calling to each other are their growing flocks seek out seeds as they swoop over the fields. The sound is a charming metallic tinkle mixed in with resonant lower buzzing tones rich in harmonics.
On the way back I called in at Tesco, where I observed a stupendous tack-fest that Halloween has become. Somewhere in China there are factories beavering away producing plastic rubbish that is designed for landfill after one night…
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Sounds of the Halloween display in Tesco. The cheer obviously doesn’t extend to the presumed Tesco off-duty employee fearful of being fired if her kid broke something.
personal finance simple living: complainypants hemingway john donne preparedness spending review sun tzu
by ermine
17 comments
send not to know for whom the bell tolls
…it tolls for thee. Hat-tip to Monevator, from whom I’ve unwholesomely pinched the phrase. There again, he swiped it from Hemingway, who got it from John Donne. We will find out on Wednesday what else is in store from the Comprehensive Spending Review, few will escape unscathed, even if only hit by dint of buying stuff, for VAT will rise to 20% from January. So far that is the only hit I know of, barring the NI hike but I believe it was the last lot who set that up.
In researching some of the previous posts I turned up some breathtaking examples of smart people who seem to take complacency to new levels – let’s hear it from
Sarah (hat tip to Lemondy for turning up that one)
Joseph and his brood of 5
Nicholas with his £500 a month nursery habit
fulltimemum on the DT – it’s not just a Guardian thang…
Though it’s true that all these individuals have kids, this isn’t their problem. They’re all better off than most UK households, and their primary problem is an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, a lack of foresight and suboptimal personal finances. Jacob from ERE has a wry analogy of how they got to be that way.
They live according to their means – all the way up to their income limit and in some cases beyond. It means there’s no slack in the system, and in some cases no savings either. Now it’s understandable if you live on a tough council estate and have no savings, but if you’re a higher-rate taxpayer writing for the Guardian you really can do better.
As Monevator intimates, send not to know for who the deficit reduction bell tolls. it tolls for thee. The obvious response to the distant drumbeat of cuts is above all else reduce outgoings. Sun Tzu had words of wisdom:
Invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the attack.
Now is about defending your personal finances. The time will come later to try and improve them by increasing your income, for instance going for a better job.
Building up savings is nice, but reducing cash haemorrhages can really improve your financial position short and long-term. On the principle that it’s good to get one’s attack in first, the time to start doing this is now, so you won’t have to mount a response to something like the loss of child benefit under fire.
That means tackling subscriptions, Sky, mobile phone packages, eating out, drinking, jazz lessons, visits to the cinema. Knowing how much you spend on these items per month is a really good start, particularly the ones which come frequently but at random like eating out.
I’m not going to bore you with the mechanics. Knowledge is power – tracking where your money is going is the key to this. I have used Quicken since 1998, and it gives a rear-view mirror perspective to my spending. Most personal finance guidance advocates setting a budget, ie trying to get a forward view on spending, but it all depends on the quality of your estimation. Mine was pretty ropey, I could only control my spending watching the rear-view. For most of those years I used Quicken to avoid going into debt and paying bank charges, living a reasonably middle-class and hedonistic lifestyle, up to, but never beyond my income. I did save indirectly, as I took the now unusual step of repaying some of the capital on my house at various times.
It was only with seeing the writing on the wall at work with some changes that drew it to my attention that I did not want to carry on doing things this way that I changed. At the time I thought I was going to be finished in a year. That concentrated the mind – I switched to intense pre-tax savings in pension AVCs and post-tax savings in ISAs – first a couple of cash ISAs to achieve an emergency fund that wouldn’t get destroyed on the stock market (it’ll just get destroyed over the next couple of years by the twin horsemen of inflation and QE), then NS&I index-linked certs for the three-year timeframe and shares ISAs for the five-year plus.
At the same time I also allocated about the same amount of resources to non-financial investments because I believe there is a significant likelihood that Britain and the West will never recover from this financial crisis, and that the financial bloodbath that started in 2007 is the harbinger of fundamental changes to geopolitical power and global resource shortages particularly in energy.
I had the advantage(?) of hearing the bell toll for me, and having a year to prepare. For pretty much anybody in the UK, but particularly anybody working in the public sector, well, chum, that bell is tolling for thee. For heaven’s sake, start preparing. Three months ago would have been a good time to start, but now is still good, and better than three months hence.
SAHM Sarah is at least on the right track, though some of her outgoings still beggar belief. F’rinstance, she’s chuffed to be saving £36pm on her car insurance. I couldn’t do that, because mine is about £20 pm fully comp, so either she is driving some fancy wheels or she is a rotten negotiator. She’s younger and a damn sight more attractive than me, but as a lady probably gets a discount for not having testosterone coursing through her veins. I hate to think how much her insurance was before!. If her husband works in Ipswich, then why on earth do they pay Cambridge house prices? For sure, Cambridge is prettier, better connected, more cosmopolitan, but is it really worth the extra costs? Plus faced with
We have no savings – all money spent on moving house six times in 10 years for my husband’s career – but we’ve stopped the £20 a month put in each of the children’s child trust funds.
Ever heard of that archaic practice called renting, dear woman? Yes, you don’t build up (negative) equity in the home, but you lose a shocking amount of money moving house if you are a homebuyer, not to mention the emotional frazzle of the process. The money lost in the home purchase turn isn’t so bad amortised over 7 years which is the average dwell time of UK homeowners, but churning your residence every two years is as nutty as churning your shareholdings every couple of months. Just don’t do it – or at least tot up the total of all those estate agents, surveyors, solicitors, mortgage arrangement and moving fees…
If you’re a banker you’re probably okay, but for anyone else in the UK live as if you’re going to take a 25% pay cut over the next year. Regardless of your risk of job loss, there are some serious economic headwinds coming our way over the next few years -
- More expensive fuel, heating and electricity as a result of increased world demand and potential supply bottlenecks
- a loss in the purchasing power of the pound due to quantitative easing, inflation or both
- potential falls of house prices in real terms due to wage pressures, less money for mortgages and inflation. That is particularly bad for people with a high loan-to-value because interest rates will go up if inflation takes hold
- Increasing food and clothing costs are a result of fuel and resource pressures
Now is not the time to be spending up to the limit of your income, like I was a few years ago. And it is definitely not the time to be spending beyond your income, no matter what the reason.
It’s time to get a personal finance tin hat – you need to electively choose to start living on less that your income even if it means doing without things, so you have space to deal with this loss of purchasing power. There’s no point in burying your head in the sand – deal with reality, otherwise reality will deal with you in its own way.
As the cited individuals show, filling in a sudden personal finance hole causes worry and grief. A sense of entitlement simply makes you blame the rest of the world for problems. It may well be the fault of the rest ofthe world, but it is easier to change yourself and your actions than it is to get the rest of the world behind your point of view.
Obviously I could be wrong, but anybody with half an ear to the news will observe that the likelihood of being richer in a few years time is less that the expectation of being poorer. Plus, what’s the worst that could happen? You scrimp and save a bit now, Britain starts booming again and you end up sitting on some saved cash? Time for that trip to Australia, pop the bubbly and have a good laugh at your ill-founded pessimism and that fruitcake at SLS.
Whereas take the ostrich mentality to the incoming crapstorm, what’s the worst that could happen? You lose your job, then your home? You start whining on the Guardian and then have lots of people say nasty things about you which brings Patrick Collinson out in hives?
Oh yes, and that bell is tolling for me too, just to show we’re all in it together. I’m not rich enough for the pension changes announced so far to affect me, but known issues I will be hit by -
- VAT rise
- fuel costs
- heat/light/power
- property/council tax rises
- increasing costs of food
- demise of the State pension/introduction of means testing, goodbye to 30 years NI payments for me.
- inflation due to QE destroying a good part, ~50% if I am lucky, almost total wipeout if I’m not, of my accumulated wealth despite attempts to turn it into real stuff and shareholdings (tin hat/optimistic portfolio)
and I’m sure George has got something thought up especially for me.
He can’t take any of my benefits away, because I don’t get any that I know of, but he can raise taxes. It is true that since I am close to the end of my working life the cumulative effect of this is less, but those readers who are at an earlier stage in your working lives and therefore more exposed can take some comfort in knowing that the devaluation of the currency will trash a significant amount of my accumulated wealth.
Plus the forthcoming house price crash will trash the nominal value of my house, though that doesn’t upset me that much as I have no mortgage. It might even give me an opportunity to upgrade. Whatever happens, the house will still keep the rain off my head.
Holkham Gap
Okay, so the picture is a bit cheesy. It’s from this time a couple of years ago, needed something to clear away the gloom. Holkham in Norfolk is a fabulous place for birds, on the classic North Norfolk coastline.
saving electricity at home
Saving electricity at home is all round a good thing to do. It saves money, it reduces your carbon footprint if you care about that sort of thing, and it cuts down on waste. What’s not to like?
For some reason the subject has been hijacked by two small changes that seem to capture lots of column-inches but aren’t that effective in the grand scheme of things – changing your lightbulbs and unplugging your phone chargers when not in use. Sorry to rain on the green parade, but these aren’t the chief power hogs in most people’s homes. This is a straightforward engineering problem, one that is best tackled by measurement and the application of science, not mantras.
You need two tools for the job, one temporarily and the other is a nice to have to keep on top of things. It’s all down to Kipling’s serving-men, though we can stick with What, Where and When.
Tool #1 – Appliance consumption meter
This measures the amount of power used by an individual appliance- you plug it into the socket and plug the appliance into the meter’s socket. It’s nice to get one that measures the cumulative power used over a period, because to get an accurate idea of a fridge’s daily use you want to accumulate the consumption over a week and divide by 7. Most people have a different daily lifestyle on the weekend compared to the weekday, so capturing over a week gets information representative of all types of use.
Appliance consumption meter
Unfortunately you only need this temporarily while you’re in the Identify the Power Hog stage – they’re not horribly expensive but it’s worth trying to borrow one first. These are also not very accurate at low power consumption devices, such as mobile phone chargers. Presumably the stories about unplugging your chargers came from somebody at Greenpeace measuring a charger with something like this and seeing about 50W or so. If I saw a charger using 50W I would reach for a fire extinguisher. A bit of common sense is needed – a charger is about the same size as a old-skool light bulb. If it’s dissipating 50W, it will be getting about as hot as a light bulb, and anybody who has tried to change one of those that has just blown will know they are damned hot. If it were the phone dissipating the 50W rather than the charger I’d still be very afraid….
View the results for loads less than ~50W with suspicion. Fortunately that isn’t really a problem, you are after hunting the big game here, unless you’re already living off-grid. I was an early adopter, so I got taken for a ride when I bought mine for £20, people like Maplin sell these. You’ll get your money back in power saving unless you’re a hermit.
It’s the things that change temperature that are the power hogs. Hit these guys first, and preferably measure their power usage over a week to know what they are costing you.
Everybody knows electric heating is expensive – every kilowatt-hour in the UK costs you between 12 and 20p on a standard domestic rate. Three kilowatts is about the maximum you can draw from a standard UK power socket, and a typical fan heater is about 2kW. Use one of these suckers for 4 hours and the kWh is 2kW x 4 hours = 8kWh, which could set you back £1.60. If you’re a homeowner using electric heating then look at alternatives such as using a woodburning stove – almost any other fuel is cheaper per unit heat.
It’s hard to live without heating and changing the heat source usually demands capital spend. However, two other domestic energy hogs need to be tackled before the light bulbs -
Fridges/Freezers. These bad guys are on all the time, and worse still, their performance tends to deteriorate gradually over time. I had a Zanussi fridge freezer which was a few years old that drew over 4kWh a day, ie 1500 kWh a year. This punk was costing me £210 a year to run (@14p a unit on average). The one I replaced it with is A rated, and uses about 1.7kWh a day, a saving of ~£120 a year. That cost me £230 in October last year, so it has already paid me back about £100 in power costs this year, and by the end of next year I will have broken even. After that I am in extra time – what investment can you get that gives a 50% ROI year on year these days…
Tumble Dryer/Washing Machine
I was of the view that washing machines were power hogs but mine isn’t, it takes less than 1kWh for a wash. That’s pretty much over a cycle at 40deg and it doesn’t matter how full it is. So fill it, but not so much the washing can’t move.
The tumble dryer, however, is another matter – it takes about 3kWh to dry a load of washing. There’s a free alternative that doesn’t take power, it’s called a washing line Unfortunately this is a change in lifestyle, and not one for the better – hanging washing out is a right PITA. At least the weather forecast is better now so you can usually work out whether it’s going to rain and hence if it’s worth doing a wash in the morning.
The cost of using a tumble dryer is only about 40p a go, but it is a regular cost so like any regular cost it adds up over time. It also knackers your clothes, so the actual cost is probably more like 50p a go when that is taken into account.
Immersion Heater
These guys are such power hogs you can’t usually run them off a 13A plug, though that didn’t stop one landlord of mine doing that, and the plug did get mighty warm too. There are three things you can do here: get a timer, use less hot water, lag the tank as much as you can. if you have one it is worth getting a feel for how much it is drawing – even if you have to switch everything else in the house off and read the meter before you go to bed and then in the morning. When I did that I turned mine off and it stays off – I use my gas central heating on water only mode, it’s still cheaper than using one of these infernal devices.
Use a Whole House Monitor to keep Power Usage down
Once you’ve taken these high-power devices out or got them under control/started saving for efficient versions you can then start fiddling about with mobile phone chargers and light bulbs. There’s a nasty tendency for new things to get added to the background drain of your house, particularly it seems if you have children That’s where you need a whole-house monitoring device, which clamps around the main live intake wire and sends the whole house usage. Mine is an Efergy monitor (I got rushed for that too, they’re now less than £50)
Efergy whole house monitor
These allow you to keep an eye on total consumption. You soon get used to the background usage of your house with the fridge on and off (mine is 0.12kW and 0.04kW respectively). It’s good because before you go to work you take a look and if it says anything else you’ve left something on that doesn’t have to be on. And you get to see if it creeps up for any reason…
See -nary a word about light bulbs. What about them? My maximum wattage was 60W light bulbs, assume two of these are on all the time 6pm to 11:59 pm for half the year. That’s £18. That duff fridge freezer was costing me five times that much. Using a tumble dryer twice a week costs you twice as much. I can’t get excited about sweating the small stuff. Want to save money on lighting without spending a bean? Never underestimate the energy saving potential of the humble light switch set to the off position. Switch the buggers off when you’re not using them, just like your parents and mine did when electricity was more expensive in real terms….
So where did all this fuss get me then?
My power usage, cost and cost per unit
The dip in 2005 and the subsequent peak is an artifact of changing provider then. I got all this kit early 2008. One the one hand it is depressing, I’ve sweated hard to get my power bill back to a shade under where it was in 2003.
On the other hand, I’ve more than halved my power consumption, and the reason the bill is the same is because the cost of electricity has gone up more than two times in seven years. Look at the monotonic rise in the cost graph. This is because North Sea Gas is running out, it is because the Pound in falling, it is because there are lots more people in the world wanting a slice of a limited energy pie. I don’t expect it do come down any time real soon. So although in financial terms I’m not going anywhere, it is still worth doing, else I’d have to find another £500 a year. And personally, I’d rather consume that as decent red wine rather than making a donation to EDF’s slush fund…
There is a nasty little wrinkle in this – look at the unit prices charged:
Differential unit pricing hides the standing charge
A shade under half my usage is charged at higher rate, which is used to hide the quarterly standing charge of about £16, because most electricity consumers are not adult enough to be prepared to see the cost for the provision of service separately. So it’s hidden as an extra unit cost for the first 240 units. EDF presumably think that nobody can get the quarterly consumption down below 240 kWh. Now I am half way there. If I could get the rest of the way, by taking over some of my demand by alternative means, or by say using a gas fridge, then I could get a much better marginal rate for energy saving
None of the steps taken so far is anything that uses my specific knowledge of engineering, it is simply common sense that anybody can do. It means I don’t have to get uptight about my light bulbs or my mobile phone chargers, and indeed I still use incandescent light bulbs and a LED lamp for reading. In the future I may shift my lighting load to LEDs and renewables, more from a resilience/off-grid POV because I expect Britain to suffer power shortages as a result of a lack of capital investment in its generating capacity in the medium term future, and this sort of solution is specific to me. However, it won’t particularly change my power bill because I switch lights off if I am not using them.
reflections simple living: a levels carpentry diy self-reliance
by ermine
8 comments
self-reliance, DIY and A-Levels
Building a packing table for the Oak Tree a couple of days ago, it struck me how much we’ve got used to buying in rather than do for ourselves compared to the last few decades. This raises the costs of living today in all sorts of ways. Our neighbours use an ironing service, there is a company that makes its living going round with a pressure washer cleaning out some people’s wheelie bins after they’ve been emptied. For those with children there are any number of child-related services, from childcare itself to after-school classes and activities.
All of these services add regular increments to many people’s cost of living. None of the increments in isolation looks particularly onerous, but the cumulative effect is quite remarkable. Take the regular outgoings my parents had in the 1970s
- mortgage
- car
- electricity
- gas
- water
- land-line phone
- rates (equated to Council Tax nowadays)
- TV licence
and now take a look at the extras a typical modern family would have on top of those costs
- mobile phone subscription(s)
- Sky TV/cable
- broadband
- childcare
- second car
They could easily end up needing another £2000-5000 a year. They wouldn’t necessarily feel any better off for it. but it is still a hit to their pockets.
With the table I was making, the advantage of building farm equipment is it is cheaper than buying, natch, and the advantage for me as builder is that rustic construction adds charm. I am no cabinet-maker, my carpentry is imprecise, so outdoor construction is good for me. It has the satisfaction of working with real stuff with my hands, unlike how I earn a living at the moment. Plus it costs less than £50 in wood, whereas it would have cost me £350 from Amazon. Granted, that table looks nicer, but it’s the wrong height since you stand at a packing table
I learned working with tools and DIY as an adult, because though my Dad worked as a maintenance fitter he did not want to pass this on because he wanted me to aspire to better things. Which is roughly what happened, so he did well, although as a tyro and skint householder I had to learn plumbing and the like from books, colleagues and trial and error.
Once again, thinking about what he did for a living, companies used to repair equipment in far more detail than they do now. If something at work needed repairing, Dad would manufacture the replacement by making it from materials, often turning parts on a lathe and using tools, both metal and wood parts, and the company had him and a few other guys doing this.
Nowadays, this would be contracted out to the supplier and they would swap larger parts. I observed the same changes when I worked at the BBC – when I worked in studios we would fault-find down to the component level and replace individual resistors and transistors. This started to move towards replacing sub-assemblies when I left, and now I would imagine most items would be on a maintenance contract with the supplier, who would swap the whole item and simply throw out faulty modules.
In short, we’ve become even purer consumers; we don’t fix anything any more, and we are far less self-reliant as a result. Life costs more as a result, since we have to replace rather than repair. As for building stuff from scratch, we seem to have neither the time nor the money. When I look at, say, this Popular Mechanics from 1971 I’m amazed at the level of skill assumed – I wouldn’t know what some of the hand tools are for, never mind use them, and yet many articles assume this level of craft skill.
Why it’s not the employers getting shafted by A-Level grade inflation, it’s the kids!
Every crabby old git has a chance to take a cheap shot at A Level results when they come out round about this time of year, so I might as well have my turn here. This graph (okay it is from the Daily Fail but the issue of grade inflation has enough other publicity) says it all.
There was an interesting thread on this board, where it shows that the reasons for the change has been lost in the mists of time for people taking A levels now. I am old enough to remember how this worked before the kink in the graph, and the explanation is simple.
When I took my A levels in the late 1970s, they were graded in terms of relative levels. That is, about 8% of the candidates got an A grade. This system, called a norm reference, is self-calibrating. It is inevitable that some years the papers will be harder than in other years, but this means that one year the A pass mark would be 80%, if it were harder the next year the pass mark would be 75%for example.
This delivers results that are useful for employers and universities. In practice, employers and unis have only so many places. They know roughly how many people they want to take on, and if they have academic requirements, they can then say they want to take the top 8% (or 80% – their needs will vary) and adjust pay rates accordingly if they are employers. Be less selective and you can pay less, but you may then accept you get people who are less smart. Smartness is not the only requirement at work and is a hindrance for some jobs, but at least you can sift the candidates and place them relative to their peers.
The downside of this method is that some candidates fail, or at least get grades that are worthless in the marketplace. At some point it was deemed that this was a Bad Thing, because some people’s self-esteem is harmed by knowing they aren’t as bright as other people. For some reason this was so upsetting that they had to cover it up.
I won’t go all Atlas Shrugged on you, but it’s a fact that ability is not spread evenly at all. Some people are stupid. There. I’ve managed to say it. Some people aren’t geniuses, much as it may come as a surprise to their parents. For instance, I wasn’t bright enough to get into Cambridge. Usain Bolt has the edge on me in the 100m too, I’m sad to say. The problem here, is that fixing the exams to cover up this nasty little fact of life may have made the dim feel better but it doesn’t allow the clever to shine.
Two things were done, one was to pretend that the exams tested an absolute standard, immediately destroying the feedback mechanism that calibrated the difficulty of the exams to the pass mark. A norm referenced system that allocates marks as a percentage of candidates is not easy to fiddle, and I find it hard to believe that the one year’s 300,000 A level entrants are going to be that much brighter or dimmer than the next year’s. A criterion referenced system is easy as pie to fiddle, because who judges the difficulty, and how do you measure difficulty other than by how many people pass? It’s just all too open to abuse, and the incentive to up the pass rate is always there.
Because the norm reference was lost, the Uniform Mark Scheme was apparently an attempt to nut variations between different paper setting boards.
There were other changes that made it possible to increase grades. When I took A levels you only resat an exam if you had failed, and you had to take the whole exam again. Now with the modular system you can resit individual components, keeping the best mark for each component, assembling your A level one piece at a time. If I were a prospective employer I would want to know resit details. Something gives me the feeling that someone who passes first time is perhaps better than someone who needs to take five bites at the cherry
The tragedy here is borne by the young people that the current system fails – the academically gifted who can’t shine in this system because the dim bulbs are being lit up from behind. It is not the exam takers who have failed, it is the designers of a system that has lost its ability to discriminate.
A second perversity of the British university system is the ramping up of admissions targets, from 7% when I entered university about 30 years ago to 50% now. There is an implicit lowering of of the bar in that. It is possible that better nutrition, health-care and education has improved the level of intelligence somewhat over the years, but probably not by that much
Compare the mayhem of UK clearing with this description of the German numerus clausus which seems to manage the numbers and indeed the studied subjects. Such a system, however, is only possible because the Abitur (A-level equivalent) still discriminates by ability. Obviously this means those that don’t do well in the Abitur don’t get to realise their dreams, taking a corresponding hit to their self-esteem. In Germany it seems this is still considered acceptable.
Eternally whingeing employers are also to blame – when I started work employers accepted that graduates coud not immediately be plugged into a job but had to be trained – for several weeks in the BBC’s case, before they could be let loose on the expensive and potentially dangerous equipment and expensive studio time. There seems to be a lot less preparedness among employers to train young people, and then some ghastly whingeing when it all goes pear shaped. Employers are entitled to expect that public schooling provides a decent level of literacy and numeracy. The rest is up to them, if they want degree courses better suited to their needs then sponsor them!
For all that I wish the A-level students all the best and good luck in your chosen careers. I can’t tell which ones of you to really congratulate, but that’s hardly your fault, and hopefully we will all find a way to sort it out in the long run.
economy living intentionally personal finance simple living: early retirement escape plan
by ermine
6 comments
My Escape Plan
Like anyone aiming to quit paid employment, my escape plan has a large financial component to it. However, reading Dreamer’s inspiring story of how she has made her plan real, reminded me that there is also a non-financial part of it too. People do not live by bread alone, and I have consolidated a lot of the intangible parts without considering them as an escape plan.
You have to take a view on what the future holds to execute an escape plan. The reason is that leaving paid employment means an enormous loss is power and direction – relying on capital rather than income means my trajectory is largely determined by what I have when leaving. There is little chance to make mid-flight corrections.
My vision of the economic future
I have a quandary here, because my view of the future is at significant variance with a lot of people, including some people whose view I respect. I am not sure I am right. The general view, which is that the turmoil of recent years has been a temporary aberration of the sort that occasionally afflicts capitalism and normal service will be resumed shortly, is at variance with my feeling that the myth of our time, continuous growth, is about to fail us.
Worse still, I have insufficient information to get a feel of when I expect the increasing world middle class population’s demand to exceed the limiting effects of peak oil.
I may retire, grow old, see a few more economic cycles and hopefully die peacefully in my bed before world demand overwhelms peak oil. We may solve nuclear fusion before then, though energy security is not the only hazard humanity faces. Something else might turn up – one of the bewitching aspects of the continuous growth myth of our time is that just when things seemed lost, so far something has turned up, like the mid-20th century energy-fuelled Green Revolution in agriculture.
In that case, investing to set myself on as best a path to deal with peak oil is a serious opportunity cost. I need a stake in business as usual too, so I choose to play both ends – invest effort and skills in the post-peak ready scenario and at the same time I hedge this by investing assuming that Britain is booming again – or at least not taking on too much water.
If you want results fast, use great force with extreme prejudice
Yoda, he of the sticking out ears in the original geek-fest Star Wars was a plug-ugly sucker, but he had a point when he berated somebody “do or do not. Do not try” If you want to retire early, you aren’t going to be living an Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. You’re just not going to get there clipping coupons and skipping lattes at Starbuck’s.
I realised in 2008 that working in an office is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life. Some events before then had made me re-evaluate things, but being targeted by some punk at work to make up his numbers showed me that the world of work had changed somewhat since I started. I wanted results, and I wanted them in years, not decades. Months would have been even better
Extraordinary results demand extraordinary efforts. That means cold turkey on consumerism, it means less is more all round. You need a lot of capital to retire early, in the order of about 20x your outgoings. None of the ways I can think of doing this don’t involve a serious hit on lifestyle compared with most others. The secret is to spend less than you earn, big-time. It means saving well over half my take-home pay, and a fair amount of my pre-tax pay too.
Young people may want to consider working in some unpleasant environment abroad for a year or so; these are usually financially rewarding to compensate for their unpleasantness or cultural dislocation. There are plenty of people that made their fortunes in the oil service industry, or working in the Middle East, where as long as you can avoid trouble and stay off the hooch then you can be made in a year or two. In the past, the military offered opportunities to break the mould, like this report of working 19 months on the Cold War Distant Early Warning Line.
The common thread on all of these is that if you want to build up the cash to do something different to most of your fellow men then you have to live in a different way to them.
The same applies to me. With two-thirds of a working life behind me, I have built up some capital, by living differently to many of my colleagues – my house is a semi where most of them live in detached houses, and I paid off my mortgage over the years rather than extract the equity to buy more house or go on holidays. But it’s not terribly different from the typical middle-class lifestyle. So if I want to retire early, then I have to hit the financial goal hard. Jacob from ERE tells us that it is possible to achieve early retirement in five years. With similar determination, therefore, in theory it would be possible for me to achieve it in less than two years; I already have 2/3 of the amount saved up in the conventional way plus a paid-off house.
Non-conventional investment – the tin hat portfolio
So my escape plan has two parts. The tin-hat portfolio finds a good meeting with DGF’s life-long dream of becoming a commercial grower using sustainable, low-carbon permaculture. I don’t understand it at all, I was born in a city, I am not into the digging and planting and harvesting side of things.
However, I can invest some skill and energy in the construction of things that every grower needs, like cold frames, buildings, energy control systems and temperature control. As well as the satisfaction of creating something tangible at the end, a reward absent from too many modern jobs, it improves the efficiency of the land use and effort.
As well as this some capital assets like polytunnels and the like which extend the growing season or make exotics possible give me a return on capital, which is the hardest part of turning savings into income these days. Businesses can turn capital into income. From a tin hat POV this particular enterprise hedges some kinds of hit to the food supply and rocketing food prices. I would find life as a vegetarian lacking the finer gastronomic things in life, but it would keep the wolf from the door. It also takes us out of the money economy for some our own consumption. Obviously in normal conditions it puts us more into the money economy from the produce sales, which is the right way to be in the money economy – a producer, not consumer
This unconventional part of my portfolio therefore also does something for me, even if I am wrong, Peak Oil is a chimera and things carry on as usual. It will also be interesting, practical and fun at times.
The general problem with saving money, turning it into a non-financial capital asset such as a business or property, and trying to live off the return on the capital is that many capital assets come in large illiquid lumps. These have to be sold to realise any gains. Take, for example, a house – it may have gone up to £100,000 but to realise that you have to sell it to someone; even if it’s a buy-to-let property there are serious transaction costs. If you just happen to need £20,000 then you have a problem, you now have to find a smaller property to preserve the £80,000.
This is why most people use financial assets to do this job, but under certain scenarios those financial assets get written off to virtually zero. I do not feel that the probablility of those scenarios is vanishingly small over the next 30 years.
I used to know a very old person in Germany who had lost their life savings in financial crises – twice. When you hear the tone of voice of someone who has known that, you get a different kind of knowledge from reading about it in a book. You understand that the thin line that holds the edifice we call finance has its limits, and under certain kinds of societal stress it may fail under the load.This is usually more of a problem for people who have capital in financial assets than those living on earnings.
This collective memory underpinned the peculiar German abhorrence of inflation and the preparedness of the Deutsche Bundesbank to pay almost any price to keep inflation of the Deutsche Mark low in the 1960′s and 70s when other European countries let it rip – all the way to 26% in the case of the UK.
In the West we have been fortunate to have lived through a benign financial environment since the Second World War where this hasn’t happened recently. However, it has happened elsewhere in the world over that time – Argentina, Zimbabwe, the USSR, the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.
The conventional portfolio
The second part of my portfolio is more conventional. It consists of a mix of ETFs, ETCs and investment trusts. I struggled with the latter, as these are actively managed and I have endless repetitions of the passive investing mantra to get over.
FWIW I’m unconvinced that continual pound-cost averaging works. Circumstances and luck have made me a pound-cost-averaging buyer when the market has been low and a forced seller when the market was higher than average. However, until I had a need for an income I found the index fund approach the easiest to have success with.
However, investment trusts have a good track record of paying dividends, and these are useful enough for a spread of ITs to give me the income I want to top up my pension, with the advantage that if I do it in an ISA it is not treated as income so I don’t get taxed on top, though dividends are taxed at source in the bizarre tax structure of the UK.
They seem to have the advantage of the income being stable over the long term. I don’t want to fret about investments and keep on churning them to release an income, so I will shift slowly from ETFs. High-yield ETFs such as IUKD that I was using are skewed in composition by the need to chase yield, which is a side effect I hadn’t thought about and didn’t want.
The largest part of my conventional portfolio is my final salary pension. It performs the position that bonds do in a self-select pension, a reasonably stable investment. However, since it is from a private employer, rather than government-backed public sector, and there is a deficit, I don’t consider it risk-free. Therefore I will draw it early – which will reduce the annual income from the pension since they will be paying it for more than the 20 years they expect me to live after 60. That means that I get some of it out before any risks/threats to its financial stability, and it is why I need to adopt ERE’s approach to saving enough capital to top it up.
Since pensions are considered income and taxed, drawing early means I get much more of it before paying income tax, which is all to the good in my view. My top-up income is derived from ISAs, which are not currently taxed, so I aim to pay minimal tax. I have paid an awful lot of income tax in my 30-year working life, and I’ve had enough for a while. I have done my part for society. If I get a State pension at 68 that will be nice, but I’m not counting on it, by then I expect the UK economy to be so hammered they’ll turn round and means test it or scrap it as unaffordable.
So I have a decent amount of diversity in my investment structure, in terms of the nature the investments and the spread. I can lose one of the three elements without going broke, though if the pension goes bust I may have to run down capital elsewhere.
The main problem with my escape plan is that the escape is two years off. I will have been at it for three and a half years by the time it comes to fruition. Saving 70% of one’s income is difficult to live with – I have the downside of a job with a toxic management structure without using the upside of the money. The halfway point is a nasty part of any difficult project – it is easy to lose hope, since the distant shoreline is not in view and yet much of the losses have been committed without return.Like Dreamer did, I continually re-evaluate if I can shorten the gap, but the maths do not change when revisited.
Finance is only part of a good escape plan. I am not a minimalist, and a big part of quality of life is who you are with and where you are as well as what you have. I have made good progress on these areas over my working life. In that I am different from many ER bloggers, who are sometimes discontented with their situation in life as well as finances. Much of that is simply being older. Getting these aspects of life right takes a lot of time; my 20s and 30s had much angst in them too I suspect some of that angst is part of the human condition.