My five year plan

The following tale involves not only myself but my wife as well.

On February 7th, 2019, I decided to make a “five year plan” and when I say plan I mean I wrote down 3 specific goals that I wanted to hit within the next 5 years. That being by February 2023.

So grabbed my iPhone, opened the notes app and jotted down the following goals:

• Debt-free
• Parent
• Homeowner

For me keeping them concise narrows my focus.

I never imagined that I would be saying in August 2020 that the plan was complete, the goals have been hit. There’s a bun in the oven…

Debt

The battle of tackling our debt started back in August 2018. Collectively, we had over £10k in debt not counting our respective student loans, that’s a different battle. I began as any financial endeavour should by creating a budget, I won’t go into any detail here but I made one. It wasn’t very good but it served it’s purpose.

We stuck to it. This is the hardest and most important thing. There are always those days, weeks or months that are really trying, there’s something you want but you have to stay the course, you have to say no. It wasn’t easy but seeing that total get chipped away each month was exhilarating.

Alas, it’s Pay-day August 30th, 2019; we make the final payment. We’re debt-free.

Parenthood

Let’s fast forward to May 2020, I’m sitting in the kitchen/diner/living area of our tiny apartment working at the table (COVID-19) and my wife walked in the room looking odd so I ask if she’s okay. She immediately bursts into tears and tells me she’s pregnant.

She was crying due to a flurry of mixed emotions, one of which being; she thought I wouldn’t be happy because I always said that I wanted to be “ready” financially and have a house, you know have a safe and secure environment for my family. But it goes without saying that I was happy. Nae. Elated. We were planning on starting a family soonish anyway and you can only plan these things so much.

This development really accelerated everything for me, in my head we couldn’t have this baby while still living in this apartment. A hard no.

Homeownership

So the search began.

That same day we started browsing Zoopla and Rightmove to see what was out there and what kind of money we were looking at. I will go more into the search and the process in another post as it’s topic unto itself. Nonetheless, we found a development within our desired parameters and reserved a plot, a house, and on July 24th, 2020 we paid the deposit.

The final piece of the puzzle, my plan was set. It is now just a matter of waiting.

So the baby isn’t here yet, he/she isn’t expected to join us until February 2021 and the house isn’t completed yet but despite that my five year plan only lasted a grand total of 2.

I’m starting to develop a plan for the next 5 which I want to give a clearer start of January 2021 rather than February. My life is changing so much it’s hard to pin point what they should be right now.