Hello and welcome! Can you meal plan your way to financial freedom?

Hi lovely people.  

I've got the kettle on.  Come and have a seat at my farmhouse kitchen table and get a warm next to the Aga whilst I introduce myself and my family.

I'm Tracy, wife to Steven and mother to Grace (13) and Jack (10). Both Steven and I work full time and run a smallholding which is our beautiful family home too.  We are born and raised in the North East of England and have lived here on the smallholding since January 2016 and love absolutely everything about it.  We are also lucky enough to have extended family who live close by and (covid/lockdown allowing) we see frequently.

As I'm sure is the same for you, we are always busy with something or other.  If we are not dashing around to school, work or days out with the kids, we are firmly planted on the smallholding (pun intended) raising our livestock and growing our own food.  Oh not to mention doing everything else that us humans do, cooking, cleaning, washing.....this is making me tired just typing!  

In my years of experience, one thing I have learnt for us to be successful is that life needs organising. By successful I don't mean anything other than have a smooth running of this place, food on the table and a comfortable home with happy and healthy inhabitants.  Being organised also doesn't mean take the fun out of things or running an inflexible military operation.  It does mean we have to be organised or things slip and don't get done, which can have negative outcomes depending on what it is.  Not having matching socks doesn't matter as much as having no food prepped/available for the evening meal, which may lead to eating out ruining our budget etc etc.  Forgetting to feed the animals is not acceptable where as forgetting to write 'bleach' on the shopping list is.  You see where I'm coming from?

As we move in to 2021 we will be making our usual plans and dreams for the coming year, one of which is already decided upon.  That leads me to this new blog.  Meal planning our way to financial freedom.  Crazy woman?  Bear with me.

Steve and I don't want to work for someone else for the rest of our working lives.  Many people don't.  Why do we have to work?  To bring in an income.  Why?  We have chosen a lifestyle choice and to have a mortgage.  To pay the mortgage we need to work and continue to earn at least one of our wages just to settle the bills every month.  So why doesn't one of us quit and the other just work?  Well then what would we do if hard times hit, we would have no plan b.  Right now, we have a plan b, one of us goes down, the other steps up and we adapt.

However ideally, we don't want to be tied to that for the remainder of our mortgage term.  

Without dwelling too much and boring you all senseless, we have given ourselves 10 years to pay our 27 year mortgage off.  There's that crazy word again.  

Well we don't HAVE to, we WANT to. Financial freedom in one respect.  Security in another?  There's many varying reasons as to why people would want to pay their mortgage off early.  Maybe you can relate this, maybe it's not a mortgage for you, maybe you want to save money for one reason or another, or simply you just need to figure out how to meet your current mortgage/rent demands.  One thing is for sure, times are really hard for many right now.

In the 4 years or so we have lived here, one thing we have managed to do, which is helping us save towards overpaying the mortgage, is reduce our grocery budget significantly.  From around £600 a month (I'm aware this is spending stupid money from not being organised, buying on a whim and eating out!) to what I think is a reasonable £300 a month.  The only way I have found to do this is planning.  Meal planning, freezer planning and planning your grocery shop.  Meal planning can be reverse planning, which I'll talk about in another post or standard planning (ie planning ahead).  Without sitting down and planning my family's meals out, I wouldn't be able to have a grocery budget of £300.  I refer to this sitting down time as one of my "Kitchen Tasks".  So this blog isn't just (or even mostly) about paying the mortgage off, it's about what we are doing with the grocery and grocery related bills to reduce them and to use those savings to over pay on the mortgage.

Other people will want to reduce their grocery budget for another reason or maybe you don't want to reduce your budget, maybe you struggle with meal ideas and would like to start planning.  Thinking of ideas to cook each day or for the freezer can be overwhelming.

Maybe my blog can help.  What you can expect in the coming posts is to join me at our Farmhouse Kitchen Table and I'll share how I manage all of these activities and my other Kitchen Tasks!  Including weekly menu plans, shopping lists, grocery hauls and related budgets.  Get insight in to our lives and follow our journey to financial freedom with regular updates on everything  I hope you find some useful or inspiring information here and even if not, I'd love for your support as we take on this next chapter in our lives.  Transparent, real life going on here!  Now, final comment for today, remember I said I live on a smallholding (homestead)?  My Aga is my favourite part of the kitchen and in the spirit of the transparency I mentioned, here's me working around a poorly duck at my Aga.

Isn't she beautiful :)

Please leave me a comment below if you're new here (everyone is, it's a new blog!) as I would love to get to know you.  

Bye for now, Tracy x

Working full time and running a smallholding

A lot of the YouTube videos we watch, the books and blogs we read or the people we have spoken to think of smallholders and homesteaders as having an 'off grid' mentality.  That they want to disentangle themselves from the rat race, utility companies and live a completely self reliant life, on a hill in the middle of nowhere maybe.  While that's all fine and dandy, Steven and I have to have a realistic approach that works for us.  Would we like to be off grid, totally self reliant and mortgage free.  Yes, we'd probably like to give it a shot before we leave this planet, but we have always been realistic in that we're a little bit different!

When we bought the smallholding in January 2016, we did so using a mortgage.  If you follow our blog, you will know this and it won't be a surprise.  Now mortgages these days can take you up to retirement age which you will also know we don't want to have our mortgage around our necks for that long and that we are actively working on maximising our income and minimising our outgoings which will allow us to pay it off sooner.  In order to pay this mortgage, we need to work.

Why am I telling you this?  Because we are priding ourselves on showing people that you can have a mortgage which means you need to work full time and run a smallholding effectively.  We are not joining in the chants to become off grid and to escape the rat race.  We have nothing against that but we know we are accepting of having council tax to pay, a mortgage to clear, utility bills to take care of and so on, for as long as we live in some cases.

What we do do ( :) ) is budget, see where we can reduce bills and save, look to where we can be as self reliant as we can with accepting of these decisions.  For example one of our most expensive outgoings is oil.  We could convert the Aga to solid fuel and live off our trees, but we aren't here often enough to feed it.  We could collect rain water and convert the house non drinking water to use it and buy bottled to drink but realistically, we aren't going to do that any time soon.  There has to be a balance.  So our budget each month takes our incomings, minus the absolute essential outgoings and leaves us with a balance.  How we spend that remaining balance is key.  A fair bit of it goes on insurances, for the cars, house and animals.  If we were off grid, we wouldn't have a vehicle to insure nor insure the animals is my guess, so those expenses wouldn't be there, but then nor would our incomes each month as that isn't self reliant isn it?  

So where are we self reliant, even partially?  We grow as much of our own food as we can and each year we learn and build on the previous year.  We make decisions for things we don't or can't grow ourselves.  For example, we have bananas for breakfast on the meat from we eat beef which we don't raise ourselves.  We are self reliant in chicken and lamb, pork later in the year but not beef or fish.  Again we could choose not to have both, but we don't, we pay for it as we like it and we can right now.

We pretty much run our smallholding before and after work and weekends, so if you are thinking about doing it then don't be put off if you work full time.  I can't comment on other lifestyles being able to manage a smallholding or not as we haven't lived anyhing else ourselves, but we know this one and we know it works.

Before work, we check the livestock and feed them all so they're set for the day.  Depending on what you have this can be anywhere from 10 minutes upwards.  I like to spend a little time watching the animals come out of the pens or coops for the day, seeing them go about their business, have a stretch or for the ducks, get a bath!  On a night is the same, check everything is ok, feed and water them, collect eggs, clean out, whatever needs to be done and before bed lock everything away.  It can take as much or as little time as you like, but it has to be done every day.  There's no days off in smallholding.

We plan as much as we can, plan for the best and the worst, be adaptable and also realistic.  Don't try and take on too much but absolutely do take on as much as you can.  You may find that you can take on more than you think but it depends what character you're like.  I would take on too much and Ste probably less than we could, so between us we balance perfectly most of the time!  

In the coming weeks I will do some posts on what organising looks like here and share our ideas and thoughts with a hope that people may find them helpful.