Sooo… this is going to be our blog!

It’s always hard to start the first blog. But here it goes.

Welcome! We are the Frugal Brits. We are a young couple living in London with a vision of achieving financial freedom by the time we’re in our 30s.

This isn’t something new, once you actually start digging into it, you’ll be surprised by the number of people who are working towards this.

Actually, we were inspired by Money Wizard to start this blog. We loved reading Mr and Mrs Money Wizard’s journey.

Mr Money Wizard has this way of sharing his ideas that makes you want to follow in his footsteps and that is exactly what we have done.

Why are we doing this?

The last paragraph was actually only half of the truth.

Over the last two months, I have been soul searching.

I lost my job.

It came to me as such a surprise as I have never experienced such a thing before.

To give you a bit of a background, we have only just recently married and moved in together. And months before that, I have recently moved to London myself.

A big jump, as I know nobody here. I secured a job before the move and I thought the move was exciting, yet not too scary.

A lot has happened in the year to follow and in exactly a year from the move, I managed to lose my job.

Not of any fault of my own. It was company money issue. Yet, that didn’t stop it from being my problem. A big problem at that as well.

My wife, Mrs Frugal-Brit, didn’t have a job. She has just enrolled in college. (I will cover in another blog post what we do exactly).

So… I, being the only one with an income, no longer had an income.

What do we do now!?

That’s something that was going through my head from the moment I left that meeting room, and it stayed with me for many days.

To make matters worse, I had no savings what’s so ever. To make matters even worse… (yes it gets worse), I had multiple credit cards that needed to be paid up.

This level of stress was something I’ve never felt before. Rent in London is very high! I couldn’t afford (literally) to not have a job.

This has been a turning point for me, (for both of us really). Luckily, in the U.K., your employer has to give you notice and you are still protected by a notice period.

During this period, it allows you to still get paid (as you’re still expected to work, handovers etc…), but you are still getting paid, which is good. Else, I don’t know how this story would have unfolded.

So for my case, I had 2 months to get my act together, find a job so that I can put food on the table again.

I was let go of my job a couple of day’s before pay day. This pay day, was very different from any other pay days. I knew I had to maximise my savings, to have enough to make minimum payments on credit cards, and enough left over to save for another month’s worth of rent (I’ll explain the break down shortly).

I sat down with my wife, we put everything on the table. How much pay we can expect in the next coming months, how much rent we have to pay, any other payments, credit cards etc and where we can start saving.

First we cancelled any unnecessary subscriptions. We had subscriptions to all of the major entertainment channels. Namely, Spotify, Amazon Prime, NowTV and Netflix. Oddly enough, we barely used any of them and we watched most of our stuff on YouTube.

Next, came food and entertainment. We made a budget for food, we went frugal and we definitely felt it for the first week. We weren’t eating meat everyday, really budgeting our food. We barely spent £120 that first month.

We also stopped our London City weekends. We used to spend every weekend exploring inner city of London. This meant train journey, breakfast, lunch and sometimes if we come back home tired, we also get take out. So this was completely cut out, (to our amazement, we found so many amazing things to do that didn’t require us to travel far either).

We went from spending upwards of £600 (only on food and drinks) to only spending £120! That is amazing. We used to spend without even thinking. Not to mention the spending we used to do with shopping, travel, unnecessary things that just cluttered the house.

Finally, we wanted to make sure that for every month, I save at least another month’s rent.

We had (have) £6000 on credit cards. This is down from £11,000 from the beginning of the year. So we were making progress, but unfortunately not fast enough.

Luckily, with some googling around, I found that I could do a 0% balance transfer deal so that I am not having to pay even more by just having the credit cards. This gives me at least a year where I don’t have to pay as much into the credit cards. Of course my aim is to finish them as soon as possibly, but I still haven’t a job, so I need rainy day fund first!

So by the second month, I managed to save over £4000. This is after paying that current months rent of £1125.

Amazing! Not to get too happy though, I have 1 month to go, yet no job. This was the lowest point of this journey.

I dedicated all my time on a single opportunity. With this going over the summer, things dragged as people were on holidays, and at the end of the day, the opportunity fell apart!

Even more stress piled on. I crammed the week after that with interviews, I played the numbers game.

I still had to struggle with juggling work and interviews. Luckily the interviews were pretty local to where I already worked, so lunch times and offsetting when I start/finish work, I managed to get through them.

Finally a break!

On the same week, I managed to get 3 offers. Finally things are looking up.

I accepted a job, that still paid me a fairly decent salary.

Things are not over of course, but through this experience, I have achieved something. The next payday, which is in 2 days from writing this blog, I will have more than £6000 in savings, after I paid rent and put money aside for other expenses.

That is quite an achievement and something I would have never thought of doing if life didn’t make this turn for us.

I remember times when I used to happily use my credit card, thinking that I will always have enough to pay for it in the future. Funny enough, before all of this happened, we planned on going on holiday (using the credit card), I wanted to buy a drone (probably store card?) and maybe upgrade my phone. Thinking about this now it amazes me how foolish I was. It never crossed my mind that I would lose my job.

This experience has really humbled me.

Not only that, we realised that we had to make a change in our lives, so that the next time life throws us lemons, we had enough water and sugar to make lemonade.

I haven’t yet started the new job. However, we have plans on how things are going to be different. We are hoping that we can share our plans and our progress through this journey.

The title of this post is very ambitious, coming from a person that allowed himself to be in such a situation, but we are determined to do this. And only good things can come from trying.

Many lessons learnt

This experience hasn’t been a total nightmare (in hindsight). We learnt something very important which was how unhappy I was at my previous (current?) job. I didn’t have time for us. and any time I did give my wife, was shared with work or short.

When I was relieved of most of duties at work, I found that during these 2 months, though I was stressed, I was happier.

I spent more time with my wife. We visited gardens and markets near us which made us feel at peace with each other, and truly close.

Before that, I worked late most days and sometimes multiple weekends at a time.

We are both appreciating this (un?)fortunate turn of events in our life after all.

So what about the money?

I don’t entirely believe that money can buy happiness. So even though our goal has a figure, it doesn’t mean that’s all it will take to create our happiness.

The early retirement is the goal, but with that, there will be many objectives that we will be fulfilling.

This journey has to make us happy. We don’t want to accumulate wealth for the sake of it. But what we are hoping it would do, is free us from grunt work of life so that we have more time for each other.

I’m sure I will cover this in another blog post; we both have dreams of living off the land, growing our own food, doing the work together, and appreciating everything more.

Just to side track…

We’ve been following the adventures of The Hollar Homestead and Justin Rhodes and their incredible families, both homesteaders in the US and they are sharing a wealth of experience with us all (thank you!). Sure it will not be easy, yet watching them on their adventure, how close they are together, it is something we are both longing to have.

So I covered too many things in this introduction blog. In the footsteps of Mr Money Wizard, we are both hoping to be more transparent in this adventure.

In the upcoming posts, we will share with you a full breakdown of our finances, income, savings (or the lack thereof, for now), and progress in our adventure.

We really hope you enjoyed this heart-on-sleeve post as much as we had writing it and we welcome you to join us on our adventure.

Peace.