Simple Living in Suffolk
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Journal of a 50-something professional looking to get out of the rat race early and start living simply, with intent.
Simple Living in Suffolk
2w ago
Jezza’s at it again. Much is made of a 2pc drop in National Insurance, which is all very well but given the £12570 tax threshold was frozen since 2021 and would now be worth £14874 you’re paying £400 more in tax anyway. Sure, every little helps as they say. You have to be earning £21k1 ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
3w ago
Monevator has a weekend reading where the general sentiment is that investors have been taking some heat of late. I have become a pussy, it seems, as I can’t really say I have taken such a lot of stick, although the high rate of inflation makes that hard to observe. I found it hard to ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
1M ago
Many years ago, Thatcher made a big song and dance about wanting to cut the headline rate of income tax, which was 30% at the time. Higher rate tax was at a much higher rate, the Beatles who were so pissed off about it they wrote a song about the taxman. Thatcher was right, a ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
2M ago
We decided to use the end of the school holidays to visit East Anglia. A joy of getting the work monkey off your back is you can take time to travel, so we staged the journey, first stopping off at Worcester where we would leave the M6. We went into the city to have a ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
3M ago
The dog days of summer drag on, we had the rioting in a minor way last month. Strangely muted compare to the summer of discontent ten years ago, Blackberry Messenger was a more effective spreader of sedition compared with TikTok, or perhaps we just got lucky this time. The greens of some of the leaves ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
4M ago
We visited the city of Bath, to observe a Great British export in full flow. Mrs Ermine is more of a city person than I am, but I was quite taken with the hipster nature of it, not quite full on waxed beards and vegetarian kefir, but getting that way. I favour it over the ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
5M ago
The Ermine household favours holidays outside of school holidays, because I don’t want to have the pleasure of the company of your delightful rugrats, and I guess they don’t want curmudgeonly mustelids littering the landscape too. I also find even Blighty too hot in midsummer ? To me the obvious time to go to Spain ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
5M ago
Some are screaming blue murder about the ‘unforeseen’ rise in interest rates. So I thought it might be worth a look back at what it felt like the last time I saw this movie. Many, many, years ago in 1989, I was that guy. I was paying 7% on a low-start1 IO mortgage with an ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
6M ago
I use a Vanguard ISA for buying ISA shares these days, and have a large ISA with iWeb with most of what I accumulated since the GFC. Since Vanguard are a percentage-fee platform at 0.15% for small fry, every year I transfer the Vanguard ISA out to Hargreaves Lansdown (HL). They are also a percentage-fee ..read more
Simple Living in Suffolk
7M ago
Over at Monevator, there is a thread on taxation that also holds a primal scream therapy session about the iniquity of taxation of Londoners these days. While I was born in the Great Wen, grew up there, went to university there and started work there, I fear my City of London passport has run out ..read more