Here’s the numbers for October:
Mortgage
- current balance: $40,866
- down from: $43,731
- total reduction: $2,865
Savings
- current balance: $698,404
- up from: $690,450
- total increase: $7,954
I feel like a lot has happened this month. We’ve both given notice at work and started to tell a few people that we’re retiring next year. The reactions have been all positive and some a bit surprised.
DH will leave mid-year as he will need to spend time training his replacement & wants to stay until a major project is completed. I’ll leave after first term, or even a few weeks earlier. That will give me time to handover from the management job I’ve done this year and have some time to catch-up on unfinished work before I go.
I have just 5 weeks left to work this year, then 10 – 13 weeks next year – it feels amazing to finally be almost at the end after so long working toward this. I have so many plans for the house and garden, so many quilts to sew and books to read. I am counting down the days!
Financially we will make some changes. We will now stop paying extra on the mortgage – which feels very odd after it being such a focus for so long – and put that extra money in the mortgage offset account. We’ll keep salary sacrificing the maximum into super and then mid next year start drawing a transition to retirement pension.
I haven’t done a lot outside of work as we have a bit of a covid outbreak here in the last two weeks. I’ve had two tests and then the associated days working from home even though we really do not go out much at all. Everything is delivered, we only go to work and the occasional visit to the shop. Travel has now been opened up to our area from Sydney with thousands of visitors expected to visit for various events. So we will continue being home bodies for the next few months until we get our booster shots in February.
I’ve found it hard to blog regularly this year with so much work & little else happening. Now that its easing up a bit I hope to get back to blogging more regularly.