Just back from the funeral of our third Granny in less than a year - so we're down to just one Granny between us now. My Gran Mason died peacefully in her sleep just over a week ago and this is the last photo that was taken of her when my Dad visited her just a couple of days before she died. At 90 she was the youngest of the Grannies.

So, no more will either of my Grannies look past me when I walk in to see them and say, "Isn't Jon with you?" (or, when speech was becoming difficult with Gran, just a straining to see round me and a quavering, "Jon?"), if he was a little slow at coming through the door! At the end of the funeral service the Minister said, "And our thoughts go with Alan, Jean (my Dad and Mum), Jon and Beverley...", and I thought, "I reckon both Gran and Nanna would have been happy with that!"

One story sticks in my mind. After my Dad was born Gran's next pregnancy was with twins who, were still born. As she put it, in those days dead babies were just taken away and 'disposed of' so she never got to see them and say goodbye. Not everything was better in the good old days.

Redundancy – 16 months on

I just thought I'd post a quick catch up on life not quite 18 months after redundancy.

Right, let's just start with a bit of history; 'cos you might say, “Oh, it's OK for her. She got redundancy and then got a new job straight away - I bet she's not strapped for cash.” Well, it was the changes I made in my spending and saving habits in the 18 months before redundancy that allowed me to take it when it was offered.

I think that in January 2007, soon after the trip to India, I had a car loan, the costs of the India trip on the credit card and an overdraft, so about £5,000 in total. OK, so £5K isn't a huge debt, but it wasn’t getting any less and was enough to worry me and for me to think that something had to change.

The idea was to have everything paid off by June 2008 when the loan ended, but it wasn’t easy. I’ve always thought, “We’ve got good jobs, we’re not extravagant, we don’t take expensive holidays, but we never have any money. Where does it all go? We can’t spend less than we already do.” I’d kept a spending diary for most of my adult life, so I knew exactly where the money was going, but that’s very different from knowing whether I actually needed to spend that money. What was needed was a change in attitude to our finances.

If anyone is foolhardy enough to ask, I can detail exactly where and how we made savings, but broadly, my main areas of savings were in: groceries, which covers food, cleaning/laundry stuff, basic shared toiletries and beer for a Saturday night (cut from around £300-£350 per month for 2 of us down to £200 – finding out that someone I know only spends £250 a month to feed a family of 7 was a shock!); petrol – I car shared a couple of days a week; shopping around more and using cashback sites for things like insurance. But just keeping an eye on everyday spends and using a financial message board to set targets worked wonders. I also tried things like using cash only for a couple of months and, whilst that didn’t really work well enough to continue long-term, it still gave me more of a sense of how I was using money and made me change some habits.

As I said, we’re not extravagant: I don’t spend loads of money on clothes, our annual holiday cost less than £600 between us, we’re not gadget-freaks and have usually had second-hand TVs, sometimes black and white. So that meant that it was just casual over-spending on daily living, so I looked at everything we spent: the newsagent’s bill, the groceries, weekends with friends, insurance, toiletries, charities, subscriptions, etc, etc and saved ourselves over £4,000 a year. We still don’t do ‘extreme LBYM’ (living below your means), for example, I still use the butcher and use small shops as much as possible, but that means that there’s further reductions we can make if we need to. To be honest we've barely noticed any change in our living standards. I can now bore for Britain on budgeting, personal finance and investments – be warned, if you say, “I don’t know where all my money goes” you may notice the Ancient Mariner-like glitter that comes into my eye and you should run away very quickly!

The plan to have everything paid off by June 2008 was achieved and it coincided with redundancy being offered at work. As we believed that being miserable in my job (actually, ‘suicidal’ in my job would be closer to the mark) was a key issue in my overspending – especially on food - we decided that going for the redundancy would actually be a sensible option. Working the figures out, it seemed that even if I couldn’t find another job straight away, with the debts paid and my new spending regime in place, I could survive on the redundancy money for almost a year – even though it represented less than half my actual annual take-home pay.

So I applied (read ‘begged’) for redundancy and got it. I also applied for a job in an area I’ve got no interest or experience in (sports administration) and got that too! So my new job started the day after my old one finished. The gross pay was £7k p.a. less than my old job, but we worked out that actually monthly it was about the same as I had been living on for the previous 18 months once the debt repayments had gone out, so actually I was going to be no worse off each month.

So, how have the last 16 months been? Well, I love my new job. I have much less responsibility, I deal with far fewer ‘customers’ each day and my colleagues and the majority of the customers are lovely. I’m doing sensible things like getting out of the office at lunchtime for a walk and I’ve got a much better perspective on what is important and what isn’t. I’ve got to say that when my boss is having to write a report, give a presentation, or deal with fractious staff (ooo, that’d be me then!) I just think, “There but for the grace of God…” and thank my lucky stars that I’m well out of it. Most days I walk away at 5pm and think nothing more about work until 8.30 the next morning, but I have volunteered to work some weekends at competitions and also spent 10 days in London over the summer working 14 hour days at a major world sporting competition. I’m still a miserable git (you can’t change everything) but at least I’m no longer a depressed miserable git – saved quite a bit on the cost of therapy too!

We now work in the same city and can car-share every day, which has saved us around £150 more per month. Jon has also sold his car, saving him money on servicing, etc, and meaning that he also now contributes to my annual car costs.

The redundancy money was squirreled away into my ISAs and I’ve actually doubled it in the last year and a bit, so I now have 1 year’s take-home pay saved up. The next goal is paying off the mortgage early: five years early is easy, ten years early is a distinct possibility.

What still rankles is that if I'd had my 'light-bulb' moment 2 years, 5 years or 7 years earlier I'd have been able to walk away from a job that I hated a long time before I did. And my mental health and quality of life would have been a lot better. But, hey, that's water under the bridge and at least I made a change before it got worse.