I hadn’t planned to put together another post until the end of February, but some significant changes have happened since the last post.
We’ve decided to bring forward our plans for retiring to June rather than September. A few reasons for this:
I’m also not ruling out an April finish should things continue to go sour with work, but a move to four days a week could help take the sting out and let me get a better work/life balance.
Everything is now booked for Strasbourg, which will be a public transport-only affair to test out the merits of Strasbourg’s network (but also to get us across country a bit quicker than driving can achieve).
The plan is to spend as much of the seven days we have exploring the likely Quartiers for living in, and also some of the outliers. We’ve been using Bien dans ma Ville for checking out where to live using hard data on each area, but I’m still struck by how quickly you can get a feel for somewhere just by being there and walking around. This was certainly the case for Portugal.
While we’re there we’re planning to meet up with Alison, who we met while in Cheltenham near Christmas as she was helping sell Crémant d’Alsace (obviously we had to buy a couple of bottles). She and Rachel had a webchat a couple of weeks ago and we both think she’ll be a very useful ally to have on the ground near where we want to be, as she lives in Freiberg.
The ever-present issue of what happens with the cat while we’re away raised its head when it looked like our local arrangement may not pan out. This got us looking at a House Sitter as an option, if not for this trip (short notice) then maybe our longer planned trip after retirement. Realising we needed some nice photos of the house - and that we didn’t have any - sent us into a flurry of tidying and photographing.
Thanks to Instagram’s algorithm, Rachel spotted a financial adviser that she thought we should check out, so recently we had a chat with a financial adviser firm.
Although we’d been interested in the Assurance Vie proposed by another company, I was a bit disappointed with the ‘get in touch when you’re living in France’ approach they offered. As a comparison, we had a very productive chat with their rep who offered to do more of a pre-planning and post-move approach.
One thing she challenged was my focus on getting annuities with our two SIPPs, as she says most people don’t use these any more given poor returns and issues with inheritance. She pretty much sold me on the idea of looking for a good drawdown arrangement for our pre-state pension years. Reading more about this outside of the chat I realised this could give us greater flexibility and possibly improve the returns we can get on the invested money.
As a result we’ve commissioned them to do some initial work for us on coming up with a holistic financial plan to help guide us better.
Other recent updates: