Retirement blog about spending money – wisely?

Even though I’ve got a section of this retirement blog entitled Finances and retirement, I rarely write a retirement blog about this, all too important, aspect of retirement. Only three blogs in fact in the six years I’ve been writing. I’m not quite sure what this tells me. What it doesn’t tell me is that I’m frugal with my money and hence don’t need to monitor my outgoings. Nope, not at all. In fact I don’t monitor my spending at all. Occasionally I might ask Mrs Summerhouse if we’re doing OK but that’s about it.

Perhaps her response, as the last time I asked, of well, how long do you think we’re going to live might have given me some clue either about what we were spending or that her monitoring methods are considerably slacker than I had hoped. I guess this context (how long are you planning on living) does lend a certain je ne sais quoi to the area of retirement and money. All very well if you can balance not leaving any money at the end with running out of money totally a couple of years before you depart the planet. Anyway, the point is until she tells me to stop or that we’re skint, I blithely carry on spending money like, as they say, it’s going out of fashion.

True, this is a fairly expensive time of year given that it’s our annual trip to Ireland. That means, ferry costs, house rental and the odd hotel here and there. In fact this year the hotel part of the holiday has been quite significant. That’s because, as a result of having to travel a week before we rent the house, on account of the fast ferry not sailing on the dates we wanted and the fast ferry being the vessel of choice on account of keeping journey time to a minimum for the dog’s sake. Does that give some idea of how complicated things can be?

So this year there will be about 10 days of hotel accommodation, more than usual and even finding a dog friendly hotel in Ireland is a pain which means quibbling about the additional 20 or so euros for the dogs on top of quibbling about the quite high prices, well, one is just grateful they’ll take us all whatever the price.

Another aspect of money slipping like sand through one’s fingers is the Land Rover. It’s already cost a lot of money having two oil leaks repaired. Now it’s time with driving in Ireland to come, to have it serviced and MOTed and yes, a third oil leak repaired. We waste a lot of money on our three vehicles but never more so than just before our Ireland trip. I don’t look at the bills so that means they don’t really exist, I just hand them to Mrs SH. Even so, an expensive time of year.

But then my capacity for adding to this spending, knows no bounds. Only yesterday we decided what we needed was a second summerhouse. The first one is the summerhouse of the title of this blog and this one sits in our back garden. All very sensible. The second one is for the vineyard and isn’t really sensible at all. Blame our man who does for us up there.

I casually mentioned to him I was thinking of putting up another summerhouse to take advantage of the stunning view. No sooner were the words out of my mouth, before I could say hand me my shotgun and let me shoot a rabbit, and hence no going back, Brian had dug the hole, filled it with hard core, made the base, covered the base with decking boards, ready for the second summerhouse. What’s a chap to do? Well, go out and spend £1,780. This on top of paying Brian for all of the above. Laugh, I nearly went and looked at our bank account.

And talking of the vineyard, there’s £250 for 100 new vines and then even madder £120 for RCGM, Reticulated Concentrated Grape Must – sugar to you and me. Just the 20 litres of it, hence the price and all the way from Devon. Crazy.

And more talking, in this case, of keeping half the pensioner population (well, three of them) employed, brings me to the Heanor house. I’ve been employing my neighbour there to work on the outhouse buildings. The last time I asked him how much I owed him for what he’d done (pointing the walls), he gave me a figure of £210. Speaking to him last night that had risen, quite surprisingly, to £480 with more to go.

This figure was not helped by the payment of £103 to a locksmith who he’d employed to get him back into the house having inexplicably locked himself out. Don’t ask me how he did this. He did explain but even he seemed puzzled. It meant our proposed trip this week had to be cancelled. No bad thing actually but quite an expensive way of achieving this no show.

And yes, there’s still the saga of the Facebook / blog link up that’s characterised by mounting bills. These brought about by my giving carte blanche to my FB ‘manager’ and my IT guy to ‘just sort it out’. I’ve stopped saying that now, but not before a bill of £200+ for work done. Is there no end to it? Yes, I think so because I’ve told them to stop. Who says I’m sloppy with money? Who says I’m not on top of my spending?

And finally for the icing on the cake of this financial blog and I don’t mean that in a good way. The image at the top of this retirement blog gives a clue as to the nature of this icing. It looks like a pair of glasses sitting on top of a gatepost somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. And so it is. More precisely, it’s the pair of glasses I lost somewhere and have just paid another £130 to replace. I laughingly said to the optician that, having bought a new pair the old pair would now turn up. Knock me down with a feather, so they did. I obviously lost them on one of our dog walks and some kind soul had found them and placed them on the gate post. True, we must have walked past them several times before noticing and staring in amazement. But then I didn’t have my glasses on so how could I be expected to notice them?

So there we are, I’m a retired person and I’ve managed to spend several thousand pounds on supporting my retirement lifestyle. What I’m not sure about, having to have been fairly frugal all of our working lives, is whether this is an entirely proper response to being a retired 70 year old person with a reasonable pension or that I’m a feckless baby boomer depriving the young of their deserved opportunities as they begin their challenge of the good life. Who knows? Not me.