The beginning of the rest of our lives…

So we decided to escape the rat race and work for ourselves, well if you are going to slog your guts out it may as well be for your own pleasure rather than to make someone else rich.

But how do you get out of the Rat Race and live a good life? You need to be self sufficient and financially independent, right. We still had a big mortgage with 17 years left to go until we could call it all ours and paid for. We did have a good income and a good lifestyle but this depended on a well paid job and a healthy profit share bonus at the end of each year.

So armed with a calculator we added up what we were worth if we liquidated our assets and became cash rich. I am fortunate (through working) to be in receipt of a military pension which is index linked from my 55th anniversary so 55 seemed to be the optimum year to do it, but we wanted to go now.

We worked out that if we sold the house we could use any equity 90k to buy a property in France and then live on the pension aided by any savings to raise the living level until I was 55 ( that would be August 2013) - so we had a plan…

Since we had done some riding on France we had a good idea of where we would like to be located. Since we also wanted to spend what quality time we had riding our bikes we would need to be near some of the best biking roads we could find but also in an area which would afford us a 360 degree option of rides which would be different. Our choice was the Limousin. With the Med, and Spain to the South, Switzerland, Italy, and the Alps to the East, The Atlantic Coast to the West. North gets us the Grand Massif, Holland and of course the UK.

We were pretty lucky to find a house which met all of our criteria quite quick – second house hunting visit. It was on the market for 120,000 euros plus fees another 12,000 euros just over the budget but we made an offer of 110,000 euros and to our surprise it was accepted, we put our house on the market in October 06 and within 3 days we had accepted an offer for £5,000 more than we expected. We were commited.

Since we still have to save a bit of cash we decided we wouldn’t go over full time until I was 50 so we needed somewhere to rent in the meantime. Well you could have knocked us down with a feather when the buyer (a fellow Marine) offered to rent our house back to us until we go and for £100 less than we had been paying on the mortgage – RESULT!

SO we have a house in France which cost us £84,000 leaving us some money over for improvements a place to live in the UK whilst we save a little and a future to look forward to.

The Future is Bright…