Taking up residence in Brittany

 Monday 29/01/24

This New Year marked our fifth since leaving behind our jobs and our home and heading off on an adventure. We've settled down into a nice rhythm of travelling, broken up with house sits.  Our plans to take up residence in France are going well, albeit very slowly, and we are learning to be patient with bureaucracy.

A frosty morning - it's actually been quite mild (so far)

Becoming residents has meant that we could do the full winter sit at La Basse for the first time since Brexit took effect and we're really enjoying the time here. 

We've also made the decision to scale back our financial reporting and tracking a bit and to convert our monthly cost tracking into Euros, rather than to keep converting back to pounds, as we were doing.

We've been raising Lily, she's been raising the roof.  Don't be fooled by that cute face!

Jasper has had his hands full with her as well.

There's only one place for a cold morning.

You never know where the danger will come from...

Our record keeping has been key for the first period as we need to keep track of our little retirement experiment as there were so many unknowns.  Now that we've built up a good record we feel we can relax a bit on the detail and just keep track of the important stuff.

The markets have been good to us this year, seemingly starting to emerge from two slow years but we are happy with the way our portfolio has held up.  We still managed to live off income (interest, dividends and the odd little bit of online work) which means we have been able to leave our investments intact.  This is in spite of 2023 being our most expensive year so far.  Some of this was planned - an extended trip to SA and extra costs of taking up residency, and some of it was not, multiple trips to the UK, mostly to get Bokkie sold.

We've seen an unusual amount of fire salamander this year.  A good sign for the local environment.

 

We love it when a mass of mushrooms appear overnight.

Another unusual visitor to the garden.

All-in-all we're comfortable with where we are at, and have another two months at La Basse before we'll set off in Orthos, our magic caravan, and Dassie - to travel through the summer.  We've got a house-sit in St-Puy (south-west France) to start us off and will make it up as we go along from there.

Hope everyone who still reads this has had a good start to 2024!