Wasn't sure on a title & not really sure what I want answering, I think I'm just looking for general money advice. I'm worried we're putting too much to one side for holidays, pensions, savings & not enjoying ourselves day to day but unsure. When I compare us to our friends they all have expensive things whereas we tend to buy experiences not material things but are always doing them cheaper and DIY which we do enjoy.
Prior warning... I want to try to give as much context as possible so sorry if I go off on some tangents...
These questions came about as today we decided to add up our combined savings, pensions & house equity. Combined I didn't expect to have as much as we have & I think its alot more than our friends who are in similar situations.
Now I'm questioning that we're not living for today enough, should we be going out for meals a few times each week etc & we're putting to much towards our retirement so just looking for some general advice.
Just a note too, none of this has come from our parents, its just from us working & saving, living well below our means. We've both had jobs since 16 and come from relatively poor families.
We're both 30 this year, no kids. As of this month, we both earn 65k.
Since 2018 we've saved to buy a house which we moved into in 2020, a week before the pandemic. In those 6 years pretty much, we've somehow accumulated £340k.
From the 340k a rough breakdown is:
~£100k pensions
~£155k house equity (around 50% equity - total house value is 315k)
~£50k ISA in S&P500
~£25k Cash in Easy Access account
~£5k Crypto (This was 20k invested in 2020, but lost it all is now back to around 5k)
My problem looking at this is we're too heavy on our pensions which we can't touch till 57 & also our house, though we're due to remortgage in a few months so cant take money out. I kind of took ownership of our money a few years back & didn't want to pay 40% tax so put our pensions up really high to put us under the tax bracket. A goal for me has always been to retire as early as possible as I ideally want to travel full time. But could I just be doing that now while we're 30? Thats one of my questions
From my salary each month, this is how I allocate it...
1k goes into my pension salary sacrifice (my pension pot is 30k)
Then from the money which reaches my account...
1k goes into Vanguard S&P500 ISA
£600 into our joint account. (Bills, food, joint spending)
£600 into my main account and just gets spent
£350 goes to the mortgage (this will soon be £500)
The remaining money (around £500) I try to save but sometimes gets spent, the past few months i've been spending heavily on a 'pay in 3' the first time i've ever been in some sort of debt so been using it to pay that off.
When I compare to our friends, we look poor compared to them from the outside. They mostly have BMW's, Mercedes or atleast brand new cars. Whereas we always have clapped out cars which are 10+ years old
They all have expensive clothes whereas mine have always been H&M & Uniqlo etc.
When we compare holidays & trips, I'd say we go on more trips than the average couple. In 2015, we went travelling for 3 years, In 2022 I took 2 months off between jobs & In Jan 2024 I spend 3 weeks backpacking while working, a weekend in Prague & a week together in lisbon.
Most years we'll go away atleast 3-4 times abroad. Last year we were ill quite abit throughout the year & I'd just changed jobs so we went on 2 cruises & 3 weeks in Devon. When we don't spend annual leave abroad, we spend it travelling the uk.
Our day to day lives aren't that exciting, we work from home & end up sitting in most evenings doing not much. When we do stuff, we tend to do it on the cheap such as camping.
What would your advice be? What would you do differently? Are we being too tight? Should we continue plowing £1k a month each into our pensions?
Another question is we're about to remortgage, what should we do there too? Should we take some money out while we can?