By bread alone

One of the questions that people ask when we tell them about our plan is how we will 'live'. This means different things to different people (see the post where I invited questions) but often people are wanting to know about money. Last week I rang the tax office, having been poked by a couple of people to do so. I'd been intending leaving all of our finances alone but informing the tax office of our change in circumstances is a legal requirement so I spoke to them about leaving dates and lack of income. We will end up with considerably more tax credits than we get now and as a result our weekly 'income' will be doubled for the year. It is made up of the residue from renting our house out once the mortgage and various other bills have been paid. It's surprisingly how much more disposable income you find yourself having even with such reduced numbers coming in when you are not paying utility bills, TV licence and Sky TV subs, phone bill, internet and all the various other things we consider essential when we live in a house.
Part of the challenge of the year is seeing what we can do without; both money and 'home comfort' wise and we won't be taking the advice from the tax office to contact the job centre for other benefits. We feel no sense of entitlement for them when this is a choice we have made. Another part of the year is about finding other skills to earn money though, seeking alternative methods to bolster our finances for the times when we want to book into a campsite, buy a bottle of wine or some chocolate, take Dragon and Star to the cinema or deal with the more mundane but likely need to find money to spend on the van.

This could take the form of finding some casual work along the way; fruit picking or something. It might be that we use our new found skills to create stuff we could sell - produce, crafted items or it might be that we move closer towards the idea of bartering and skill exchanges instead, something I would love to make a part of our lives. The other option is an income from writing about our adventure and sharing it with people. This blog is first and foremost an account of the year for the four of us. I have always kept diaries, in hardback notebooks with doodles and scribbles through my teens, adorned with names of people I thought at the time I would love forever with hearts drawn round them. I have accounts of the early days of our relationship and then with the advent of the internet I moved to internet diarising or blogging for recording parenthood and our Home Ed adventures. With an adventure as big as this one I felt it deserved a new diary - or blog - all of it's own. We have enough friends and family who want to catch up with us along the way and share our adventures that I have opened it up for everyone to read and I'm thrilled to know plenty of people are reading it - Hello Everyone!

This of course opens the blog up for sponsorship and advertising opportunities too. I won't be compromising any of our ideas so there won't be adverts or posts about supermarkets, curriculums or anything that is otherwise against what we are trying to achieve but if the odd post pops up here and there marked as 'sponsored' it's there to boost our funds along the way, please view it as a brief commercial break :)