The answer to my question “Will I Take Redundancy?” is yes! I accepted the offer and left the company, my last working day was Friday 29 August. It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

My plan is to retire. I have 2 pensions I can start taking now and together with interest/dividends from my investments I should be able to get by. In fact I can pretty well maintain the same standard of income. I guess that makes me very fortunate. But really, it was not luck. I’ve been investing for the long term for many years. My previous sacrifices have left me in a good position. And I’m still young enough to enjoy it.

I’ve read again what I wrote last year, and history repeats itself, or at least I do. Ironically, I’m cash-strapped again, after resolving last year to sort my financial situation out.

We went to Kent, near Hever Castle for a week and had a great time. Really good weather and lots of interesting places to visit. We included a 5.5 mile walk so that gave us some good exercise, and a sun tan.

I start back at work today, after a two and a half week break.

Our holiday in Crete is over and we’ve come from blazing sunshine and temperatures around 100 degree F every day, to showers and temperatures in the high 50s F (if we are lucky).

It’s not all bad though, at least not to my mind. The summer days in Greece are too hot for me to bear for more than a couple of weeks.  And, unles I’m doing a fair amount of sightseeing and exploring, just lounging around by the pool quickly loses it’s attraction. To be back now in a temperate climate, with work and hobbies to resume and friends to catch up with, is actually very welcome.

Whether I’ll be quite so happy after a full day at work remains to be seen. Apart from the shock of being back at my desk for over 7 hours, there may have been some significant changes. Including the possibility that I may no longer have a role.

Before I went on leave there were moves to restructure and remove resources in my group. I may have been absent at a crucial time. Not that my presence would have made much difference,  I’m not in a position of influence in these matters.

I’ve again got myself into a situation where I’m asset-rich but cash-poor and it is a little uncomfortable. Because of the house price boom in the UK of the past years, I have an asset worth much more (double at least) than I paid for it. Similarly I have stock market investments, mostly held in an ISA, that are probably of about the same value as my house.

But right now, I don’t have a lot of cash available. And I’m about to go on holiday, so I’m experiencing a cash squeeze.

I can’t easily make use of the value of the house, at least not without taking risks that are not worthwhile. And my ISA stocks are intended to provide an additional income for when I retire. That is too important for me to mess about with.

To get by in the short term, I’ve taken out a loan with my local Warrington credit union, NEWCU. Hopefully that, together with moving some money from my reserve bank account, will just about tide me over.

For the future, I’ve already taken steps to cut back significantly on my unnecessary monthly outgoings so hopefully, I’ll be able to rebuild my reserves.

My never-ending quest to have a tidier house continues. I am making some progress, I think. No, I definitely am, it’s just that there is so much to do that it is daunting. I think that I’ve mentioned before how my poor habits lead me to leave things lying around and not clean up after myself.

Despite this, things are slowly improving at the moment. It goes in fits and starts but if I just focus on doing a little at a time I can make inroads into the piles that I’ve accumulated.

One technique I have learned that works for me is to start with my back bedroom, which is full of things thrown in haphazardly. There is no room for the bed; I’ve had to leave that dismantled. Anyway, I file or throw things out from there. Then when I’ve made a small space I move things from other rooms into it.

That way my living area gets an immediate benefit and I don’t have to view the debris every day.

My car is due for both a service and it’s annual MOT. I have a knocking sound from my right front suspension that I’ll have to get fixed before it can go in for the MOT certification. I’m guessing it happened when I rode up on the kerb a couple of months ago. I thought at the time that something might have broken.

I’m going  to the National Tyre depot in town this morning to have them check over the suspension. If they have the parts to fix it, I can leave the car with them. Otherwise I’ll need to return tomorrow or later in the week.

Then, once the suspension is fixed, I can arrange for an MOT and service to be done. In the past this would have been straightforward.  For several years now I’ve had my cars loooked after by a small backstreet garage where David, the head mechanic (and usually the only one), has been very helpful.

However last year the garage owner died and there was no-one in the family left to run the place . It looked like it would close and leave David without a job. This had just happened when I rang to book a service and David was very upset.

I haven’t heard since then what happened to David. I just hope he found himself an alternative place to work.

I’m beginning to think about our summer holiday which is fast approaching. We fly out from Manchester on 16 August for two week in Crete.

Because of a small oversight on my part, it is actually just over two weeks. Earlier in the year I’d been attempting to make an exchange of my timeshare weeks in Spain for a holiday on Crete via RCI. First of all, a single week became available and the check-in day was Friday, 17 August, checking out on the following Friday, 24 August.

It was two or three weeks later before another timeshare week was offered. I booked that one before realising that it began on Saturday 25 August.

So now we have to find somewhere to stay on the night of Friday 24 August. The other complication this has brought is that of booking the flights.

None of the budget deals on offer were for a 15 day holiday. As a result I’ve paid quite a bit more than I expected to for the plane tickets. Such is life!

I’m mulling over the latest offer of cable broadband but I’m hesitating because of my previous bad experience with a cable provider.

I signed up for their telephone service shortly after I moved in to my present house, when cable was still pretty new. Things went very badly then with a delay of around a month with the switch-over and terrible service from their help desk. I swore never to use them again.

Things do change though. That original cable company is long gone and the new owners swear they’ve learned the lesson of the damage poor customer service can do to them.

The other main factor pushing me in the direction of cable, at least just for broadband, is the poor quality of my ADSL line. I’m quite a distance from the local exchange and this severely limits the speed and reliability of the ADSL line.

And, of, course, it also helps the cable case that the new offer comes in at almost half the price I’m paying now.

I’m running late this morning. I switched off my alarm at 6am and then kept pressing the snooze button until 7am. And, when I got up, I felt dopey and was moving slowly. This is all a result of getting to bed late at the weekend.

At least there was a good reason for that. My girlfriend and I celebrated being together for 10 years by going out for a good (expensive!) meal at Simply Heathcotes in Manchester. That was enjoyable, we both had a good time. But I pay for late nights by being tired and lethargic the next day. And, before you comment, it is not because I’m getting older. I’ve always been this way, perhaps even more so as a teenager. And yes, that was a long, long time ago.

Never mind, I’ll pick up as the day goes on, in fact by the time I get into work I’ll be just about OK.

A quick update on my trip to London last Friday. Everything went fine and we made some progress on refining our new organisation in the meeting. As a bonus, I got to spend a little time in a bookshop. But only 10 minutes or so as our meeting overran by an hour. I did buy a book and I’ll report back on it at some point later on.