I've been really busy lately, not that my personal situation would suggest so. You may have thought that by now I'd have moved into the flat I made an offer on in the summer, settled in with maybe a wife and a couple of kids by now. This isn't the case. I am still at home, no closer to living anywhere else.
I'm nearly 22 years old. In the olden days, you used to die at 30 (Jesus, in fact, outstayed his welcome). That's why kids started working up chimneys at 8 years old, so they got some income in, enabling them to move out shortly after hitting puberty. They'd get married at 12, have kids at 13 and retire at 20, so they could enjoy their twilight years properly. By their standards I am a pensioner.
Even though none of that is true, I still feel too old to live at home.
Basically, the flat I wanted (because it was cheap) in Slough had too many legal obstacles to overcome. In the 6 months we took to wait for the process to take its course, once I had signed the mortgage application and made a formal offer on the flat, the company who own the flat provided one solitary piece of information. That wasn't enough, so I pulled the plug and decided to think about something else.
Thankfully, 6 months of expecting to move out meant that I hadn't spuffed my monthly income on frivolous crap (aside from a Wii and new laptop). Nearly 6 months of salary, minus the newly purchased electronics and a few drinks at new year, is enough to add to the deposit I had in July last year. This meant, somehow, my budget of affordable places just increased by 20 grand, opening up a whole new world of properties; places where the bedroom, lounge and kitchen don't share the once space. Comparable luxury.
So now I've made an offer on somewhere in High Wycombe and am determined not to emotionally invest in the flat at all (shouldn't be too difficult, what with it being a flat in High Wycombe). The whole experience of being a first time buyer has stressed me to the point of wishing just to live somewhere so long as I never have to
Work has kept me busy, too. In a give-take sort of way, my team were told of the glory of achieving a decent bonus for our hard work over the last year. This was balanced out by being told that they would be more than grateful for us to do some probably unpaid overtime, to catch up with the current backlog of work going on. This and the corporate M&Ms (yes, you read that correctly) everyone in the company was given, emblazoned with the operating profits of the company, has got to put them in the Sunday Times top 100 places to work for.
Still, I'm de-stressing by getting back into 5-a-side football with colleagues on a Thursday evening, which is always fun, so it evens itself out.
