For those of you following the blog, you will know that we are working our way towards Coast FIRE, where we are looking to scale back our workloads so that we can spend our middle years with our two children, currently 2 and 4 years old.

I would just hate to look back on my life and realise how much time I spent at work, and how little I spent with the family.

In about another year or so, we are hoping to make the move, literally and figuratively.

One part of the transition to spending quality time with the family is to quit my full time job as an Operations Manager, and focus on my financial advice business which offers me far more flexibility and occupies less of my time. My wife will continue in a part time capacity if she can find a suitable role.

Our focus is on earning enough to at least cover our fairly low expenses, while allowing any leftover savings to remain untouched and grow. That is if we have any left after the build!

The second part of the move, the literal part, is moving house. I will get into the reasons in another post, but we were looking to move somewhere with a much slower pace of life and more of a community feeling, as well as affordable land. We found that place in late 2019 in a small Northland town with a population of about 3,000.

We found a very generously sized section of 2,600m2 for $290,000.

My wife has always wanted to build a house. It runs in her blood, with a family full of house builders. We have a design that we are happy with, which we have sent out to builders to quote.

It’s a 300m2 4 bedroom house, including the garage and outdoor living, that will provide ample space for the family to grow.

In April 2021, we met with four builders on site. Two local builders, Green house builders, and Passive house.

I spoke about our desire in a previous post to build a passive house, but the reality is now hitting home that it is not financially viable at the moment. The passive house option would have cost well in excess of $1.3 million. We found many of their architects and designers uninspiring too. Guessing due to the build price.

We think we can achieve a well enough insulated home, without going for the full passive option. If we went passive, we would have been compromising on too much with the house design. So, unfortunately not for us.

So there we are. Already having to make compromises!

Up next, I will go over the reasons for the move in more detail, then we will discuss the quotes. Will our plans be derailed with the cost of building increasing over the last year or so? Stay tuned!