Well, how frustrating! We’ve gone from quite a good financial situation to not a very good financial situation, due to the pound to euro exchange rates, in what appears to be the blink of an eye!
We still have the same amount of money – however because of the exchange rate it shrinks when it gets here!
We have enough money here in euros to finish the work that we’ve planned. But we’re going to draw a line under it then. We do have more sterling, but I don’t want to transfer it at these rates – everything is just too volatile. Transferring any more money now will make our work here proportionately more expensive and no longer good value. It will use up any safety net that we have as it won’t go anywhere near as far.
Luckily we’ll have all the main building work finished, including the front of the house. We’ll make sure that we have the guest room finished so we can offer bed and breakfast.
The main things we won’t be able to do are the fancy bits like getting the rest of it decorated and reupholstering the furniture etc. Not forgetting of course other essentials such as investing huge amounts in light switches and buying new towels. (I may have given the impression earlier that I was disparaging of our decrepit old towels – what I now know that I should have said is that I love our vintage towels!
However this isn’t the end of the world and we’ll have got all the main things done. I know we could do the painting ourselves, and we might do the plain white outside walls, however I really want to use a professional for the inside.
So we have set ourselves a challenge of completing the work, and indeed living, off of our dollar and euro earnings rather than transfer any more sterling.
On the plus side, it is quite good to really focus on funding the rest of our work from our earnings – and we’ll be in a good position eventually when the financial situation shakes itself out. It also means that we’ll have a bit of a breather before getting the rest done so we can really decide what we want in the way of decoration etc.