So, today I’m going to do something that is considered very taboo in the UK and talk about actual financial stuff. Buying a big castle or property big enough for the number of people we want to help isn’t going to be cheap and I stuck up a progress bar when I started the blog, but you’ll notice there are now three.
I’ve been doing basic research into how much castles in Scotland cost over the last few years, working out what’s feasible, how much we’d need and what sorts of bills we might expect, problems etc and it’s brought me to the conclusion that there’s more than just saving up to buy the castle.
We obviously need to buy the actual building, which is our first progress bar. The literal liquid cash (or buying power), needed to make the offer on a Scottish castle. This hasn’t been difficult to work out. For about the last two years or so, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Scottish castle market and we’ve established that there’s a range of about £750,000 for the lowest end of castle which needs a lot of work, or isn’t ready to live in yet, up to approximately twice that, £1.5m if we want it ready to go.
The latter tends to be the price for castles that are already being run as hotels or whatever, and we’re going to shoot for that larger amount, for two reasons. Reason 1, I believe in aiming for a goal that is slightly above the basic necessary, because even if you don’t quite get there, it gets you somewhere awesome. Reason 2. Even if we got one cheaper, we’d have to sink a significant amount of funds in order to renovate, and that’s a lot more hassle that I’m only likely to take on if the building was otherwise perfectly what we wanted.
As you can see, we are 23% of the way there (23.33% to be precise). That’s made up of the mortgage we can get, the amount of cash we can already buy with (Bryan and I), money in our current house, etc etc. This is the most obvious, but will be the hardest progress bar to fill. It’s basically liquid assets and the mortgage we’re able to commit to. This is where the majority of the fundraising will need to focus and we will need to work hard at.
I am encouraged that we’re already almost a quarter of the way there though. I won’t go into backstory here either, but given how life took a sort of hard reset for me in the last few years and I’ve only been moving forward for a year or so now, this is a positive start and makes me glad I finally crunched the numbers fully.
The next bar is a little bit more difficult to pin down and is where a lot of my research will have to go into ongoing issues. It’s not smart if we raise all these funds for buying a castle and then can’t afford to look after it, pay the fixed cost bills and keep the lights on etc. Now some money will probably go towards this from people coming to stay for retreats, others who come to live with us more long term etc. But I wanted to know for sure that if the worst happened and it was just Bryan and I by ourselves in a castle, can we keep it. I’ve worked out that for things like council tax (British equivalent of property taxes), internet, maintenance, electricity, gas etc. We need to make sure there’s about £1800 coming in per month.
I’ve not included things like food, cause that fluctuates entirely with how many people are in the castle, or any cost like that which we cover for ourselves already. If anyone stays with us, comes to do a retreat, or we host a conference, feeding those people and any extras they generate will be part of the cost we pass on. Or we decide to cover to sponsor someone free or something. Either way, it doesn’t need to be included in the amount for making sure we don’t lose the castle once we’ve gained it.
Similar to the castle fund itself, we can already put some money toward this that already goes to those costs in our lives and I also already have some low level investments generating monthly income that can add to the pot. As such we are 27.2% of the way toward this goal as well. It might not seem like a lot of a fairly small monthly sum, but we’re not factoring in things like food, clothing, mortgage payments or anything like that which I also already pay for and would be paying for in the castle too. I expect this will be the easiest bar to increase, however.
The more I have invested, the more that takes care of itself. The more I earn and have disposable income, the more I can contribute. And the more books I have, the more that will go up. It’s also the hardest to calculate accurately, so I’m being cautious. My book income is often higher than the amount I’ve used for my calculations and the investments can return higher amounts, but I’ve used the base levels I’d expect if I was sick for an entire month, or whatever.
Which brings me to the final bar. Debt. This is probably the hardest part to talk about. Bryan and I have some debt. In the grand scheme of needing £1.5m for a castle, it’s not a lot of debt. Maybe about 1% of the total. But I wanted to include it simply to be accurate and complete. Part of the debt is also my student loan. I’m close to having it paid off and if I do get it paid off then I regain 9% of my income each month (UK student loans are paid back via a percentage of income per month). There’s also a small loan we took out to cover the cost of the first stage of Bryan’s spouse visa when it ended up twice as expensive as we budgeted for.
Getting the two of us to the point where we could live in the same place, be working together, and both be able to support each other has taken some serious energy, money and stress. We couldn’t even begin to think of working toward a goal like this until we were able to actually be in one place with half the bills and everything else that gets easier when you’re in one place.
That’s left us with some debt to settle and paying that back would free up a lot more cash to go toward the ongoing costs when the time comes. We’re sorting that ourselves anyway, and will continue to do so, no matter what, but I felt it would be disingenuous of us to talk about making forward progress without showing the whole picture. Part of that financial progress is getting to the point that we’re not paying interest on debts anymore. Paying off my student loan also directly impacts my buying power in the UK.
So, that’s the three progress bars. We plan on focusing on getting the debt sorted to start with, but we will be working toward all three simultaneously. Next, I will aim to increase investments and income to tackle the monthly amount needed, partially because having that amount coming in sooner also grows the liquid assets faster.
And then finally we’ll focus on building the actual pot needed to go buy a castle. The buying power will also automatically grow as my book income goes up, but, as I’ve already said, I’m wary of relying on that solely too much. Book royalties are inherently unstable, so this will remain a conservative part of the process, but probably the bulk of what gets us there.
I’ll blog some more next week on some of the work related stuff I’m doing to bring in funds, and also on the financial advice we’ve been looking into and getting to help grow those numbers.
Thank you everyone for reading this, not so easy to write, but necessary part of the process, look at financial numbers and the actual money behind the goal. I hope it’s not been too dry, I tried to keep numbers brief and talk about the reasons behind them.
If anyone wants me to talk about anything more, has questions about what we’re doing, looking at etc. feel free to drop them in the comments.