07/10/2026
Now I'm building another garden bed.
We’ve recently managed to offload our middle child.
She’s bought her own home, so we’re now down to just one at home.
And while we love them to bits, when you’ve got adult kids at home — plus partners coming and going — the house can get pretty crowded.
And you do get a bit sick of asking them to unstack the bloody dishwasher.
Or is that just me?
Anyway, almost as soon as she moved out, something changed.
And I don’t just mean we suddenly had more room in the house.
We had more room in our heads.
Suddenly we started getting into all the things around the house we’d been meaning to do.
The garden. Painting. Jobs that had been sitting there for months — or, if I’m being truthful, considerably longer than months.
And now I’m building another garden bed.
My to-do list is actually getting bigger.
But strangely, it feels good.
Because things that have been sitting there circling around in my head are finally getting crossed off.
Done.
I see much the same thing happen with people and their finances.
When you’re just trying to manage everything month to month, it’s easy to get stuck down in the weeds.
The mortgage. Bills. Rates. School fees. Credit cards.
Another month rolls around and you do it all again.
It's hard to think five or ten years down the road when most of your attention is going into getting through the next few weeks.
But something changes when you get the big stuff under control.
Particularly the home loan.
When you can actually say:
Here's when we're going to have this thing paid off.
And here's how we're going to do it.
That gives you headspace.
You can start looking further down the road.
Could we invest? Work less? Help the kids? Travel more?
What do we actually want the next 10 or 15 years to look like?
Because getting your home loan under control isn't just about saving interest.
Sometimes it's about getting one bloody big unresolved thing out of your head.
So you can start thinking about what comes next.
Anyway, back to the garden bed.
P.S. Still waiting for sign-off from the certifier. 🐈
