Background

I'm Jack (not my real name, but so that some folks identity is protected.), a software developer/architect with nearly 30 years of hard graft behind me. Aged in my late 40's and with a quite young (wife in her late 30's and two great kids turning double-digit) family.

We lived had lived the last 20 years in the South of England, with me working away from home (returning weekends) a lot of the time. About five years after the kids were born, in 2002, my wife (Penny) and me started to talk about life in the UK and a possible change. Before we had met, both of us had independently backpacked round Asia and Australia and I had been brought up in Botswana where my parents had been teachers. In 2002, we really started to notice that both of us were working our socks off (Penny teaches Pilates) just to pay the mortgage - not that we had a very large mortgage - and bills with no real life. Added to that, our confidence in the UK economy was on the slide as more and more 'pre-approved' offers for loans (we're not 'borrowers'...) and other hard-sell-credit came through the letterbox; if everyone in the UK was getting these then the bubble would eventually burst.