We downsized from £60,000 to £16,000

The Stoddart family downsized from a comfortable £60,000-a-year life in Brighton to live in west Wales on £16,000 – and they still have to pay a mortgage. Here they tell how they did it

I was sitting in a business meeting a couple of years ago doing what normal people do in meetings at work. There was lots of "blah, blah, blah, financial targets" and "waffle, waffle, waffle, notes from the last meeting" when it dawned on me that, now in my mid-30s, I didn't want to "do business" any more. I didn't want to work in an office, in fact.

I started wondering what would happen if we were all thrown into a practically challenging situation, such as the middle of a jungle somewhere; how would we cope and, you know, survive? What good would PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat skills do then?

Look, I was a bit bored and my mind was wandering, it happens to us all. But the point was I'd had a growing, gnawing sense of frustration at my lack of practical abilities for a while. My young family and I were reliant on others in pretty much every area of our lives. If we wanted something we bought it, if something broke we'd replace it, or get someone in to fix it. I couldn't even change a plug, for goodness sake. Our lives in Brighton were comfortable but when we stopped and thought, which we increasingly did, deeply unsatisfying.

Cut to the present and my partner, Chris, 39, and our two young children, aged two and four, have traded in our tiny suburban-by-the-sea home, affectionately known among friends as "the hobbit house", for a 2.3 acre smallholding half an hour outside Cardigan in west Wales for virtually the same price – just short of £300,000. We have swapped well-paid and bustling city living to become the skint owners of a small and remote piece of land up a, sort of, hill, where the nearest pub is an hour's walk away.

Chris is working part time still in an office-based job and I am currently unwaged while writing a book about our often hapless efforts to become all-round useful for a change. We share childcare and smallholding duties, our few savings are long gone, and we still have a large mortgage commitment.

So how's it going? Well, the challenges this past year and a bit have been immense and at times we've felt lonely, frustrated, angry, confused and overwhelmed in equal measure. But throughout it we've been able to laugh at ourselves and our uselessness (if not always immediately) and "get on with it". From cooking off a single gas-ring camping stove for nearly a month to dealing with escaped pigs in the road and frozen water pipes, we've come through it hardier and stronger.

There have been days when it's rained so much the ground is so muddy you can barely wade through it and when the wind has been so cold the phrase "chilled to the bone" takes on real meaning. But there have been many moments of sheer joy and the children love it here, really love it. What child wouldn't relish being able to play in a field, feed pigs and collect chicken eggs, and then ride on tractors and diggers and the like. Who needs a day in a theme park when you have all that on your doorstep?

The fact the children are of pre-school age has made the move easier. We didn't have to worry about them having to start afresh at school – their first experience of it will be at the rather excellent new bilingual school just a five-minute drive away.

We hope our new practically minded, thrifty lifestyle, rich in so many ways, will give our boys a solid grounding and fill them with the confidence and strength of character necessary to find their own way in the world.

Our greatly reduced coffers have forced us to start to become the more practically minded people we have long craved to be. I emphasise "start": we have years of learning and "catching up" ahead of us. From trying to fix a blocked septic tank (thankfully not me that time) and coppicing wood, to repairing an old bike and giving the kitchen cupboards a lick of paint, we are giving things a go, rather than paying to get someone in. We have to.

Some things work, others don't, and we're lucky to have patient and helpful neighbours, one of whom has become a mentor in all things "handy" and "country practical". He knows how to do most things, and what he doesn't know he has a go at anyway, and this "can do" attitude is greatly inspiring. I think he finds our idealistic and, at times, ill-considered ideas amusing and we are becoming more and more able to help him in return – the fine art of bartering being very much alive in rural west Wales.

If you'd have told me a few years back we'd be living on just shy of £16,000 a year I'd have laughed. Let alone if you'd have told me that we'd have a hefty mortgage to pay out of this and our weekly food budget would be £50. We now spend less on food in a month than we'd have blown in a week in our old lifestyle. But we eat a healthier, more wide-ranging diet than ever before. We're growing some of our own vegetables and soft fruit and starting to rear our own meat, and buy high quality food staples in bulk – huge sacks of flour and rice and the like which save a lot of money and last many months. I enjoyed cooking before but now I love it, and have become adept at making all sorts of meals, cakes, breads, sauces and condiments afresh.

Things that once seemed essential no longer do. I used to buy a lot of clothes and was always tempted by email marketing. Yet since moving I've not bought anything, apart from wellies and a poncho – because this is Wales and there's a lot of rain and, oh god, the mud. I have boxes and boxes of clothes already, so there's nothing I really need.

The kids need new clothes as they grow, but our policy of essential items only seems to work. The shopping craving doesn't go away entirely but has subsided over time. Undoubtedly living rurally has helped. I can't just stroll into town, I have to drive an hour to the nearest half-decent shops.

Interestingly, by far the biggest challenge has been the reactions of friends and family from our old life to our changed circumstances. They have been great, travelling by coach, car and train to visit, but we can't just go for lunch, or pay to go on a boat to look at the dolphins in the nearby bay. That would be a week's food money gone in a few hours. We have got better at explaining to others, and I think most people "get it".

The truth is, our needs and wants have gradually reduced over the time we've been here and we are becoming much easier to please. When a bottle of wine is a luxury for just a few times a week, rather than a two-minute hop to the nearest shop because you've run out, it matters more. It's a treat rather than a given, and the same goes for so many other areas of our lives. The desire to get a cheeky takeaway subsides along with your bank account and since living like a peasant you've learned to cook really well, so the half hour drive to pick up food hardly seems worth it.

If you were to ask me why we have done this, I'd say because it felt like it would make us happy in a real sense – there is no farming or alternative living background in my family. My former high-earning lifestyle was me just trying to be normal, to earn enough to buy nice things and then to work some more to buy more because that's what we are supposed to do, right? But the truth is, it didn't do it for us any more. We had an increasing sense of there must be more to life than "this".

The closest Chris and I had come to farm animals before was a city petting farm. Our upbringing was more of the Findus crispy pancake and frozen mixed vegetables nature.

And before you ask, we're not hippies, although I like hippies. We're not doing any yoghurt weaving ... yoghurt making maybe. We just wanted a stab at a lifestyle that may have the potential to offer us and our children long-term fulfilment.

With the help of our generous neighbours we are learning fast, from how to kill, pluck and gut a turkey to driving a tractor. It is exceptionally hard work and it can feel a bit overwhelming. There are also so many ideas and projects that we can't wait to start; from making our own dairy and beer, to building an underground cold store. It's exciting and positively life affirming. Who knows how useful our continued new found skills might turn out to be in the future, whatever it holds?

We won't be living on less than £16,000 a year for ever. As I say, I've spent this past year writing a book about our often bumbling experiences and so have been unwaged during this time. But neither is this some middle-class experiment. Our real-life experiences have shaped our outlook forever and our needs and wants have simplified. Regardless of how my writing career takes off, and whether our finances lift, we are in this thrifty peasant living for the long term. It's our definition of normal now.