Gus Petrakis

When you do get it pumped, be there and ask them to show you the baffles and tell you the condition. That's the visit where you find out whether your outlet baffle is broken, which is the failure that quietly sends solids into the drain field and costs thousands. Twenty minutes of standing in the garden being nosy is the best value in the whole system.

Whatever you agree, get it in an email and get them to reply yes before you write another line. Verbal agreement on a call at this stage is how you end up here again in three weeks with a worse mood.

Mine went up 15% in year one and 4% in year two, and I stopped worrying once I realised the withdrawal rate implied by the new number was still under what I'd modelled. Worth checking that before you treat it as an emergency, sometimes the budget was just conservative.

Before the rod, try a one-off high temperature run: turn the thermostat up to 70C for a few hours, then run every hot tap for a couple of minutes each to push the hot water through the pipework, then turn it back down. That kills the bacteria in the tank and the smell often goes for months. Be careful with scalding while it's up there, especially if there are kids in the house.

One underrated piece: part time income in the first few years does more for sequence risk than any allocation tweak. Two days a week of consulting covered about 40% of our spending for the first three years and meant the portfolio barely got touched while it recovered. It also gave me somewhere to put my brain, which I hadn't expected to need.

Short cycling is the single most common way people kill a well pump, because it's the startup current that wears the motor, not the running. A pump that starts three times a minute in the shower is doing many times the wear of one that runs continuously for two minutes. Fix it soon rather than at your convenience.

Split it. I put half the surplus at the mortgage and half in taxable for three years, which felt like a fudge at the time and turned out fine. You don't get the maximum of either outcome and you don't get the worst version of either regret.

Get a second quote and ask each of them specifically what happens to the backwash water and how much it uses. My first quote was for a system that would have dumped a lot of water into a septic field that couldn't take it, which nobody mentioned until I asked.

Worth separating admin you must do from admin you chose. Bookkeeping is a couple of hours a month if you keep it current, or a full weekend in January if you don't. An accountant for a few hundred a year buys back more time than most productivity changes, and gets the tax bits right.