Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.

Progress on my goals

Shares are down, gold is down, Bitcoin is up

Pretty much ‘nuff said. Markets for both equities and bonds have been depressingly flat, whereas the small Bitcoin holding I have is showing pretty good growth.

Gold has dropped to, which is curious.

In case you’re wondering if there’s a lesson to be learned – there isn’t one beyond the age-old idea of diversifying across asset classes. You never know what’s going to grow or decline at any one time, so I try to spread my resources around.

If we were to look at nominal growth, I think I’m actually up across the board in all asset classes at the moment. Not that this matters too much, but essentially because I’ve been consistently investing in them all for a couple of years now a market downturn only seems to hurt the amount of upside I have if I wanted to cash out today.

As I’ve alluded to before though: my outlook on investing has changed over the course of this blog and my FI campaign. Initially, I was very keen to optimise my portfolio; whereas now, I’m more inclined to focus on how much I can put into it, which is the one variable I control.

It’s like stoicism for people who aren’t going to read Marcus Aurelius.

Distractions and detours

For the Glory of Rome!

My partner hit me with the latest internet trend: how often do you think about the Roman Empire?

So now I’m acutely aware that I think about the Roman Empire a lot. So much. Comical amounts that suggest brainwashing.

To be fair, I studied archaeology once, and wrote a dissertation on the Roman forts in Britain. All the same though, it’s pretty mental to think that it’s a common thing amongst men. I wonder why?

Rome isn’t even the coolest ancient civilisation. The Sumerians had it nailed. The Akkadian/Sumerian goddess Ishtar or Inanna was the goddess of war and sex – seriously, a sexy war god. They also describe the first female ruler, King Kubaba (the word for king doesn’t seem to be gendered in Sumerian) and explains that she was an innkeeper who overthrew a hegemon.

Dude, you could have overthrown the system in the name of a sexy war god to live in a city ruled by the pub landlady in ancient Sumer! What a cool point in history, and it was around 1,000 years before Stonehenge was a thing.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

This week is Screamager by Therapy?. Wouldn’t be my first choice of song or band, but my guitar teacher wants me to get to the point where I can start to play along with songs and/or other people, so that works for me.

There was a cool moment in the lesson where I was able to jam along to the first part of the song having only just learned it. That was cool.

Fitness

Made up for lack of fitness with a few more training sessions.

I even made it to archery this week – check me out! Understandably, it took a few salvoes to get my eye back in. We’ve headed indoors for the winter season and the closer range is a short-ish walk from work, so I’m fairly confident about getting to shoot once a week as standard until we go back to the better (but further away) outside butts.

On the flip side, my diet discipline slipped quite a bit. I’ve had a fair bit of sweets this week and understandably looking a little bloated. It’s like I never learn…

Final thoughts

Diversification across asset classes is clearly something that works for me. It’s cool to see that not all my assets are doom-and-gloom dipping at the same time. This is a deliberate plan and alway has been, but now that I’ve been investing for a little while I’m starting to see first hand how that pans out with cost averaging.

This week has been a little boring to read, but that’s just the ride I guess!

Anyway, now I’m thinking about ancient Sumer/ Mesopotamia. Came to write about money, stayed for the archaeology daydream.

My financial independence campaign continues!