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

Progress on my goals

Boat plan – one step forward and two steps back

Turns out we can’t reverse park the boat. Our mooring pontoon is tapered just too much for that to be anything like comfortable, as we found out yesterday.

We’d be listening to the hulls of our boat and next door’s boat rubbing against the pontoon all night until one breaks through the other. No bueno.

So now we’re about to spend the afternoon ordering replacement stanchion posts and a gate kit so that we can customise the lifeline/ guard wire that surrounds our deck to have a dog-friendly gate in it.

This is probably going to delay us by a week or two. I’m a bit down about it.

We realised that this is actually our Own Damned Fault and we had lost sight of what was important to us with other distractions. You’ll see a separate standalone post on this shortly.

Distractions and detours

Arguments with neighbours

In stark contrast to our mooring neighbours who seem to be nothing but friendly, our lodging neighbours have decided that now is the time to start bullying our mother-in-law.

Such drama!

The argument had stemmed from a houseminder two doors down, who had complained to me that I had parked our car on the visitor’s spot while waiting for our insurance paper – the equivalent of a tax disc – to turn up. We can’t park cars in the road on the Channel Islands without this, it’s a major bureaucratic issue that would have been fine if Storm Ciaran hadn’t slowed things down last week.

In case you’re wondering: all other houses in the area were empty, their inhabitants being away from the island, so there were no visitors to inconvenience.

I spoke to the man, he seemed reasonable, and explained that the paper was expected any day now. He understood and said that he was OK with this. The paperwork turned up that day in the post and I moved the car. No biggie, it was all very amicable and he seemed happy.

However, when I got home late from work that night, I learned that said gentleman had decided to knock on the door and scream at my mother-in-law, who he had believed was alone in the house. To prove his point, he’d felt it appropriate to block the communal driveway with his car and threatened her that he would leave it there for a long time if he ever saw another car from this property in the visitor’s space.

The woman was quite shaken up. She thinks the only thing stopping the man from forcing his way in was our dog.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike decided to speak to him, on the grounds that he might allege anti-social behaviour or a threat of violence if I did it, and magically he backed down.

This has been a significant distraction this week. As well as trying to move out, we’re having to deal with this unnecessary drama.

“Couldn’t you just sue him?”

So there’s no right of trespass here, but there is a right of access to the highway that said gentleman was infringing.

Thing is: it’s all very well having rights, but you have to pay up if you want them enforced in court.

Speaking as a lawyer, justice is generally the preserve of the wealthy in most Western countries. I don’t have a spare few thousand pounds to throw at a court to get justice.

Non-legal remedies had crossed my mind, but they risk getting criminal convictions that would cost me my licence to practice. Probably a no-go if I want to press on to FI, this job makes me good money and having a record would exclude me from this and many other similarly well-paying careers.

So basically, because we have more to lose than a pensioner who is watching a house for his allegedly famous sportswoman daughter (I actually don’t know who she is but I haven’t told him that), we’re having to tiptoe around a temper tantrum that should be easily resolved.

Yay.

Non-FIRE goals

It’s our anniversary!

We’ll, OK, technically that’s the middle of next week, but we celebrated this weekend.

We treated ourselves to a nice restaurant and a bottle of wine that ordinarily I’d never pay that much money for.

It was delightful! Worthy of a special occasion.

A hardcore money-saver would put this down as a “distraction”, but I see my marriage as an investment. We’re a pretty strong team, and you have to invest in your personal relationships.

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

Cigarettes and Alcohol went well at lessons this week. My homework has been to write a solo for it.

With the obvious distractions at my lodging and the boat, I have sort-of written something, but I can’t tell if it’s any good or not. We’ll see!

Having a homework assignment of basically writing some music is really cool though. It’s inherently cool, even if I suck.

Fitness

I only managed to get in one training session this week due to chores and work pressures, but it was a full-length session and I felt good doing it.

The downside is that I had a choice between hitting the weights and archery this week, but I think on the whole I’m happy with my decision.

Final thoughts

Being distracted by nonsense has been a massive burden on my mental capacity this week.

It’s amazing and irritating how something so unnecessarily destructive like a confrontation that makes no real sense can throw you off from making progress on things that really matter.

Now we need to be worried about an old lady being bullied by a neighbour as well as build the life we want for ourselves.

Seems like no-one wins from this situation.

Not a great week, but these things happen. Might as well press on!

My financial independence campaign continues!