Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
OK – this is actually two weeks, but the reason this is late is that I was in Bath last weekend for my brother’s wedding. Blogging didn’t seem appropriate at the time, I sort of had something more pressing in mind.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Moved into our actual cabin!
We’d ordered a custom-fit mattress from Ship Shape Bedding that finally turned up this week, so last night we officially moved from the rear cabin to the forward cabin.
Bed space is a lot narrower, it being the peak of the boat and all, but we get tons more admin space.
The mattress is fantastic and I’m not receiving any affiliate commissions for saying that.
Here’s a pic:
Fitted the second new hatch
When we bought the boat, we knew the hatches needed replacing. A couple of months ago we had a decent weather window and changed the one in our (new) cabin, which took a couple of days due to the learning curve.
I’m proud to say we changed the second hatch in the saloon in four hours total.
A boating pro would tell you that you can lift old hatches out and reuse them later. Sadly, we couldn’t find the replacement parts for the hatches on our boat, and removing them was… destructive.
I guess I can’t say I’m the world’s best boat maintainer. However, we’re doing this ourselves, so I’m rightfully proud of our development.
Payday
Got paid, topped up my Lloyds pot. Because the fees on that are so low, that will continue to be my main investment vehicle this year.
That being said, even though notionally the fees of the Wealthify robo-investor account are notionally higher, it has maintained a fairly good performance while having low volatility. I can’t be sure if that’s by design or the fact that its valuations aren’t live prices, but I can’t complain and haven’t closed that account. It reinforces my thinking that a robo-advisor isn’t a bad way to start investing.
If you’re not sure about how best to invest, best advice is to simply start with “good enough” and refine from there.
My savings rate at the moment is 44% excluding the whole “do pensions count?!” debate. Not perfect, but not bad either. With pensions it’s something like 56%.
I’m not a big fan of doing too much data porn on my FIRE position, because (a) if you’re new to this, it’s demoralising if you don’t realise I’ve been going hard for a few years now, and (b) it’s really boring to write. However, as it stands, in non-pension assets I’m on something like £60k total, with Lady SierraWhiskyMike being probably around the same level. The boat/ emergency fund) is on £20k-ish, which I pay into monthly but is then siphoned off to pay annual mooring fees and/or upgrades, maintaining a float that I try to keep above £12k.
We also have pension accounts, but the pension system in the Channel Islands isn’t as advantageous as the UK system so I basically only pay workplace contributions into it to get the employer match. If I was still UK tax resident, I’d be using an ISA and SIPP combination with low-cost providers, but here it’s general investment account as main vehicle and workplace pension provider to get the employer match.
Earned a bonus!
Our stats at work came in for the last year, and now that the accounts have been done I’ve been given a nice performance bonus. It missed payroll this month, so hopefully that’s in next month’s pay slip.
Probably going to skim some of it off for a city break or something, but most of it is going into the Lloyds investment pot.
Distractions and detours
Writing class
We’re reviewing two stories at a time, and I’m near the end. Probably not going to write much more about writing class until the course is over in June.
Brother’s wedding
As I said at the top. We spent last weekend in Bath to attend my brother’s wedding, which was literally in the Roman baths at Bath. Great day, cool to see little brother 1 of 2 looking so happy. His wife is lovely and they’re great together, nothing but best wishes for them.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
We’ve spent two weeks learning The Evil That Men Do by Iron Maiden. Loving it, not quite up to pace yet but it’s fun to play and we’re most of the way through the intro and verses.
I realised this week that I know lots of bits of songs, but very few in their entirety. After asking around, I’ve been told that’s pretty normal for the one year of playing experience I’ve got. The big fear is that someone asks me to “play something”, but I don’t actually know any songs all the way through. Might have to do something about that for my own peace of mind.
Fitness
Not been too bad on the phys. Have had at least two dedicated gym sessions per week, and kept active and mobile when there hasn’t been a gym. I can tell you from Lady SierraWhiskyMike’s fitness tracker that we were clearing 15,000 steps most of the days we were in Bath, which sounds like a lot(?).
Final thoughts
Payday always means a big boost to the investment pot, so that’s cool. Having been on the boat for something like five months now, I’m feeling a lot more confident about making big investment allocations on payday, knowing roughly how much I’ll live out of for the month.
As things stand, I’m well on my way to achieving CoastFI within the ten-year time frame I set myself at the start of this blog. I mean, I’m not exactly far off this now. If we packed up, moved to the UK and maintained our cost of living for twenty years, we could reasonably expect that the growth of what we have today would fund a reasonable standard of retirement living, albeit not a glamorous one or one with much fat in the budget.
I’m grateful for the good fortune I’ve had so far, and hopefully things will continue in this vein for the foreseeable future.
My financial independence campaign continues!
