Financial independence is an intimidating objective. There are so many numbers and nearly all of them are bigger than your annual salary. The common way to deal with this is to break it down into numerical milestones and focus on getting the first one done, but even that’s a huge leap for most people.

Having now cleared the mythical £100,000 in invested assets, I don’t think this is actually the biggest challenge, or the thing that guarantees you’re on the right path to success. I don’t even think it’s the thing you should aim for at the start.

The hardest part is simply getting started, and it’s a mindset and behavioural change, not a numerical status.

“You need that first $100,000…”

If you’re reading this blog, I’ll bet you’ve already tried financial YouTube.

I’m not judging: video is much more easily accessible than an obscure text blog, and you can play it in the background like a podcast while you do your chores.

Well, if you’ve done the YouTube scramble and devoured endless personal finance content (thank you, by the way!) then you’ll almost certainly have come across a host of near-identical Warren Buffett clips and quotes repeating the message from the late Charlie Munger that the first $100,000 is the hardest part.

Are you intimidated yet? I was.

Well, it’s nonsense.

Is your first £100k the most important, or is the late world renowned investor just looking back and remembering that building the start of a portfolio was hard, so attributes that to the first $100k because this looks like a small fraction of his final net wealth?

I’m betting the latter.

And, yes, I’m aware that I changed from pounds to dollars in the sentence above. That’s deliberate.

So it follows then that it’s the building the habits that get you to the big numbers that’s hard, not the number itself.

The single biggest obstacle to overcome

Your thoughts and habits are being manipulated every day.

You really want to spend your money… don’t you?

It’s been a hard day/week/month at work, but you have money in your current account. Hooray!

Maybe now’s the time to really treat yourself? After all, you’ve been a good girl/boy/non-binary this whole time, you deserve it.

What? You’re only buying a tub of Ben and Jerry’s? Why stop there? Look at all these nice things you could have! Just click on Amazon and make this happen, we’ll get it to you in 24 hours. Ooh, then you get the surprise of a parcel in the post, too! Such excitement!

In fact, why manually search for this? Think of what you want, then ask Alexa to order it for you.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take a holiday away this year? How about a luxury villa? Lots of sexy young people go to these sunny places, look at all these photos and video clips. You’re not old, you could come on these adventures and jump off these cliffs into the cool sea, swimming with bikini-clad blonde ladies like this one!

You know what? Put down a deposit, we’ll let you book it right now. A few clicks and a web form, no need to actually speak to a person – you’ve had enough of those in your day job. Let a nice easy software solution do it for you.

That was easy, wasn’t it?

Probably going to need a new wardrobe, can’t just where the same t-shirt and shorts on this holiday while you’re surrounded by the same people you live with and/or your friends who’ve known you for years. That’s not cool! Not to worry, a few easy web searches and you can order some brand new threads. Chuck out your old ones, get these on you.

Apple Pay? Of course! Why enter card details in when this is so seamless?

Maybe your phone is a little tired. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was also a video editing suite with LiDAR? How about an iPhone 15? 24 months line rental at £50pm, we’ll practically give you the handset for free. What a great deal!

You get the point: but it’s not your fault

Well, not entirely your fault.

Dude, there are legions of well-educated and talented professionals who deliberately target you using advanced psychology every day, just to get you to part with your money.

You’re a busy person, you will get tired, and that’s when you’re most vulnerable to influence. Are you really going to just shrug off the combined might of the best and brightest using science against you?

It’s actually worse if you’re a parent

Because these bastards attack you via them.

Your son/daughter only wants a PlayStation 5, all their friends have one, it’s how they socialise. I mean you wouldn’t want them hanging out on street corners, would you? It’s dangerous out there! They might get up to mischief, fall in with the wrong crowd, start shooting heroin into their eyeballs and get in prison or join a gang.

No. Be a responsible parent and buy the PlayStation. Maybe a membership pass so they can chat to their friends online, it’s only a small annual subscription fee. A few skins so they can enjoy playing Fortnite for a bit longer.

Wait, you’re putting them through after-school clubs, right? Kids can’t develop properly unless they get at least three different sports/art/music clubs a week after school time. They’ll need you to pick them up with all their kit, so you’ll need a comfortable, reliable and safe car. Ignore the safety ratings of used budget hatchbacks: an SUV is the best thing for them. Here, we’ll let you buy it on finance, low-cost monthly payment.

Have you considered private tuition for GCSEs? If you can’t afford private schools, this is the next best thing!

Get the mindset right first

The single biggest thing that changed for me was realising that I don’t actually have to listen to any of the noise.

You must choose to take control, pick and choose services you actually want and what you can live without, and decide where your money goes.

It is a choice, but it’s not an easy one.

Our family were taken aback when we lived without a car and I got some strange looks when I told them I was side hustling on Uber Eats while I retrained. I regret nothing. In fact, we only have a car today because we move the dog on an island with poor transport infrastructure. When he’s no longer with us I’ll ditch that, too.

This is minimalism in its easiest form. Just cut out things unless they specifically add value to your life. Make them justify their existence in your world, don’t do the justification yourself.

I recommend doing a digital cull, too. Use an ad blocker on the internet, select entertainment services that minimise advertisements (there’s a reason I don’t use Amazon Prime much, unless it’s a one-month rental to binge watch The Boys), unsubscribe from e-mail lists.

You’d be amazed at how little you actually need when you do this.

When you’ve adopted this mindset, building an emergency fund is easy

I found it hard to stay out of debt at first. I’d needed to pay off a motorbike loan before I could even get to start thinking about FIRE.

Yeah, really. I bought a motorbike on finance once. Debt was cheap, £7,000 didn’t seem like a lot. I now don’t own any motorbikes and I don’t have any debt, but if I wanted to I could just go any buy one in cash.

You know what? I don’t feel the need anymore.

The thing is, when you get the mindset right, you end up with spare cash at the end of the month.

To start with, you suck’s at doing anything with that spare cash. You think “Great! I’ll put that aside for [insert treat here]!” Been there.

Then, when you’ve internalised this new way of living, you’ll realise that actually you should get rid of some of your less-essential monthly outgoings. Streaming services are cheaper than Sky, so you do that. Then you realise you can’t watch more than one at a time anyway so you pick one (if any) and cull the rest. Then you realise how bad the BBC is and ditch your TV licence for internet streaming only…

Soon you will realise that you’re now accumulating faster. Not much by quantity, but a lot faster by percentage. Going from saving £50 to £100 extra a month is a 100% growth in your savings rate, and that was a pretty big step up for me when it happened. Eventually I hit the heady heights of £200 savings per month and I really thought I was cooking on gas at the time.

The test comes when you set up a side cash pot to save up for some big expense. You’ll know you’ve really taken everything on board when it becomes time to spend that cash pot on that big expense, when the day finally arrives… and you decide not to.

This might take a couple of goes. Don’t worry about failing a couple of times, you’re only human. You will eventually get to the point where your new attitude gets in the way of you pulling the trigger on something.

Here’s a secret: you won’t actually miss out by doing this. You’ll probably find a low-cost alternative and get just as much joy.

When you’re at this stage, you finally realise that you have an emergency fund already sat there. You don’t want to spend it anymore, but if you needed money you already have some.

It’s all downhill from here

The rest of this is just rinse and repeat.

Mediocre investment plans can still work

When you’re beating the Captains of Consumption more often than you’re losing, the rest of this is straightforward.

You need to maximise how much you can save and put that surplus to work.

A lot of people then stumble here. They discover FIRE and the financial independence community, they get dazzled by spreadsheets and account types and investment strategies.

These are all good things. You can learn a lot from them, but analysis paralysis is terrible and you will be dazzled by cunning arguments from people who mean well but forget that you’re new to this “having money” thing and don’t really understand what’s being said to you.

It’s true that a low-fee, moderately risky portfolio of funds will generally do better for you over the long term than a slightly higher fee plan. There’s evidence to suggest favourable portfolio allocations over time according to different market conditions. In theory, you could find an optimal investment strategy and commit to that.

But the best plan for you is the one you actually do, not the perfect one you discuss.

If you’re getting 6% return after fees from a mediocre plan, you can make this work by investing for longer or finding more cash to put into it. If you just want to get rid of your mortgage first, you’ll at least lower your expenses so that you don’t need such a big stash anyway, and you can probably double how much you invest once that’s paid up.

A mediocre plan executed well will work if you do it. Could you be more efficient? Maybe, but just doing it will get you to where you want to go eventually.

This is why I think that using a robo-investor is perfectly reasonable, especially if you’re starting out. There are cheaper options out there, but robo-investors take all the noise away and leave you with something workable until you can build your investing knowledge.

Hitting bigger numbers is just a matter of time.

If you can get your mindset right, if you can just get started, these arbitrary numerical milestones are simply a function of being consistent for a long time.

We crossed £100,000 some time this year or last year. I don’t know for sure when, but I do know for sure that I don’t care. In theory, the growth in our portfolio should make a reasonable contribution to our progress, but it affects nothing in my daily life at all.

That hardest part is getting started. It’s a mindset and behaviour thing, not a net worth or investment milestone.

So get started!

If you haven’t already, get things together. Make the small changes now, start on your journey.

It won’t cost you much and it’s worth more than you’d think.

My financial independence campaign continues…