Thoughts and reflections about the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
This week we’ve been working our poor dehumidifier HARD.
Boats in Northern Europe/ UK/ Channel Islands get bad condensation around this time of year and we have to stay on top of it otherwise we get a white, grimy surface mould on our surfaces.
Short explanation: science.
Longer explanation: temperature changes are more dramatic throughout the day, plus in our case we cook and live here, so the air inside warms up over the day and moisture condenses on every possible surface as the cold creeps in at night.
Anyone reading this who lives in a single-glazed house will be familiar with the problem, which is basically the same issue.
Fortunately, much like living in a single-glazed house, the solutions are simply:
- Vent the place and open the hatches/ port lights during the day to encourage air flow
- Wipe the windows with a cloth/towel to get rid of the big condensation in the morning
- Consider putting the heating on at night, especially as it gets colder during the winter
- Run a dehumidifier
None of these things are overly arduous but I can see why – if you’re used to comfortable, modern buildings – this would put you off living aboard.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike has also dotted some dehydration packets around to make sure our clothes don’t start absorbing moisture from the air. Boat lockers (like a wardrobe, but boaty) have louvred vented doors on to encourage air flow and reduce the chance of this happening, but as anyone who has ever lived in a damp house will tell you: moisture gets everywhere if you don’t stay on top of it.
I absolutely 100% recommend this workhorse:
In fact, if you work for Igenix and want me to review or otherwise recommend this, I absolutely will because I love it so god-damned much. Honestly, if I had an affiliate link for it, I’d post one.
If you own a boat: consider this an investment in your quality of life.
Payday!
Payday again: investing again.
Excluding my pension, I invested 38% of my take-home pay into a mixture of index funds and gold. Including pension, that figure is a bit over 52%.
Equities
The index funds I bought are the Vanguard Developed World ESG fund (ticker VINGUA) and the Vanguard UK Gilts fund (VIUKGV). I paid in a roughly 80:20 split. To be honest, the gilts are only really there to allow for rebalancing, and I’m on the fence about whether that matters too much.
Neither of these are ETFs. That’s because I have a slight preference against ETFs on the basis that they tend not to trade at the price of their underlying assets, whereas a more conventional open-ended fund should in theory be pretty close to its asset value (minus costs). It’s not a major preference. If you like one more than the other it’s not a big deal. The advantage of an ETF is that you can buy or sell whenever markets are open and when I was using Trading 212 I used ETFs just fine.
My pension fund is entirely in a global equities index tracker. I think my index fund is provided by Legal and General or something, but honestly it’s vaguely equivalent to the Vanguard ESG FTSE All-World I used back in the UK and charges are roughly the same.
The reason I didn’t look to rebalance the pension pot and insert bonds or property assets is purely that my pension fund provider in the Channel Islands has an online platform that is, essentially, unusable. It’s impossible to log into, and all you can do when you log into it is express a preference for holdings. Sod it, just invest my money like I told you to!
Gold?
I’ve been buying gold sovereigns for the last couple of months and intend to do so for a little while. I’m conscious that my entire job and most of my assets rely on digital infrastructure to make me money and I wanted a “real” assets hedge against that being disrupted.
Look, I don’t think that some EMP is going to come along and wipe out the financial system. Probably unlikely. However, I don’t think it’s beyond capability that in the near future a state actor decides to use quantum computing to try out economic sabotage. If that happens, I have no doubt that things will get worked out, but in the intervening period I’d be more comfortable if (a) most of the global stock market growth wasn’t driven by tech platforms, and (b) there was an emergency pot of resource that I could rely on in that intervening period between such an event and service being resumed.
We live on a boat, so property (I.e. paying off the mortgage) isn’t an option yet. That being said, we are toying with the idea of picking up a rental flat/ post-boat-life property using the non-pension assets, mostly for the same reason.
Anyway, back to gold.
Physical delivery is cool because there’s no counterparty risk once you’ve gotten it. The downside, and living on a boat it’s a major downside, is that you probably want to pay for secure storage away from your home location.
Our boat can be broken into by any determined toddler with primitive tools. Suffice to say, I pay for storage.
My target over the next five years is about £20-30k in today’s money. The idea is that this would cover us for a year’s expenses, or a major work on the boat (or, indeed, a replacement but smaller boat). I’ve given it a range of because despite what gold bugs tell you there is a price volatility to commodities.
No Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is on a bit of a tear this year, but I’m way over-exposed so I haven’t been buying recently.
I might start buying on the next “catastrophic” event, but for now I can’t justify piling in to a single asset class that already makes up too much of my portfolio.
Yeah, OK, you might think the gold sovereigns contradict this statement because I haven’t given you any numbers. Let me put it this way: I’m not about to become a Bitcoin millionaire but it’s more of my non-pension assets than would make sense if you looked at my risk appetite.
A note on investment performance
I checked the performance of my Wealthify robo-investor and the performance of my self-managed investment account with Lloyds sharedealing. Despite the much lower fees, the index fund option doesn’t seem to have performed as well as Wealthify, despite the latter being semi-actively managed.
Take this with a pinch of salt. The Wealthify account may have just gotten lucky with systemic growth at a time when the Lloyd’s account didn’t have enough in the pot to benefit. Over such a short time scale it’s not really fair to jump to any conclusions here.
Still, I can’t help but think that this supports my argument that a robo-investor isn’t necessarily a bad option. If you just need to get started they’re worth looking at while you build your knowledge.
I use Wealthify. There are others, but this one seems to work for me, and Lady SierraWhiskyMike is happy using it. If you’d like to try Wealthify, use my referral link and you’ll get £50 when you’ve invested £1,000 for 6 months or longer.
No pressure, I don’t really care as long as you’re investing.
Channel Islanders can only open a GIA. UK mainland readers can open an ISA, SIPP, GIA or cash savings. If you don’t have one already, I strongly suggest opening an ISA while you work everything else out.
Distractions and detours
Writing club!
We had the second meeting of the writing club that we’d continued since doing the fiction writing course earlier this year.
I’ve actually written a fair bit, but I tend to do a small thing and then kill it instead of developing it further. Probably says a lot about me I guess. Anyway, with the help of the writing gang my stories are actually getting better.
We played a game using some prompts where we basically had to follow one prompt for 10 minutes, then continue the same story but include the next prompt, then repeat one more time until we’d written a short story in 30 mins. I write better when I’m under pressure like that. Something about the challenge of the constraints makes it a better, more fun story.
So anyway I wrote a post-apocalyptic short story set in Wales that involved a snotty kid, a first-person narrator and a pissed off sheep called Dolly. These things happen.
I love the writing group, they keep me motivated. And, you know, honest. I often lie and tell myself I’m still writing, but when someone looks you in the eye and calls you out there’s nowhere to hide.
Inked up Part II
Tattoo has almost healed! I went for a cheeky run today and so far nothing bad seems to have happened to it. It’s still a little early to go swimming but I don’t think a little sweat will harm it any more.
One part looks like it might need retouching, but I’ll give everything time to settle before I do anything about it.
Hosting renewal
I had to pay out for hosting renewal on this blog. Sadness, big expense.
This blog doesn’t make me any money. In all the affiliate links I’ve posted, I think Amazon says it will pay be £2.53, when I finally clear the minimum payment threshold.
Well, what do you expect? I took the ads off because they were irritating, and I exclusively write about my lifestyle of living cheaply!
Fortunately, money-making is not the point of this blog. Obviously, if I gain 10 million readers, I’d be an idiot not to put some kind of ads or products on here; but it makes me happy to write about my experiences to my small – some might say bijoux – audience of legendary individuals with refined tastes in internet content.
Anyway, I’m paid up for the next three years, so there goes my pocket money until Christmas.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
We’re playing Bon Jovi Wanted Dead or Alive this week. I suck at it, it’s a big step up in playing. Eh, if you don’t push yourself, you don’t get any better.
It’s obvious that I’ve had little guitar time over the last few weeks but I’ve recovered fairly quickly.
Fitness
Today was my first run back after three weeks and my cardio conditioning has clearly gone to rat poop.
Which is entirely predictable. Cardio conditioning only lasts around three weeks, and no amount of walking was going to compensate for the long-distance running cardio capacity I’d developed.
Fortunately, a lot of evidence suggests that if you’ve already been at a certain performance level and have lost it, it should only take you around one tenth of the time to regain that former position – well, within reason. A 70-year-old is going to struggle to regain the bodybuilding physique of their 25-year-old self if they’ve done nothing for the past 45 years. That’s not the position I’m in, so I reckon I can get back up to distance in a month or so.
Time to park my ego and get on with it!
Final thoughts
A lot has happened this week!
I got paid, made more investments, went to writing club, and got my first post-tattoo run in. That’s pretty good.
Hosting renewal was a bit of a setback (hosting this blog ain’t cheap!) but that’s now sorted for the next few years.
Actually, Lady SierraWhiskyMike and I were talking about the blog while we walked the dog yesterday in the unseasonably warm October air. While technically the blog is a cost to me, I enjoy writing anyway so it doesn’t feel like a chore.
That had been enough of a reason to continue, but we talked it through and Lady SierraWhiskyMike made the absolutely solid point that I’ve financially benefitted from the blog.
No, not like that. I haven’t made money directly by selling the data of my readers.
What has happened though is that I’ve stayed focused on my financial goals and accountable for my progress. Would I have lost motivation or been discouraged if I hadn’t started this blog? Probably. Investing so much of my disposable income might well have grated on me if I hadn’t sat down every week and written about my investing objectives.
So yeah, thanks for reading and taking the time to write to me or comment on my posts. I always enjoy it when you guys reach out to me, and it turns out that in some small way, you’re actually making me financially better off, too.
My financial independence campaign continues!
