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

Progress on my goals

Boat life

It’s stormy out there!

Storm Darragh is hitting us in our home as I type this blog post. A bit surreal. Cool, though.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike took down the sails yesterday while I was at work and the canopy tent has been removed. This means that we’re presenting a low profile to the wind and actually it’s not that bad.

I know that not everyone knows stuff about sailing boats so I’ll explain quickly.

Our boat has a furling/ roller furling head sail on the front, that wraps around a pole at the front of the boat when fitted but not in use. She also has a stack pack/ lazy jacks system, which means that when we collapse the mainsail it folds into a big canvas bag that lives on the horizontal boom arm attached to the mast. These are still big enough to catch the 70mph gusts and rock the boat around if we were to leave them attached.

We’ve gotten good at this after last year.

This weekend we need to check the drawings of the new water tank that we’ve been sent and then get that ordered. Should arrive January-February time, ready for knuckle-skinning March as I re-plumb the boat.

We’re also decorating for Christmas. That nice, homely looking picture at the top of this post? That’s our miniature Christmas tree. When Storm Dickweed calms down I have some lights to go around the outside, too.

Distractions and detours

Christmas parties

As well as being irritatingly busy, it’s also party season at work. There’s a lot of temptation for a big blowout but I’ve still got these fitness goals to be getting on with and I don’t really want to undo them all.

“Moderation”. I guess I’ll be boring and use “moderation”.

With Christmas being midweek this year, I’m actually in work for the Monday and the Friday. Corporate money never sleeps!

Probably not getting a bonus

I’ve also done the maths, and despite working long hours, travelling for work, building a new practice are bringing in over a quarter of a million pounds (and climbing), I won’t actually qualify for a bonus this year. Lawyers’ bonuses are based on the number of hours spent working on matters, whether they eventually get charged to the client or they get written off as an inefficiency.

Financially, I would have been better off keeping my head down, being super inefficient and therefore being less profitable for the business.

I feel like there’s a lesson in that, somewhere.

No matter. Integrity is its own reward, and I’m not willing to waste endless hours of my time faffing about slowly just so that I can gain access to a portion of a 3% bonus pot. There are other things I want to do with my week than corporate work!

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

This week we’re practising hammer-ons and pull-offs with that classic Iron Maiden song, The Trooper.

It’s such a great record!

My teacher is jumping around the playlist I put together. Almost all of the songs are too ambitious for me right now, but they’re good to take parts from and practice skills. For example: I can’t actually play Master of Puppets at anything like the full speed, but it was a good way to practice picking patterns and mixing pedal tones in by using a song that I recognise and knew what it ought to sound like.

Fitness

Despite the hard work and partying, I managed to fit in three decent gym sessions this week. I’ve been exploiting the opportunity to use the treadmills because the weather has been de-motivational for running this month.

The bad thing about treadmills is that they can be a little unrepresentative of the effort required to actually run somewhere. On the other hand, they’re really good at training to run to a set speed and at incrementally increasing said speed.

I’m training for a marathon, so shorter run times aren’t really a good metric to measure, but I’ve gotten to sub-20minute 5km runs fairly consistently now and sub-45minute 10km runs aren’t much of a push.

Albeit those are treadmill numbers, so maybe add 10%.

I do add “random” setting incline to my running because it’s good to condition the legs (and because the real world isn’t flat), but I don’t really put it on a challenging incline setting for distance runs.

Final thoughts

Reading the above, it looks like I’m having a bit of a downer this week.

I don’t think I actually am, mind you, it just looks like that because of the topics I write about on here.

We’re also getting to that time of year where I do my annual end-of-campaign-year review. I’ve started to look back at stuff already and it’s awesome how much I’ve achieved over the year, even though week-to-week feels like slow movement.

I think that’s a great note to end on. Let’s end on a high, and go with the fact that little marginal gains build up over time to make big changes happen. Little, consistent efforts, and a tiny bit of planning.

My financial independence campaign continues!