It’s that time of year again where I look back on the successes and frustrations of the past year of my financial independence campaign.
Gimme the details!
As with the previous years, this is being broken down into my three big pillars.
- Investing in myself
- Spending intentionally
- Investing my money
Investing in Myself
What I said I wanted to do…
Think back to Campaign Plan 2024. I said I’d:
- Get better at sailing and explore the surrounding islands
- More reading – with some educational reads thrown back in
- Write more frequently: at least weekly
- Practice guitar five times per week
What I actually did…
Sailing
We did get better at sailing and we sailed to the remote island of Alderney from where we’re based.
I think we could’ve done more sailing, but the repairs turned out to be more of a time suck than expected. The hatch repair alone took us several weeks.
However, we now know how this all works and we’re getting reasonably good at getting the boat into/out of our mooring. A mooring that the marina staff rated “quite difficult”. So, you know, we’re making good progress.
We’re also full-time live-aboards now! That’s the biggest win.
Reading
I definitely kept reading.
It’s hard to say that I added more educational reads into my rotation. I have read a lot this year, but the only high-brow reads were:
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
- Nope, that’s it.
However I’ve read 34 books this year, plus short reads. So it’s not the case that I haven’t kept up a reading habit, it’s more the case that I’ve been devouring sci-fi and weird fantasy books rather than actually learning something new.
Oh yeah: I started reading Ali Abdaal’s book Feel Good Productivity but I thought it sucked and put it down. It’s not counted in my list.
In hindsight, this goal was a little difficult. I have a stressful job and on the side I’m learning guitar and writing stuff. There’s a limit to how much “personal development” I can actually do without just suffering burnout or turning my spare time into a grind.
I think I can do better with the balance, mind you.
Write more frequently
I now have a weekly writing routine for this blog. It keeps me honest and helps me track all the progress I’ve been making.
On top of that, I took a writing course and now I’ve gained a small friendship group for writers. We meet up once a month, do a mini-writing exercise, then give ourselves homework for the next meeting.
Yeah, I missed I think two or three weeks of the blog, but I definitely managed this on average and following the rabbit down the hole seems to have come out better than I could’ve expected this time in 2023.
So I’m calling this a win for SierraWhiskyMike!
Guitar practice
I definitely haven’t been playing five times per week. Try three.
My guitar has come a long way. I still suck and probably always will do (a lot of guitarists have told me that you always think you suck) but I’m playing stuff that doesn’t force Lady SierraWhiskyMike to wear headphones when I practice now.
That’s really cool. I feel like a rock god badass when it all goes well.
I’ve been playing for one year and nine months at this point. Well, ish. There’s some technicality about the exact number of months, but it’s basically one year and nine so far.
Spending Intentionally
What I said I wanted to do…
- Return to packed lunches and meal planning
- Sailing and a city break for holidays
Wow, short list.
I sucked at meal planning
Turns out that I don’t have the discipline to reliably plan my work lunches.
I even bought Huel, but I find quite often that I deviate from using Huel by buying an actual sandwich or lunchtime baguette.
To be fair, this isn’t a showstopper. The friction here is that my way of life is quite intense and tiring, so buying lunches frees up my mental capacity a bit. It’s also hard to have Huel for lunch after going to the gym for a hard cardio workout. The body screams for solid food.
So, yep, I failed this one.
We did the holidays thing!
Yeah, we sailed to Alderney and we went to Paris for our anniversary.
I’d actually forgotten about the city break idea until writing this post, but it turns out I’d been planning for it all along.
I’m calling that a win.
Investing Money
What I said I’d do…
- I reckoned that I’d go for £1,600 per month on auto-invest, plus pension contributions of £7,000
- Maintain £100 per month into Bitcoin until my exposure exceeds £10,000
- Avoid gold and venture capital investments
I totally maintained the traditional investments
So this plan changed a little because:
- I got a slight pay rise and this added £600 to my pension contributions for the year. Yay!
- I changed from auto-invest to allow for purchases of gold mid-way through the year.
Ultimately though, I basically did this thing. And went beyond (!).
My Lloyds Sharedealing had about £20,700 of contributions in it as of today. That’s an average contribution of a little over £1,700 per month.
Basically I was able to put in a lot more at the start of the year. I was able to put in around £2,000 up to August.
When Lady SierraWhiskyMike switched to part-time work, I gained a bigger share of the costs. Not much bigger, but it is bigger. However, after an initial dip in September due to a family emergency and me being overly cautious, I’ve stuck to £1,200 a month contribution to shares.
On top of this I’ve been buying either a gold sovereign or a 1/4oz coin every month. That’s between £480-£580.
I guess this means that realistically I’m still maintaining an effective savings rate (above the slush fund/ cash reserves and contributions to our boat’s account) of around 51%. That’s based on my post-tax earnings and including my pension contributions, which I guess will eventually be taxed.
If we exclude pensions, it’s around 38% effective investment rate.
Bitcoin exposure got too big…
For what it’s worth: I believe in the Bitcoin project. So much so, in fact, that I specialise in it as an area of law. However, I know most of you don’t, and I don’t think having an opinion on it either way is essential to your own financial independence campaign.
By all means ignore this section if you just don’t get it. That’s cool, we can still be friends.
So the last year’s price action has meant that my Bitcoin exposure is way above the £10,000 arbitrary limit I’d set and as a result I haven’t been buying any. It’s just sat there for now and is likely to be rebalanced at some point to crystallise those gains.
This has been my best performing investment. It’s also the class that I’ve contributed the least to.
I may do some opportunity buying if there’s another FTX-style event causing a market crash, but apart from that I don’t have any plans to continue buying BTC in the short term. Maybe when people get bored in 2026 and the market slumps for a bit.
I u-turned on gold
I hadn’t planned to do any gold investing.
However, markets have been running hot for a while and the news seemed to be constantly pushing the story that interest rates were going to be reduced by various global central banks, so I had to figure that high inflation and asset-price inflation (the “everything bubble”) was going to continue.
I decided about mid-year to diversify away from my investments effectively all being reliant on digital infrastructure by building up a modest gold reserve.
Unfortunately for me, much of the world decided to do the same thing, and gold prices have skyrocketed. Well, as far as gold prices ever do. Great for the paper value of my holdings, crap for accumulation.
My plan is to spend the next couple of years building our gold reserves to £10,000-20,000 as an additional kind of emergency fund on top of our cash position.
That’s roughly the price required to do a single major repair (e.g. a substantial hull repair or an engine replacement) on our boat or a similarly-sized one.
That way, if we’re getting smacked by markets and then need to take some serious emergency repair actions, there’s another pot to call on that’s not (hopefully!) exposed to the systemic market risk while whatever economic emergency is raging in the background.
Initially I had thought storage to be a problem but we’ve found an off-site solution to that which is reasonably affordable.
Things to work on for next year
Investing in myself
I’d like to keep up the good work with writing and guitar, I’m enjoying those and they give me a sense of flow when I’m in the moment doing them.
Fitness has to remain a priority because that’s important to me and how I see myself as a person. I’m not a gold-medal athlete in any sports, but I take pride in being fit enough to do most things to at least a recreational level.
Something that’s on my mind at the moment is the idea of developing skills. Originally I was looking at money-making skills, such as when I gained my financial advisers diploma, but now I’m thinking more about other skills that enrich my life and keep my lifestyle costs down.
Not exactly sure what that looks like, but that’s the direction of travel.
Spending intentionally
This one is probably the biggest thing for me.
Now that Boat Life is a thing I’m doing, I have quite a generous monthly budget to allocate to various things.
Obviously that’s why my investment rate is so high, too. I couldn’t afford rent or mortgage payments here and add so much to my general investment account.
I’m going to have a think this year about what matters to me and what I’m willing to spend more on or trim some of the fat off.
Investing my money
Look, the Bitcoin gains were an overwhelming success, but I can’t expect that all my investments are going to be great buys over the next year.
There’s no reason to abandon my monthly investments into equities/bonds funds. I reckon markets are running hot and most companies are overvalued, but I can easily afford to absorb any volatility and continue to pay in when prices of shares move. At the moment I should be on track to add another £20k to my FIRE pot over the next twelve months.
I reckon next year will see me at the level of gold holdings I was aiming for. If not next year, then mid-way through the year after that. I think I’ll continue to buy this alongside the usual investments for the next twelve months and then re-evaluate.
Gold doesn’t generate any return or produce anything economically, so I don’t want to be over-exposed to it, but I think that it’s a reasonable store of wealth and a hedge against an increasingly digitised world.
2024 was a year with a lot of success in it
This is basically the conclusion!
We transitioned to Boat Life better than I could have hoped, and that’s allowed us to make phenomenal savings and investments.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike is currently working part-time while exploring her own thing on the side. If that works, we have the option to work while travelling when we eventually set off.
And if it doesn’t, we’re no worse off than if we were in a flat paying rent and working full time.
I had a wobble about my job, but Lady SierraWhiskyMike is able to pick up some of the admin and that’s given me a bit of breathing room. I was also able to set new boundaries with my employer, so I should be in a better position going into next year.
Our investment pot has rapidly grown. Now that we pay a pittance in rent (i.e. mooring fees), that money is being channelled into investments and we’re making huge gains towards our targets.
And on a more human level I’ve been able to pursue my writing, fitness and guitar alongside all of this.
Let’s see how I can take this momentum and push forwards into next year’s campaign plan.
