Thoughts and reflections about the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Ah. Again, a two-week update. This is all on me: I spent last weekend at a family event and didn’t bring the iPad to type this up. It’s just not the same when you try to do it all on a phone.
Will have a word with myself.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Water tank is ready to ship!
This week I transferred across the funds for the water tank so that the company will release it for shipping.
So who knows? We could have running water again by end of Feb!
When it arrives I’ll have to find some way to fit it in the hole that it needs to go in. There’s an oddity with boats in that your water tank doesn’t just sit in the space you’ve set it into: you also need to make sure that it doesn’t fall out if you ever get knocked down by a big wave.
Oh yeah – and I also want it to be removable in the event that you break it somehow. I’m not doing all that polava with the ratchets again.
New interior lighting
Yesterday, I replaced the aged and sort-of worn out interior spotlights in the aft cabin and the saloon, following the success of doing the same in the forward cabin.
Can confirm that all lights function as they should.
The light is brighter than the old ones, but it’s more directed. Lady SierraWhiskyMike likes that they’re much smaller and more robust, and while we’d converted the old ones to LED these lights are designed and fitted with LEDs so we’d expect better energy efficiency.
Energy efficiency isn’t just about paying electricity costs. Sure, we’ll save a few pennies on our shore power bills, but more importantly when we’re at anchor we have to operate from a battery bank. The smaller your power consumption is, the better it is for your batteries and the longer you can be out and about without regenerating from solar or wind.
Pay review
We received our pay reviews at work this week. My pay increase was 1.9%, which means that in real terms my pay has dropped below not only last year’s pay but also the pay that I was recruited at.
Which is a big deal, because I was recruited as a newly qualified lawyer, i.e. someone with no skills. Apparently two-and-a-half years later I’m less valuable?
Anyway, I raised this with my boss who agrees that this is probably wrong in my case. I’m leading project teams, designing business strategy, leading the sales push into a new practice area and training people on top of my day job. This isn’t something that a junior lawyer is ordinarily able to do and it’s only because I have previous career experience that I can do it. Basically, my firm is paying me the same as any other junior lawyer, but I’m not doing the same job.
I approached the conversation with business numbers and compared it to what I brought in and a reasonable level of profit to be made from me (for lawyers, the standard rule is that you should bring in 3x what it costs to pay you). My boss brought in the numbers for my cost of employment and honest figures for the current state of the business, which was really helpful and we each got to see the other’s point of view.
My boss doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally raise my pay. However, we agreed that he’d approach with a number that I suggested as a fair compromise that wouldn’t break the bank in his case but was lower than my figures suggested I was worth to the firm.
I also proposed that this could be paid with additional leave entitlement if cash flow was an issue for the business, because ultimately I can use the time to do things that I’d probably need to pay someone else to do instead, like make things for the boat or do more of my own repairs.
There’s no guarantee that this will work for the firm and I may get told to poke off. Which, you know, happens. It’s a jobs market, some days the market value isn’t what you’d hope it would be. But it seems reasonable that I pushed back against an initial low valuation.
Distractions and detours
London family trip
For my brother’s 30th we went to London to do game at the VR Sandbox in Covent Garden.
It’s a pricey diversion but I’d saved up for it and I highly recommend it. Even my parents were blown away by the VR immersion. We did one of the zombie games.
Spent £310 on shoes…
Less bad than it sounds, but I still walked away from the shop like I’d committed a murder.
I have wide, flat feet. On top of that, I’d really like to have boots that last a long time and can be repaired to replace the Dr Martens that three winters later are looking pretty sad.
Also: I don’t want to own too much stuff. These need to be a workhorse for social and work stuff.
So after a lot of reading, I visited a Loake shop. We sized up my Frankenstein feet and tried on some of the G width shoes that they had available.
What surprised me is that my definitely-not-plantar-fasciitis pains disappeared instantly.
Which is amazing, because I’d run 11.5miles that morning in zero drop shoes. I should have been in pain.
I’d later learn that this is because Dr Martens don’t have a supportive “shank” in their boots whereas the Loake boots absolutely do, and this takes the stress from your feet.
Anyway, I ended up paying £310 for these boots. They do a cheaper ones, but I wanted a pair that would last a long time and could simply be repaired. A lot of different advice online suggested that only one range of Loake boots is actually made in England and is much better build quality, so I paid a bit more to make sure I was in that range.
Actually, that’s half true. I believe they cut the leather abroad and assemble them in England. However, if I wanted a true pair of Northamptonshire handmade boots from another brand I’d be looking at £800+. Big step up for diminishing returns.
Spending £310 still freaked me out, but it’s justifiable.
I’m reliably informed that I should be able to get 10 years out of them, but will need to have them re-soled every couple of years. Loake do a repairs service by mail order so that suits my objectives just fine.
I left the shop a little bruised in the pocket, but reasonably confident that these will last me a long time with proper maintenance. Having worn them to work for a week now, I can confirm that these are still just as comfy as they were in the shop.
Returning to iPod
Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about how I’m conscious that we’re spending money on music but not actually owning anything, and that somehow this bothered me.
So I did a bit more research and a lot more reflection, and I managed to find a 60GB iPod Video on eBay for about £70.
Remarkably, this only had 71hrs recorded use, which means it had been sat in someone’s drawer for years. Obviously there’s some cosmetic scratches from that, but it’s barely been used.
Why this one>?
I picked this iPod deliberately because there’s a modding community for old iPods who reckon that this model is the best compromise between features, sound, and being able to open the case up.
That also means there’s a whole market of replacement (higher capacity) batteries, upgraded storage, replacement screens and cases, Bluetooth transmitters (no, really) and so on.
This device is old – I think 2006 era? – so even though it hasn’t been used much there will come a time when that battery is beyond its serviceable life. iPods of this size also have an actual hard drive rather than a solid state drive or SD cars, which means that (a) there’s more moving parts to break, and (b) if they get shaken too badly that might break internally. Fortunately, the modding community has a lot of options to upgrade this, and you can massively increase its storage capacity for a modest amount of money.
I read somewhere that the 60GB version has a better RAM and can accept a bigger storage upgrade than the 30GB version that came out at roughly the same time.
There’s no rush for me to upgrade this though because this particular one has seen so little use. I can see if it’s working for me without having to make any repairs or upgrades.
My experience so far
My whole music library fits onto it and I had a great time looking back through my actual music collection and uploading it onto the device. The iTunes software is still a clunky piece of crap but it works enough to get my songs moved across.
I’ve always used an iPod Nano for the gym, so I already had wired headphones. However, Lady SierraWhiskyMike commented that they sounded like crap. I tried the same songs with my guitar monitor headphones and suddenly we realised how much better quality a regular MP3 could be when you’re not streaming it from Spotify via Bluetooth.
So I have bought some in-ear monitors which you can see on the photo. I paid about £30-35 for them from Amazon, and they sound fantastic. Much better than my (much more expensive) Sennheiser Bluetooth headphones with Spotify, even though I set the settings to high definition.
I also learned that the music I want to listen to is, funnily enough, the music I’d bothered to buy/copy from my mates. Which makes sense.
Plan for this
I’m can’t tell if my short-term enjoyment is just the excitement of having something new, but my initial thoughts are that this iPod and my dumb phone are a better everyday configuration for me than my smartphone and Bluetooth headphones. The music sounds better, it’s already curated for me (because I bought it!) and the batteries for each don’t need to be charged every day.
So I’m going to do this over the next month or so before I take any further actions.
I’m still on Spotify because it’s useful to discover new music, share things that inspire me with my guitar teacher, and it allows Lady SierraWhiskyMike to have access to a broad library.
I find that I tend to use Spotify to search for new music and add to my “liked songs” playlist, it’s not something I generally sit down to listen to, whereas she likes to follow a genre rabbit hole and listens to a lot of different artists in the same day.
I guess you could say that I like to go deep into a smaller selection, but she’s happy to drift through new sounds all the time and experiences more breadth. There’s pros and cons to each approach and I’m not snooty enough to say that one way is better than the other.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
We got back to Rainbow in the Dark and I can now play most of it at near-recording speed. It’s a huge improvement on where I was!
The plan is to move onto another song next lesson, but I really enjoy the riffs in this one so I may try and learn the solo. It’s an awesome song.
Might actually buy the album on iTunes to listen to on that iPod…
I’m sounding a lot better and we’re progressing with the improvisation, too. I’m still not great at that, but I’m getting better all the time. My playing actually sounds like a guitarist now.
Ugh, OK, fine. I sound like a drunken middle-aged punk rocker in a mostly-empty pub that needs a proper clean. It’s still massive progress though! Didn’t need that integrity check.
Fitness
Smashed out 11.5miles of running around Regents Park last weekend when I was there for my family event. Forgot my thermal top and it was sooooo cold in London!
I was meant to run 9 miles, but I got temporarily geographically embarrassed and ended up doubling back a bit over half a mile in the wrong direction. Mint.
These last two weeks have been pretty good on the phys front. I haven’t overdone it by any measure, but I’ve steadily been plugging away and increasing my running like I should. My treadmill 5km time is comfortable sub-20 minutes again and I’m not completely dead at the end.
Partly to minimise impact, and partly because it’s an easily controlled environment that isn’t in the cold winter air, and a third partly because of the convenient location of my gym to my office, I’ve been using treadmills to train speed and timing during the week and running the longer, slower endurance runs outdoors on a weekend. Seems to be working out for me.
Treadmills are weird in that your real-world performance is generally worse than your treadmill performance. On the other hand, it’s easy to train pacing and to practice things like running up inclines on a treadmill. They’re a good addition to outdoor running, but they’re not a replacement for it.
Speaking of which, I need to do this weekend’s run after I hit publish.
Final thoughts
Some tasty progress on the boat front. Looking forward to not having jerry cans everywhere and having to refill every day. Once a week is fine!
I’m reasonably hopeful about my pay review discussion. If it doesn’t go my way, I guess I have a decision to make about whether I should stay or not, but I’m still well paid for my financial independence campaign and living on my boat is fairly cheap. It’s not critical to me that I get a pay rise that’s bigger than my current calculation.
I’ve spent a lot of money this month. It has all come out of tactical savings/ money I’d deliberately put aside for this purpose, but I still had a moment of shuddering as I spent it, particularly with the boots.
On the face of it, the boots seem to go against the spending intentionally part of my 2025 Campaign Plan. I mean, £310 doesn’t look “minimised”. But, like I said above, the intention is that these last 10 years or more with repairs. Over the long run they should amortise out to be minimised expenditure, and I deliberately picked a timeless design that works for both work and casual wear so that I can get the most out of fewer items of footwear.
The iPod is a cool experiment and so far I’m happy with it. I like that I’m building on a music library that I already own, and that when I eventually cancel Spotify (which might well happen) I won’t be sat there with no music. A world without music is a sad world to live in.
Fitness is going well, can’t complain. Speaking of which: time to put my trainers on…
My financial independence campaign continues!
