Thoughts and reflections about the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Warmer weather is starting to sneak in, which is nice.
The running water has made things easier, which is real nice.
Boat life is getting easier. I reckon next month we’ll be putting the sails back on ready for some local sailing weekends.
Condensation and washing clothes
One of the weird problems we have is that we have boat lockers instead of wardrobes.
Aside from the obvious problem that space is limited compared to a house, what’s weird is that these lockers tend to be massive condensation traps. The lockers have louvred and vented doors on them to promote air flow, but obviously with the best venting in the world they don’t air out if you fill the locker with clothing.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike is finding this out the hard way. As I type this, her casual locker is now drying out in the main saloon.
We’ve found that synthetic fibre clothing doesn’t like this at all. Woollens seem to be fine, cotton is so-so but polyester really hates this abuse and gets instantly stinky.
This means we end up washing our clothes more frequently. At £7 for a wash and tumble dry (plus the washing tablet), that’s not a cheap hobby. A single load of washing per week is £364 per year. We’re doing 2-3.
Ideally we need:
- Fewer clothes in the lockers, so they stay dry;
- More natural fibres, so that they don’t degrade when a little damp; and
- Clothes that survive more wears between washes.
Merino wool clothing trials
So now we’re looking at rotating our clothing out for merino wool tops and clothing. We understand that you can go many weeks in the same merino wool tops-shirt without (allegedly) stinking up the place, because it doesn’t absorb the oils and greases from your skin (so your BO doesn’t stick to it). If we did that, we could probably halve the amount of clothing we own in general and save ourselves easily one wash per week.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike has done a five-day trial in a 90% merino t-shirt and so far the results seem promising. You have to hang it inside out at the end of the day for best results, but our initial assessment is that a rotation of, say, three t-shirts could be enough for weeks of wear.
There is a problem though: merino clothing is seriously pricey.
To start with, we ordered a t-shirt by brand Super.Natural and (although it hasn’t arrived yet!) a polo shirt by brand Isobaa from dropshipping website Sport Pursuit.
Sport Pursuit is great for finding budget kit. It’s a drop shipping website that negotiates deals, so you often don’t have that much variety on there, but if I’m buying sports kit or “lifestyle” clothing (I don’t know what that means) from a brand then I tend to check it out first because stuff is usually half the price of other shops.
Here’s an affiliate link to Sport Pursuit.
I figured that if the polo shirt looks OK, I could probably wear it to work. My office is fairly casual and if I stick to dark jeans or chinos, a smart-ish top like a polo and my brown boots I’m probably going to be OK for everything less formal than court.
It works out that even if I were to ditch all of my clothing (unlikely) and buy entirely new merino kit from a premium supplier then, provided the trial works out as promised, the savings on clothes washing alone would probably break even in the first year.
Payday
Payday happened – but this time I didn’t drop my investments in on the day.
This is because I’ve automated them and the collection date seems to be 3 March. So Monday.
Actually, I feel a little weird about that. When I made the investments manually I got the satisfaction of watching them drop into place. In some crazy psychological way, I now feel like my bank balance shows one number but there’s a debt hanging over me for those investments.
Which is both ludicrous and weird, so I’d better have a word with myself and snap back to reality.
Distractions and detours
Trump confirms: US no longer a reliable ally
Last night I joined the whole world in thinking What The Fuck? as the Citrus-in-Chief and Tangerine-at-the-top, D Trump, basically announced through the medium of shouting down the leader of an embattled country that the US no longer wants to be involved in what the rest of the world is up to.
Seriously. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a link to the BBC clip where Trump and Vance act like total chumps to Zelensky on TV. This might be history in the making.
Which is conceptually fine, except that the reason the world order exists as it does is because the US has for the best part of a century insisted that it would be the underwriter and broker of Western security.
The big question on mine and everyone else’s lips is: what else will the US renege on?
It then logically follows that we’re witnessing the end of the unipolar world under US hegemony. It probably started with the end of the US dollar gold standard, got prodded firmly into place by Vietnam and Afghanistan, leaned a bit on Libya, and now took a great big public announcement with Trump 2.0.
The end of the world as we know it isn’t the end of the world
I reckon over the next decade or so we’re going to see progress towards:
- The end of US dollar dominance
- A decline in reliance on NATO
- A federal state of Europe – like the EU, but, you know, actually a state
- The return of France as a global player (to the extent that it hasn’t visibly been)
I don’t see that Putin is going to roll through Ukraine and kick off World War 3, but all the same it helps to keep fit and stand by for that mass conscription order!
OK, gallows humour aside: this looks like it might be the moment that Europe decides to get its shit in gear. None of the European nations (including the UK) are really structured to be independent anymore and the US seems to want to be isolationist. For economic and military survival, then, it probably makes sense for the European nations to start working together pronto to form some kind of unified federation.
Now, super-Remainers (dude, that vote was nine years ago!) would say “But that’s the EU!”. Except that – and I agreed with the Leavers on this point – it really isn’t. The EU is designed around the fundamental treaties and frankly it’s not set up to do half the stuff it does, which is why inefficiency and corruption were so obvious. What it says it does, what it’s designed to do and what it ends up doing are three different things.
However, with the US no longer being keen to do the thing it insisted it was the best entity to do – keep the rest of the world in line – then we in Europe should be re-evaluating our priorities, alliances and political structures right about now. We have a vested interest in, collectively, being the Big Bad Boss Man of the globe, so that the Orange Guy and Our Boy Vlad don’t take centre stage. Maybe it’s time to come together to do that?
Investing with the threat of uncontrolled Russian aggression
What happens in the public sphere is not necessarily what happens in the private sphere and I have every confidence that businesses will adapt to the new normal (because they have to) and continue to make money.
So I’ll keep on keeping on.
I have (and you may want to have) an allocation to physical gold in a location that you control. Not because it’s useful in the apocalypse (it isn’t) but because global uncertainty tends to add turbulence to both global markets and the value of fiat cash. Having a tasty emergency backup that I can sell fairly easily at whatever the value of the GBP at the time is to keep us afloat in a financial storm seems sensible to me.
As described previously, after Elon’s flagship stunt I felt the need to have a bit more home bias, but that’s just me.
It may also be a good time to look at things like energy resilience and self-sufficiency. Again, not because these are great things to prepare for the apocalypse (although, to be fair, that’s also true…) but because if markets for goods and services go crazy it might be helpful to be a bit less dependent on them while global political changes happen around us.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
We’re doing a bit more work on Black Night be Deep Purple this week, with a view to me playing the Grade 4 piece as a one-r in the next week or so. That’s pretty cool. To date we’ve been playing sections of music and I think my teacher wants to progress me onto playing whole songs and longer pieces now.
Fitness
Absolute disaster.
I was tired but happy after my long run on Sunday. No problems.
On Monday, I did my recovery jog of about 3 miles on the treadmill. Nice and easy, no problems. This warmed me up for a flexibility and stretching session and I felt good to fight again.
Then on Tuesday, about 25 minutes into a normal treadmill jog, instant and inescapable leg pain. Excruciating. Had to abort the run immediately.
Well for the rest of the week I’ve been taking ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory and unable to navigate stairs in the usual fashion.
At first I thought I’d trapped a nerve (there was no warning before suddenly my leg wouldn’t work anymore) because the pain seemed to be coming mainly through my hip and then firing in my knee as a response. Sounded like a pinched nerve.
Now that things have had time to rest a bit, I still can’t use my left knee properly. It feels tight at the back of the knee, below the meat of my thigh, and there’s instant sharp aching pain on the outside of the knee beside the knee cap. So that’s either a hamstring strain or one of those weird supporting muscles at the back.
Which means I’m out of action for easily 2 weeks and maybe longer before I can start to build it back up.
The marathon is in less than 5 weeks.
So, mathematically, I’m probably not going to be running my marathon in April, even after all my winter training.
That sucks balls.
Final thoughts
We’re becoming more and more adapted to The Boat Life. I’m happy with this. I don’t know how the merino wool trials will go, but initial indications were positive.
My running injury is a total downer. On the plus side, having to rest is giving me more writing and guitar time, but I strongly suspect I won’t be up to doing this marathon. It sucks to set a goal and then fail it. On the plus side, I got into the habit of doing a long (10-14 mile) run on a weekend, and that’s been a good thing for my fitness. I guess it actually did the job of keeping me motivated to stay fit.
Global events are chaotic and, like most of the world, I’m a little concerned at the direction of travel. However, chaos breeds opportunity, and I think this might be the start of a united Europe emerging. I hope so. It’d be nice to be able to live in the Mediterranean again.
Screw it. I’m injured, I can’t go anywhere. I’m going to sit up in the cockpit in the sun and read for a bit.
My financial independence campaign continues!
