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

Woohoo! 100 updates! A number that’s entirely arbitrary and teaches us nothing.

Still, I’m probably going to have a nice refreshing can of lemonade on deck to celebrate.

Progress on my goals

Boat plan

We put off doing more of the wiring this weekend to go to a local music and motorbike festival.

Which was, to be fair, pretty awesome.

Most of my switches have turned up so I can spend next weekend refitting as many of them as I possibly can and undoubtedly breaking all sorts of things in the process. Standard.

Our gas regulator failed today without warning, but at the bank-breaking sum of £12.30 we managed to get a replacement that works perfectly. Was a bit of a surprise, and we’ve planned a dinner of salad and cold cuts because if we hadn’t gotten it working then it was going to be cold food only until we found and fixed the fault.

It’s a good thing this happened on a warm weekend in June. Imagine losing your cooking gas in midwinter? Hard routine in the rain was something I’d hoped to have left behind with the military, so I’m glad to have avoided it.

I have another confession to make…

…no, I’m not having a secret family like Dave Grohl.

Since hitting CoastFI a couple of months ago, I’ve been buying Bitcoin alongside my pension contributions and savings. And I don’t intend on stopping.

I’m actually massively overweight in bitcoin and I had planned to rebalance that into normal equities, but that hasn’t actually happened. Instead, as more and more businesses – many of which are public – have been buying bitcoin as a capital reserve asset, I’ve been buying, too.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that I hold bitcoin. I’ve been quite open about my belief in the project beyond the “number go up” thing. Working in digital assets law, I am seeing a trend for more integration of it into payments and cross-border transactions. I suspect – and want – this to continue, so I am backing it with my own money.

I am still buying my usual index funds in my pension (a global tracker with an ESG filter) and I’ve been putting aside 20-25% of my take home pay into cash (see previous updates for why I’ve been doing that), but I’m now also contributing 10-20% of my pay into bitcoin, which is the proportion that I had earmarked for gold.

Effectively, while I’m betting quite heavily on it, I’m still contributing to traditional (ish) assets and those should grow and accumulate over time to carry me anyway if the Bitcoin revolution doesn’t actually happen. I’ll still be mortgage free on the boat I want to be on, I’ll still be reasonably comfortable of having a pension in retirement, I’ll still have an emergency fund and – pending the implosion of present-day capitalism – will still have a healthy amount of capital to see me through hard times or acquire property or a bigger boat or whatever.

This isn’t a Bitcoin blog so I won’t focus on it, but I wanted to be clear about it because I’d be a liar if I said that I wasn’t buying into it and my integrity is worth more than being universally liked.

Distractions and detours

Local music festival

Lady SierraWhiskyMike took me to a local music and motorbike festival this weekend. It was awesome!

We aren’t going to get another motorbike. I enjoyed the Triumph Street Triple we had a few years ago, but we had to sell it when our circumstances changed and I can’t see how living on a boat is going to work out with owning and maintaining a motorbike. We don’t have a garage and I can’t bring myself to do any more maintenance on machines that I won’t have time to play with. We’re already doing too little sailing as it is!

Anyway, music was brilliant. A buddy of mine was playing in a metal band who were pretty damn punchy, and there was a two-piece experimental act in one of the side tents that blew my mind.

Alright, we spent £80 on lukewarm cider, but we had a great time and even got some dancing in. Lady SierraWhiskyMike’s FitBit reckons we hit like 17-18,000 steps in the day.

We then spent today walking to the chandlery and then onwards to pick up the car and our dog from the mother-in-law, racking up another 20,000 steps. That should burn off the cider, right?

As a side note: cider is one of my favourite things to drink at a festival because it’s OK when it gets warm, even though I’d prefer a cold beer in a pub. My favourite booze to sneak in is a decent whisky because it’s easy to get a good amount past security, easy to sip on, and is OK to drink neat if you take your time.

Not legal advice. Or, you know, any kind of advice. Definitely not lifestyle advice.

Shocker on this season’s sailing plans

We have a two-week window planned to go sailing in August. The idea was that we’d be able to find at least a four-day weather window in that period to get a decent shakeout of the boat and, you know, enjoy ourselves.

Unfortunately: my mum-in-law now needs to go in for a hernia operation at the end of the month, which means we might not be on caring duties for an old lady instead.

Bugger.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike is also likely to miss my sister’s wedding, which is the weekend immediately after the proposed operation.

Depending on how my various job applications turn out, we might instead get some time during the winter to do something like a charter in a hot country this year instead. We’ve also somehow managed to fix the diesel heater on the boat, so all-year sailing is now an option for us and we can do something in September-October time, but it’s a bit of a shocker to lose out on the deliberately set-aside sailing window and two weeks’ leave.

Probably going to have to squeeze in some more long weekends with what’s left of my leave allowance and get some local sailing in.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

This week’s guitar lesson was Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine, which is a totally banging song that Teenage SierraWhiskyMike loved when The Matrix was still a cool film and not just Andrew Tate brainwashing kids.

I reckon I can nail the first page of the tab this week and then progress next week. Let’s see!

Fitness

Two decent training sessions in this week, plus all that walking…

I’m not actually sure if doing a lot of walking makes up for drinking. We didn’t hit the cider particularly hard – we’re not that big into drinking to be honest – but it’s a lot of calories that are entirely sugar and alcohol. Probably evened out but the jury’s out on that one.

We still did a lot of walking, mind you. That should count for something, right?

This week’s gym sessions showed that I’m getting stronger. I managed to do 10 pull-ups in a single set over two different days, so I’m definitely seeing some kind of progress because I hadn’t been hitting above 8 in recent years. It’s definitely paying off, but if you’re imagining me as a ripped calisthenics athlete I’m sorry to burst your bubble: I barely resemble a slightly lumpy baby and it’s just not the impressive definition you might expect from someone who’s deliberately trains.

Probably because I like beer and sweets.

Final thoughts

Temporary pause in boat work to enjoy ourselves, after the news that our set-aside sailing time might not be so set-aside after all. Screw it. I’m glad we took the time out to have some fun on the way. We’re totally comfortable enough to do that.

Fitness is still showing great improvements with the Jack H Woods calisthenics training methods. Cider was probably a setback, but I guess I’ll see for sure next week?

Great music has been a theme of my week, with awesome guitar songs to learn and some banging live music.

And I confessed that I’ve been a naughty boy, buying bitcoin instead of selling it into traditional assets like I said I would. Oh well!

I think it’s getting time for a mid-year review, don’t you?

My financial independence campaign continues!