2025 was the year I hit CoastFI, and now I’m looking ahead to my next goals.
Here’s my financial independence campaign plan for 2026.
Onward!
This is a long read – feel free to use subheadings to skim the details.
Year 6 and all’s well!
Here are my other campaign plans:
Story so far
Back in 2021 my goal was to hit CoastFI within nine years.
“CoastFI” meaning that I could effectively go back to earning exactly what I need to survive day-to-day and letting capital growth take care of the rest.
Biggest factors in my success to date
- Overpaid a mortgage to 60% LTV and renovated a house… which we sold in 2022 to move to the Channel Islands.
- Career changed to corporate law, which uplifted my wage considerably over the last three years.
- Moved onto a sailing boat and learned to love it, embracing minimalism.
This all combined to the point where our survival costs are something like £12k per year, with actual living costs being around £25k… between two of us.
I can already hear people shouting at their phone “BuT yOu Don’t hAVe KiDzz! I could never do that!”. This seems to be the default response to anyone taking an unorthodox approach to FIRE. It’s true, but this is my campaign, not yours. The principles apply universally even if the details and timelines would need to change to fit your specific needs.
Values and beliefs
I had a revision of what I want for myself and the beliefs I hold.
Many are the same. I still:
- Want to be free to pursue my own projects without the fear that I’ve somehow burned out any hope for Old Age Me.
- Prefer minimalism and intentional living to big spending.
- Think that saving and investing more is better than chasing an optimised portfolio.
- Want to be a writer one day.
- Believe that fitness/health and financial wellbeing are linked.
But now I have some new beliefs that I want to test going forwards:
- I want more time and location freedom, and for the most part an office job won’t allow me that. Therefore, my best option is to find some way to create an income on my own terms.
- Corporate law paid well but the job involved grinding for long hours doing repetitive valueless tasks for clients who don’t value the services. It probably doesn’t suit my goals to continue with it.
- If I want to be a writer, my time would be well spent actually writing and trying to make money doing that. Therefore, I need to test out ways of making money as a writer, and commit to the attempt. I can’t accept any job that would prevent me from trying to do that.
New ambition
Well CoastFI has been achieved, so technically all I need to do now is stack shelves or wait on tables sufficient to cover my expenses.
After a lot of reflection, I realise that I love living on my boat. It’s amazing!
What’s hard though is living on the boat in a cold country in winter.
My new goal: by 2036 I want to be on the boat somewhere warm.
My initial thoughts are Mediterranean European countries but honestly I’m open to locations. I hear Mexico is quite good for this, and haven’t ruled out Africa.
This means that I either need sufficient assets for a golden visa somewhere or a digital nomad visa or something similar. Most countries don’t let you migrate to them unless you can pay your way, and chances are that I’d need to learn the local language so obtaining a job with a visa is probably out of the question!
Start state for 2025
Pension assets
My military pension makes up the bond-like component of my pension pot. It’s worth something like £8,000 a year.
In my UK SIPP and workplace pension, I have around £24,000 saved up and accessible at UK pension age.
I have around £23,000 in Channel Islands pensions.
Using the 4% rule on the shares as an estimate I have about £9,880 pre tax income per year from age 65 already.
I’m assuming no UK state pension.
I have 30 years until state pension age. If the invested pensions double every 10 years, as would oft be quoted by advisors, I would expect that to be £370k ish plus the military pension, or £22,800 per year.
Not bad, but obviously not guaranteed.
Non-pension assets
I have around £99,000 in non-pension invested assets.
If we use the 4% rule as a wet finger estimate, that’s £3,960 a year ready to drawdown today.
This being said: I am self-employed in 2026 and plan to draw down up to £10k of this to cover living expenses if I can’t bring in some money – which is a significant risk.
Again, assuming I sit on £89k of this for 30 years and it doubles every 10 years, that’s £356k at state pension age, or £14,240 a year at 4% drawdown.
So with pensions it’s £36k pre-tax as an estimate, assuming no further contributions.
That’s… a sketchy estimate at best, but it’s good enough for a 30-year lead time when my target is a modest £24k a year(!). Seriously, I live cheaply.
These figures are based on historical real returns of global equity markets. They’re not perfectly reliable and obviously I would hope to add some further contributions over the next 30 years to offset the margins for error.
Self employment risk
I basically had a mental crisis at work and quit my well-paying job in September 2025.
There were a combination of factors for this that I won’t repeat here.
However, I start 2026 as part of a three-person startup. If it works, I’ll have built something!
Most businesses fail, though. They generally fail because cash flow takes too long to build and the founders go broke before the business can take off.
CoastFI improves my odds but I have a genuine risk of this happening.
I plan to hedge against this by looking for other ways to earn an income. One of which is going to be writing, because that’s a long term ambition of mine anyway so I’d be stupid not to try it.
As at 1 January 2026, the other options I’m considering to generate side income are:
- Joining the Army Reserves, given that I’m still young enough to do it and have military experience (but don’t want to live the full time military life anymore!)
- Offering my services as a professional director for companies in the Channel Islands
- Picking up a part-time consultant lawyer job
All of these have upsides and downsides and I’m probably going to have to research them a lot more before I commit to any of them.
While this is in motion, Lady SierraWhiskyMike has returned to work 4 days per week, up from the leisurely 2-3 days she had grown accustomed to. This means that she could in theory carry my survival costs while I try and make this work.
Standing fast: the three pillars of my financial independence campaign:
- Investing in myself
- Spending intentionally
- Investing my money
My goals for the year are based on these three pillars, as always.
1. Investing in myself
Sailing level up
We want to do another long sail this year, plus a shorter one or two to one of the other Channel Islands.
The longer sail will either be Northern France again or southern England.
Our aim is simply to get more sailing time in. With self-employment, I should be able to work remotely, too, so the sailing time should be more flexible.
That said, Lady SierraWhiskyMike is working a conventional job four days per week and that’s going to add some planning factors to it.
Guitar
I plan to continue lessons in 2026.
This doesn’t sound like a goal until you realise it’s £200 per month in expenses that I now need to cover without a guaranteed income(!).
Thing is that it gives me so much value that I don’t want to stop right now.
Fitness
Last year I learned that my body wasn’t really up for marathon distances anymore. Maybe running ain’t my jam, maybe it’s just casual cardio for me!
I really got into calisthenics mid-way through the year though, so that’s a good direction of travel for me.
My goal for 2026 is to learn to do freestanding handstands for at least 5 seconds.
This actually scares the hell out of me. Dunno why, but being upside down just freaks my head out and I haven’t been able to handstand yet without walking my feet up a wall.
It’s time that changed.
If I can do this, I can progress onto handstand push-ups and more calisthenic tricks that mean I don’t need a formal gym.
Writing
I’m going to try to earn at least £500 from writing in 2026.
Ideally I want more than that, but these things take time and I’m predicting that there’s a learning curve here. I don’t expect success in the first year really.
To make this work, I… might go back to writing erotic fiction (sorry, mum!). It’s a good entry point because there’s a market for indie authors, and frankly without an employer there aren’t many consequences now if I get caught.
2. Spending intentionally
I have no real income so this is basically try not to spend in 2026!
The good news is that as I’m self-employed I don’t need much office clothing. My wardrobe staples of cheap t-shirts and jeans, hard wearing yet functional, will now cover most occasions.
Dinners out and takeaway foods will now massively reduce, because I can’t afford them. Probably good news for my waistline as well as my wallet.
Planned spending
Download Festival 2026
We’ve already paid for tickets, so it’s accommodation, travel, food and beer to cover.
Friend’s stag do in April
Again: I’ve paid for the events, it’s travel/accommodation/ food/ beer.
Big sailing trip 2026
Boat is mostly ready to sail, so this should be fairly affordable now. Last trip cost around £600 but we could have done this on the cheap if we had tried a bit harder!
3. Investing money
Obviously if I don’t earn an income I can’t invest it.
However, if I do earn an income this year: I’m going to reinvest into my own business ideas as a priority, or hold in cash to cover downturns until I have a £10k cash buffer.
In the surprising event that I manage to have more than £10,000 in cash buffer, I will probably look to put this into equities and/or Bitcoin. Honestly though I don’t expect this to happen in 2026.
Strengths and weaknesses of this Campaign Plan
Here’s a short summary of the strengths and weaknesses of this plan, as I see them.
Strengths
This plan doubles-down on my wanting to be self-employed and basically forces me to try to earn money.
No more talk: all action.
Weaknesses
I own all the risk and have almost zero certainty of earning any income in 2026.
In fact, there is a large chance my assets decrease in 2026 and I have to spent 2027 working out how to reverse the damage.
This makes it a true Hail Mary play and not one for the faint hearted.
In case you’re wondering: yes, I have to deal with doubt on a daily basis because of this plan. I’m as nervous about it as you are, dear reader!
What if this fails?
I will know the 2026 Campaign Plan is failing because I will have drawn down £10k of investments and be considering further drawdowns. A true sign of things not working out.
If there is just no hope in October-November 2027, then I will re-evaluate and consider returning to traditional work in some form: albeit that might be part-time work while I persevere with the startup. I’m less keen on that, though, because then I will probably be unable to progress with writing at all, I’ll be too knackered to do it.
Realistically though I could make a choice to return to law and embrace failure but continue with financial independence, or I could get a regular job in any industry just to cover my bills while my investments grow.
But what if it works?
When people consider risk they tend to focus on the likelihood and consequences of failure.
Risk is a two-way thing though. You take a risk because there’s an upside chance.
The upside of this plan?
If it works, I will have at least one and probably 2-3 income streams and all of them will be ones that I can influence directly.
I may even be able to be location agnostic: I could work on my own projects while travelling, opening up new opportunities for me and Lady SierraWhiskyMike.
Best case? I could bring my ambition years closer.
Screw it. Here goes nothing!
My financial independence campaign continues…
