Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Galley tap was repaired and all was good with the world… then Lady SierraWhiskyMike broke the door!
Apparently it “just fell apart” as the was leaving to get a taxi to an airport at 0600. Hmm…
So I dragged myself out of the berth, took the dog for a nice long walk and then glued it back together.
All done by 0930 – the metadata on the photos can verify.
I let that dry in the sort-of sun we had and then refitted it before bed. It was a cold day doing my start-up work on the boat and my jumper was essential. However, 24hrs later and it’s fully set and ready to go. Good as, er, sort-of new.
I used EvoStik wood glue and some convenient clamps I had laying around.
As regular readers might have gathered, this sort of thing happens to me quite a lot. Something I’d thought to be totally fine often spontaneously fails on me in a spectacular fashion. Boats aren’t really meant to be lived in long term, so production boats (like mine) suffer a lot of wear and tear from living aboard that a solid working boat might laugh at.
We have quite a good quality production boat for our home, but she’s still a 2003 production boat. Stuff breaks.
Actually I was quite happy with the speed of getting this done. Maybe two years ago I’d have been frantically searching the internet for advice on how to do this. Today? Well, I knew I had clamps, acetone to clear up the wood, wood glue and epoxy resin if I needed it. I didn’t know if it would turn out perfectly or come out looking a bit scruffy but I was pretty confident that the door was getting rebuilt that day.
So that’s cool.
Start-up work
The regulator came back to us with a list of questions that were easily answered and a request for fuller documents.
This is allegedly the “light touch, innovation start-up” route to regulatory applications. The difference between this and the normal way? Well, none really so far.
In theory the application presupposes that we’re getting a licence permission based on a plan with agreed controls and then building out the details, but in reality the regulator wants so much specific details that we’re going to need to send them our operations manual and playbook. This means we need to buy and build the entire product first, then apply for the licence… i.e. what normal non-startups do. Thanks guys, real helpful.
Fortunately we’re not far off that already.
I spent this week creating our independent recovery plan. I’ve of our constraints is that we need to be able to independently recover without placing any reliance on third parties.
This means I now know about Linux bootable systems, VeraCrypt encrypted file containers, and Shamir’s Secret Shares algorithm on Linux. If that sounds like gobbledygook to you: it did to me at the start of the week, too.
Short version is that I’ve turned my old laptop that I’d completely neglected to recycle into a Linux-based, air gapped recovery terminal that can never connect to the internet because it doesn’t even know it has WiFi and Bluetooth anymore. So it should be malware-proof.
I’ve also managed to create USB thumb drives that allow us to rapidly take any laptop anywhere and turn it into this recovery machine, all without an internet connection.
More importantly: I got to use my Dymo label maker.
Distractions and detours
Thought for the week
Was talking with my guitar teacher this week. He was asking about my startup work and so on and talking about business and finance stuff. He likes to bounce ideas off me because I’m a lawyer and I like to ask him for tips and things because he’s a carpenter.
Anyway, one of the things that has come up a few times is the idea that basically you can build yourself a job out of basically any skill if you find the right way to package it.
So we’re chatting and one of the things he was asking about was Bitcoin. Now, I am a Bitcoiner, but when someone asks me “Is it a good idea for me to buy Bitcoin now/this year/when it crashes/when it ‘goes up’ (etc)” I generally try to avoid encouraging them to buy anything. I openly admit that I buy, but I also tell them that my main investment vehicles are (now) my business and equities, and that I buy Bitcoin because I like the movement. Basically: if you like the idea behind it, buy it and try to use it; but if you’re just looking for investments, maybe stick to repeatedly tested investing strategies with traditional assets.
He said he didn’t really “get” traditional investments.
I pointed out to him that he was self-employed guitarist and that reinvesting in his business allows him to generate something called internal rate of return, i.e. if he made his business 10% more profitable by investing in a bit of kit then that’s going to be way more effective than any investment purchase.
That threw him out a little bit. He hadn’t really thought of it that way.
So yeah. This ramble is a little bit about how you could think of internal rates of return. FIRE guys love that.
But more importantly: he hadn’t realised that his dreams of being a professional guitarist had actually come true. Yeah, ok, he still works as a carpenter part-time, but he is for all intents and purposes a professional guitarist. He owns a business teaching guitar and he plays in a band for money. That’s… actually a pretty good life outcome. Sure, he’d never founded the next Metallica or Iron Maiden, but definitely has been living his dream of being a professional musician.
He seemed quite chuffed about that when I left.
This got me thinking: am I the same?
I’m not sailing around the world or anything, living a life of heady travel while my investments pay me. I get that.
But I’m still living on a boat with my wife and dog, sailing every summer to France and the other Channel Islands. I’m debt free. This year I’ve even started being my own boss. My wife works a 4-day week. My investments aren’t life-changing right now, but they should be enough for me to have some kind of pension in old age.
If this is all I achieve financially: isn’t this pretty good?
I’m actually sat on the deck and typing this in the sun on the iPad. What a time to be alive.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
This week we started Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits. I’ve played this live with a band when I was a drummer, it’s a pretty easy going song but it’s got enough technical bits to make it interesting.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t sleep well on Tuesday night and absolutely sucked in the lesson. Like, terrible. Jelly for fingers.
Whatever. It was still a good lesson.
Fitness
Second physio and basically I just need to keep doing what I’m doing while stretching more.
Hey ho.
Haven’t really trained hard this week. It was raining yesterday, so I use the CrossFit bands and did a bit of a mini-workout on the boat. Not the most impressive thing ever.
Should probably go and do some rings in the sun later if the weather holds.
Final thoughts
A few curve balls this week. I got to exercise some repair skills, I learned some new computer skills, I sucked at guitar.
Overall though I guess I’m pretty happy.
My financial independence campaign continues!
