Thoughts and reflections form the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat plan
No boat stuff this weekend: I’ve been in the UK at my sister’s wedding.
So there’s that.
Payday
Yay! Paid again!
I have some big expenses coming out, so I’ve temporarily reduced my savings rate to a little over 20% (excluding pensions and stuff). That’s just to avoid going into debts and/or eating up my liquidity while paying for these things.
Obviously if I have cash left over at the end of the month then that’ll get invested, too.
More on potential investment thoughts (real estate) below.
Found out I need glasses
I’ve been getting mild but frequent headaches, and problems being able to proofread my work, which I’d put down to a mixture of workplace stress and being overly caffeinated.
Well, the doctor sent me to get an eye test, and it turns out the most likely culprit is that my eyes have developed differently and my left eye is struggling to focus on close-in stuff.
This means my bad left eye is struggling to bring things into focus while my good right eye is struggling to match the left eye and give me a usable image on anything closer than, say, three feet away.
Obviously, I make my money as a lawyer by reading things that are right in front of me. Like most desk jockeys, I have to spend hours reading things on screens.
So I’ve now got a pair of fairly mild but essential glasses on order to pick up tomorrow. Yay, me.
Fortunately I only really need them for my desk job. I can probably take the hit on a bit of eye strain outside of the office. That being said, I’ve already been warned that the stress my eyes have been going through to date will be more noticeable when I’ve got glasses because I’ll adapt to not straining to read… so I may end up with them all the time eventually.
Bugger.
Actually, I messed this up a bit. I’ve ordered frames and lenses from the optician because that optician had availability to do my eye checks. Turns out, I’ve overpaid a bit for the actual glasses, and the smart move would have been to take the prescription and order them online. Who knew? I sure as hell didn’t!
Fortunately, around a third of the costs are likely to be met by my employer-provided health insurance.
Possible real estate purchase
During the wedding, Lady SierraWhiskyMike and I stayed in a one-bedroom flat we’d found on AirBnB. We were talking about it and how actually it would be dead easy to live in a one bedroom flat after we’d tired of boat life.
We’re still loving the boat life, we’re talking about if that fails for some reason or we eventually tire of the discomfort.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike has been saying for a while – and, if I’m honest, I get where she’s coming from – that it feels weird to have no real estate assets to fall back on. Notionally, it’s obvious that our investments are going to be the main power behind our future retirement(s), but there’s that little bit of us that doesn’t like being beholden to the finance industry to make things happen. We’re also acutely aware that our situation – at least, until we’re actively cruising around – is precarious because liveaboard marinas come under a lot of pressure to reduce the number of liveaboard moorings they offer. There are becoming fewer mooring options as time goes by, meaning that there’s a risk that one day we can’t find anywhere to go.
Which isn’t a problem while you’re travelling, but is a big problem if you need to work for a bit or do your own repairs while living on the vessel.
So we’re revisiting the idea of buying a one bedroom buy-to-let flat, with a view to it being our potential home in maybe a decade or two’s time (or something to sell to buy a potential future home).
I don’t particularly want to be a landlord, but the best financial plan is the one that lets you sleep at night.
If we bought a one-bed, we could conceivably pay the mortgage off really quickly and then it would be both a minor income stream for us and an insurance policy against the real risks of us sinking the boat or finding that we’re out of liveaboard options one day.
This is a plan we’re going to temporarily put on the back burner. I think I need time to see if the latest job applications bear fruit before I can look into this further.
Cancelled Evernote
I’ve been using Evernote for a while and it’s fantastic. I especially recommend it for lawyers, because you can use it to link up research material (obviously not client info, but generic legal concepts are fine) and access them from any device.
Unfortunately my workplace has now blocked Evernote Web from being accessed on my work’s laptop. Geniuses. This rendered a lot of my legal know-how notes inaccessible at work: the place I actually need them.
This means I can only really access Evernote on my personal devices and use it for personal stuff.
Well, at £80 a year, I’ve decided that it’s not worth using if I can just use Apple Notes for free, and get that to talk between my iPad and iPhone. I already pay 99p a month for Apple Cloud, so I might as well just use the Notes app anyway. It’s only marginally worse than Evernote and it’s free for me to use given the hardware I already have.
It’s kind of a pain in the bum that I’ll need to migrate over my Evernote notebooks, but ultimately if I can’t get the benefits of access at work then there’s no point in me paying for a notes app when I could use a free one to achieve the same thing. Might as well save my £80.
Distractions and detours
Sister’s wedding
This weekend was my sister’s wedding and we’ve been away for four days in the UK, seeing friends and generally burning cash like it was unfashionable.
I am now poor.
It was totally worth it. Sure, we paid for flights and hotels/ Air BnB and all sorts of travel food, but money is kind of there to be spent on things like family events.
We also took the time to link up with some friends while we were in the area just to reconnect and have lunch or dinner (as applicable).
My sister had a great day and I had a brilliant few days connecting with people I care about. It was a satisfying trip and I’ve returned home to my boat in the Channel Islands feeling what is probably emotionally [Spiritually? I dunno, I’m a thoughts guy, not necessarily a feels guy!] refreshed, if not physically refreshed from a long weekend of meals out and beer.
Potential new jobs update
Interview is next week for the potential job. If that doesn’t work out, I’m hoping that my new glasses will take away one of the friction points of my current job and thereby make that more bearable.
Actually, despite the cost of buying glasses in a country where the NHS doesn’t subsidise your eye care, I’m relieved that my headaches are physiological and not stress-related. I’ve got enough stressors in that job without worrying about it killing my eyesight.
Still, I’m relatively hopeful for the potential new opportunity, even though it will likely remove me from my legal career and make returning to the law difficult if I don’t get on with the change of direction.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
I’m definitely making progress. New Born is still giving me grief because it was a big leap forward in what I’ve been doing, with some weird and unorthodox chord shapes. That’s just part of learning though.
My teacher seems happy with my progress to date. I’ve noticed I’m getting better at learning new ideas now that I’ve been playing for a while, it really shows when we look at playing a riff of a new song that’s fairly similar to something I’ve played before or uses a similar rhythmic idea.
I’d like to learn a few more songs of my choosing instead of just doing the core lesson work. Then again, I’d like to do a lot of things. I guess time’s just a limiting factor?
Fitness
Well eating a ton of wedding food is probably not a good indicator of fitness improvement..!
On a more basic level, I’d gotten two big sessions in last week. I managed a set of 11 pull-ups in one go, which is more than I’ve done before, and I can now pretty consistently run 5km on a treadmill again.
This bodes well for my transition to Napoleonic Fort Gym. And returning to outdoor cardio.
Final thoughts
So I spent most of this week spending money for my sister’s wedding. No regrets.
I have probably agreed to pay too much for glasses that I probably could’ve gotten cheaper. Some minor regrets, but mostly hopeful that some of my work stressors will go away.
And I ate too much posh food that’ll need burning off. OK, I have real regrets there.
Ultimately, it was a pretty good week. I got paid, I’ve met a load of my people, I’ve looked at some options and the future is looking bright. Overall, I’m pretty happy.
My financial independence campaign continues!
