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

Progress on my goals

PAYDAY!!!

Yeah… I still get excited about payday. I barely spend a third of my pay and it’s still really cool to get money coming in.

I remember seeing a video or reading a book somewhere (you might have guessed: I read a lot of personal finance content of varying quality) where someone described getting a monthly wage as being hooked on a drug. The idea was that you should wean yourself off it and ascend to some mega-god-tier-entrepreneur-investor. Apparently when you stop being hooked on it You Become Rich.

Maybe there’s a strand of truth somewhere in there, but screw it. I’m working for The Man anyway, might as well enjoy the ride. Gimme the drugs!

Distractions and detours

Work this week has been another thrashing. I get paid really well, but there’s a price for everything and the price of the big lawyer bucks is the risk of burning out through overwork on concurrent fast-paced projects.

Don’t cry for me, Argentina. This ain’t a pity party: I made a deliberate choice to career change into a high-paying field, knowing that the cost was stress on the job. I fancied that more than having a cool job and the stress that I might lose it, or that I might have to work it for a lot longer. There’s ups and downs to everything, and if I was seriously unhappy I could just stop and do something else.

Headspace continues to make a difference. Maybe it’s all one big fat placebo, but my thoughts are a lot more joined up when I’ve stuck to daily meditations than when I’ve let things slide for a couple of days.

I’m thinking of getting my Nintendo 64 modified with an RGB chip, so that it outputs digital signals that can be plugged into a modern TV or projector without the weird fuzzy picture.

Fun fact: the N64 could play a digital signal, but back in 1997 we all had cathode ray TVs that needed analogue signal, so it’s deliberately modified to deal with that… and now looks fuzzy on an LED TV.

Anyway, I thought it might be cool to project Mario Kart onto a sail in an anchorage one day. That would be pretty unusual, making the most of video games and living on a boat. We’ll see!

Non-FIRE goals

I got a good night of archery in on Friday. Oh, my shooting was terrible, but I had fun.

This week’s guitar lesson was all about getting a better sound out of playing chords. The Foo Fighter’s Best of You is the song of the week, rearranged for beginner acoustic guitar but played on my badass Jackson electric.

It was also a great week for fitness, with two swimming sessions squeezed into work lunch breaks. That’s pretty awesome!

Final thoughts

The week has been busy, but the automated investment decision has already taken care of my financial independence campaign before I need to worry about it.

If I have any spare cash at the end of the month, I can invest it wherever, safe in the knowledge that my FIRE is just a matter of time.

My financial independence campaign continues!