Thoughts and reflections from the past [two] week[s] or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Self-employment/ start-up dreams
This is why I didn’t publish last week – it’s been a roller coaster.
I started my first official day in my new place on Thursday, but it turns out I had a long line of pre-starting meetings with potential clients.
Big ones.
In fun news: I now have a personal services company. Hooray! I’m personally incorporated!
That company offers me out as a consultant to the new place, in which I effectively run on a profit sharing agreement. So technically I’m not a shareholder, but I am also effectively being paid the same as the two founders.
We’ve sent out three different contracts to potential clients on my watch, which is pretty cool. Already. I haven’t even begun marketing yet, so this is a good sign.
Feedback from potential clients has been coming in already. They’re basically telling us what they want from us so that they can sign up. Not all of it is useful feedback, but hidden in the flow are some crunchy nuggets of gold that we can build with.
Still maintain that I won’t be rich this year but 2026 is going to be the year during which foundations are built.
We revised our go-to-market strategy, targeted our offering to differentiate ourselves from the competition, and we’ll finesse this in January.
Phew!
Brief next steps
I’m going to go on holiday for a bit, then we’re going to hit January hard.
Potential return to side hustles
Obviously trying to set up a niche consultancy is a financial risk. There’s every chance that this might not work out.
So it’s time to revisit side hustles and diversify my income a little.
Thing is, my consultancy is a very white collar business. That means that if I’m seen to do something like casual labouring, I’m probably going to devalue my brand – something that’s completely irrational but is just a feature of selling services to financial services professionals.
We’ve actually had this already as feedback: “If you’re not doing this full time, how can we trust the product?”
So any side hustles I do have to be either (a) something lots of people do (like a NED appointment… which I don’t have) or (b) online so that no-one on island knows about them.
Might go back to writing.
Distractions and detours
Get to the plane!
Tomorrow morning we depart for Tenerife to do a Christmas and New Year out somewhere warm…
…except that they’ve just had the biggest snowfall since 2016 and we’re renting a little VW Transporter campervan conversion.
Eh, whatever. We’re hardy people, we’ll live. I’m told it’s still 22 degrees* by the beaches so it’s not like it’s a big obstacle.
*US readers: that’s Celsius or Centigrade, not Fahrenheit.
I won’t get much time to do things other than go hiking, sit on the beach, cook camping meals and get a little bit of blogging or other writing done.
Honestly? I’m looking forward to it. A bit of chill out time at year’s end. It’s also the first Christmas period I’ve not been working since starting out in law, so that’s something.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
This week is the last before my two week break from guitar, so we did some improvising and playing around. We had a chat about the next year, and he’s going to have a think about a plan for 2026.
Part of me thinks that paying £200 a month for lessons is an extravagance when I’m basically pre-revenue, but guitar is an anchor to getting better at something with no intention of being paid. I’m going to put aside a budget for it and just accept that I may need to live on rice and beans to do it.
Fitness
Fitness has taken a massive back seat because I’ve been working full-time while moonlighting to prepare for my business.
I don’t feel great about that.
Holiday is a bit of a regain. We tend to be quite active on holiday and we’re not going hard partying, so I’d imagine we will probably return a bit leaner and a little fitter. Our plan is to get a lot of hiking in and stretch our legs most days.
On a typical holiday, we’ve recorded over 15,000 steps per day on our FitBits. I’m not taking a FitBit this time (two weeks in a campervan means charging will be an issue!) but I’d imagine 10,000-15,000 steps is going to be a daily average, including rest days. I know what we’re like.
Tenerife also has a lot of calisthenics parks, like most of Europe. I don’t want to plan my holiday around fitness, but if there’s one nearby I would probably swing past and try a few things out. I’m still far from impressive, I just enjoy the process.
January is going to hurt.
I’m trying to work out what fitness to do in January. I want a gym, but I don’t really want to pay for it at the moment (because it’s like £50-100 a month here!). I’m also wondering if joining a club or doing classes would be good business networking, which is about to be very important to me.
Not a problem for now. I’ll mull it over later.
Final thoughts
Good initial indicators on self-employment journey so far. I’m confident that something will happen, whatever that looks like.
Will review potential side hustles all the same.
Having temporarily put basically everything else on hold, I suspect January is going to mean a painful regain of basically all my fitness, guitar and writing. Ew. Gross.
For now though: I plan to put most other things on hold for the next two weeks.
I may delay the next campaign note. Why, you ask? Because it’s time for an end-of-year review!
My financial independence campaign continues!
