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

Progress on my goals

Boat life

The galley tap is out, and we’ve got Attempt 1 at fitting the replacement today.

If didn’t come quietly. I’ve had to carve the old tap apart piece by piece with an oscillating multitool and a metal cutting blade. Kitchen taps tend to be secured by brass bolts and iron or low-grade steel backing plates, which when you’re on a boat gives you a lot of galvanic corrosion and makes undoing the nuts and bolts incredibly difficult.

You get galvanic corrosion in household kitchens too, but the constant presence of salt water makes this more pronounced on boats. The sea turns your boat into a floating battery.

The worktop is a little damaged from the leaks in the tap. We’re planning to epoxy it to give it better water resistance before fitting the replacement tap.

Slight problem: we couldn’t find the tail end connectors on island that would be inserted into the hoses we use on boats as plumbing pipes. I heated the hoses up and stretched them around a male 15mm to 10mm brass connector, then jubilee clipped that to secure each of them. This may or may not work long term. If it doesn’t, I’ll be ordering more tail end connectors and we’ll be back on jerry can water for a week or two.

Last SierraWhiskyMike took advantage of the improved weather and finished off the cabin deck vent by sealing in a protective outer cover. That should allow us to better control humidity in the cabin without needing to open the hatch, which will be helpful when it rains because the deck vent is rain shielded. She also attacked the accumulated winter crap on deck and cleaned her up ready for sailing.

So far the tap is working!

While we were down there, we did a quick check and service of the water filtration tap. It seems to work! The water definitely tastes cleaner coming through that tap than the usual cold feed, so it might be something we start using just to feel posh.

Sailing plans

It’s looking like this is going to be a busy year as I launch all this startup stuff, but one of the perks is that I can work remotely from anywhere with internet or 4G/ 5G.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike’s company has an office on one of the other Channel Islands, so sailing between islands on weekends is now an option for us. That way, if the weather turns and we’re on the wrong island, we just work for the week remotely and sail back the following weekend.

We’re eyeing up a return to Alderney and a visit to the other larger Channel Island in the coming weeks.

Summer is hard to plan, but knowing that St Malo is just a day’s good sail away means we’re pretty confident that we can just pull another summer trip out of the bag when there’s a window.

Start-up work

I got my first founder stipend from the second start-up, so now my personal services company can afford its bills for the end of the year.

I’ve also used “AI” in anger, successfully.

ChatGPT helped me to create an accounts spreadsheet so that I don’t need to pay a professional at the end of year. I’m already pretty good at spreadsheets, and in theory I already know how company accounts are supposed to work – lawyers get trained on this – but it was helpful to have a sanity check and ask questions about what-goes-where.

I also used ChatGPT to help me set up LibreOffice for my personal services company, so that I have lawyer-formatted templates for general contracts, my letter of engagement, and invoices.

There’s a few bits to unpack here.

How I get paid

Personal services company

So I have a personal services company. This means I have a company whose entire service is renting me out to clients.

The personal services company is a contractor to clients. This means that when a client hires me, they’re actually just entering into a commercial contract with the personal services company who then sends me to do the work. Clients then avoid all my social security, taxes, pensions and similar problems. Those problems stay between me and my personal services company. They don’t have to do any HR work, either, they just terminate the contract if they don’t like me.

That contract is usually a letter of engagement.

I am the sole director and shareholder of the personal services company. I have the choice to pay myself by a salary or by dividends. I don’t have a lot of money in the company, so a salary is out of the question for this year, and I have to pay myself in dividends from actual profits of the personal services company.

(I also loaned the company cash on an interest-free basis to buy a laptop, software, and to pay its admin fees for 2026, so I can repay that first.)

In case you’re wondering: it’s not a direct tax wheeze. Dividends from personal services companies count as self-employment income, so I have to deduct my income tax, my social security contributions and the company’s social security contributions from dividends as if it’s a salary.

That being said, the personal services company can buy things for work, can make business expenses and can make investments in its own name. As long as the money or the assets stay in the company, there’s no tax on them. This means that if I need a work laptop it’s effectively 30%+ cheaper for me to buy it through the company, provided that it’s legitimately for work.

The company also protects me from liability. If I get sued and the company collapses, my pension and savings are (mostly) protected.

Startup 1

Startup 1 is a consultancy business. It owns most of startup 2, and it has a contract with startup 2 to provide a bunch of services – one of which is to pay myself personal services company for my fees as a director.

I am one of a few directors of startup 1, and a minority shareholder.

My personal services company has a consultancy agreement with startup 1. I invoice my fees for work I do, and they pay me a percentage of those. The deductions are for things like the specialist software and insurance that startup 1 pays for.

We did this so that startup 1 isn’t an “employer” for HR and pensions issues. The other directors are on similar agreements. A consultancy business is generally cash in -> cash out, so there’s not a lot of retained assets that will ever be held in here unless we try to launch startup 3 or something.

I’m also a minority shareholder, so if startup 1 declares a dividend then I get a little bit.

My personal services company also has a specific contract relating to startup 2. That gives me a contract right to a bigger share of any sale proceeds of startup 2 or any dividends paid out of startup 2 that startup 1 then pays to its shareholders. Basically, startup 1 won’t give me a bigger shareholding because it does other stuff that I don’t get involved in, but I’m doing a lot of the work for startup 2 so I need to be paid for that project. This specific contract allows me to do that.

Startup 2

I’m a director on startup 2, along with others. I don’t own shares in it, but the specific contract with startup 1 gives me economic interests in its success. For financial purposes (but not voting or control), I’m effectively a 23% shareholder.

Startup 2 is applying for a regulatory licence to do some financial services.

Startup 2 has a contract between me and startup 1 so that I can charge fees as a director (and be sacked, obviously) as a commercial party. This means that contractually I’m a consultant, but it’s through three different relationships:

Startup 2 > Startup 1 > Personal Services Company > Me

We did this to keep startup 2 outside of pensions and HR issues until it’s actually operating and hiring staff.

Strange effects this has

Startup 2 needs to be self-contained, so I have a laptop and software for that which startup 2 entirely owns.

Startup 1 provides software, but I use it on the laptop that my personal services company owns. However, I can only really use that for startup 1 business, so if I do anything for my personal services company on its own then I need to use separately licensed software.

My personal services company is also a side hustle vehicle. There’s nothing to stop me being a director of any other company and taking fees for it, nor to do my non-reserved legal activities through it as a business (I’m still a solicitor of England and Wales, so I can do some general counsel work for small companies).

This means that as well as having Microsoft Office on my laptop, which Startup 1 pays for, I’ve had to use LibreOffice for the personal services company in case I get side hustle work.

Potential side hustle work

So the potential side hustle work isn’t merely fanciful. I was asked by an investor to help them with one of their startups on an advisory-only basis, which is why I suddenly needed to set up LibreOffice and use ChatGPT to help me get it configured.

I don’t know for sure that this will come into fruition but I kind of need to be ready for that now.

LibreOffice isn’t intuitive. There hasn’t been millions spent on a clean user interface. However, it’s pretty decent, and with ChatGPT assistance I’ve been able to create a few template documents that will speed me up for the kinds of work I’m expecting the personal services company to actually do.

So if things come up, I’ll be ready.

I’m tempted to create a landing page/ enquiries page website for the personal services company, to offer fractional in-house general counsel services to startups. I reckon I can do that.

Distractions and detours

New Bitcoin hardware wallet

This is presently en route to the island and I should be setting it up next week, things going well.

I’ve also configured my Ledger hardware wallet to be used as my personal services company’s hardware wallet. I accept payments in Bitcoin and would probably accept payments in USDC on Ethereum if offered, so it makes sense to have a separate hardware device for any I actually receive. While I’m getting a more sophisticated wallet for long-term personal holdings the Ledger system is perfectly fine (and easily set up) for my personal services company and gives me a good baseline level of security.

I use a Ledger Nano X, but if I was starting out today I’d go with the cheaper Nano S. It’s £43 and does basically everything the same, except that it doesn’t have Bluetooth and doesn’t allow you to have quite so many accounts. Most people don’t use a hardware wallet on mobile so Bluetooth is probably unnecessary and I generally use the USB cable anyway.

Writing club

I feel kind of bad that I haven’t made any progress towards earning from writing like I wanted to at the start of the year.

The reason for this is that I just don’t have any more time. The personal services company, startup 1 and startup 2 take up most of the prime writing time. Well, most of the time generally. There’s not a lot of spare capacity here.

Still, I’m trying to make sure I attend the writing meet-ups and at least do the homework.

The gang really like my dialogue. I have the opposite problem to most of the others: my dialogue is pretty good and carries the story, but my descriptions are a bit… meh. Everyone else seems to love a descriptive image or an inner description of a character’s feelings but struggle along with dialogue.

Someone said I try writing scripts for radio or stage plays. Might just do that, but not today. Got enough stuff on these next coming months.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

We tried Unforgiven II this week and I barely hung in there at half speed. I think my instructor was a little downhearted about that, he didn’t think it would be such a step up for me but little tricks in the song are still a long way above my skill level.

Not sure how I feel about this. It’s obvious that he thinks I’d be practicing more, which I suspect is because most of his students are, well, school students. Adults probably don’t commit to lessons for years, whereas school kids do *and* they tend to have a lot more time playing after school or on weekends, in bands and stuff.

Meanwhile I barely average 2 hours a week on top of lessons, and I generally play the last lesson’s homework and some scales.

Can’t beat myself up though. My playing has come a long way, I at least sound like a guitarist now, I just don’t make enough time to practice… but with the startups and my other projects, I’m realistically not going to do much more.

Fitness

So I didn’t get in much structured training, but I’ve been averaging 12,000 steps per day, got a bike ride in, and I’m definitely losing fat.

Which is good?

The physio did weird things to my kneecaps and the pain basically stopped. I still have impact pain and she wants me to do more stretching, which I totally neglected and need to get back on top of.

The weather has really cleared up and Lady SierraWhiskyMike and I have returned to our default hobby of just going for a long walk to get a fancy coffee. That’s pretty active, it’s low planning effort, and we live on an island so it’s pretty fun too.

Final thoughts

I’m a businessman, doing business!

It’s really cool to actually have self-employed income. Not much, granted, but it ain’t zero either. That’s exactly the position I wanted to be in last year.

Hobbies and fitness are taking a back seat but I guess that was inevitable. I’m definitely a lot happier working for myself than I was in a law firm.

My financial independence campaign continues!