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

Progress on my goals

Payday!

It was that magical time of the month where my current account is temporarily flush with credit for a little less than 24 hours.

Ahh, the sweet feeling of income.

Obviously, my automation kicked in and sent everything everywhere all at once.

I committed to a higher savings rate

My savings rate had been around 50% of take-home, but that included my employer’s contributions to my pension pot.

I’d been umm-ing and ahh-ing and generally faffing about making excuses as to why I needed a big buffer of slack funds each month. No more! This week I took action and upped my standing order to my investment pot.

It’s now a little under 50% of take-home pay. When you add in my pension contributions and my employer’s pensions matching, my savings rate is 61%. If we were to include the crypto allocation and the cash I put towards the boat’s pot it might be higher, but to be honest I don’t think of those as my FIRE stash and still count them as lifestyle costs.

If we were going for full FIRE, that would mean I could basically hold this course for 12 years and be sorted…

…buuuut I’m hoping to travel before then, so we’ll see how things go. Hence why my target is CoastFI rather than true FIRE: I’m aiming for enough of a pot that I can set off guilt-free at an early opportunity, I don’t need to be fully self-sufficient at the point of departure because I’m happy to do minor things to supplement my income.

Distractions and detours

We bought some new space-saving pans for the boat. Very fancy! The handles detach and they come with lids that turn them into fridge-friendly storage pots, which is pretty cool. Not the cheapest, mind you, but a good solution to minimise the storage burden.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

Another Ozzy track this week: Crazy Train. I’m not really sure I mastered the last one to be honest, but I think it was more to build up the pedal tone technique.

My practice amp is pretty cool in that it’s battery-powered, i.e. boat friendly, but my guitar sounds naff on my amps and great on my teachers’. I guess at some point I’ll outgrow this practice amp? I know there are modelling amp emulation software packages out there now that could work with my iPad, but I haven’t tested any. I’ll wait until I’m a bit better and have a look round then.

Fitness

This week I caught the lurgies from someone at work and ended up taking two sick days. Gross!

Needless to say my fitness hasn’t been on point. Even worse, I missed out on a team-building event, so it’s not like I got the silver lining of having time off. My team are a good bunch, so it’s kind of sad that I missed a paid-for social. Anyway, fitness sucked this week and I’ll have to get back on the horse next week.

Final thoughts

Upping the savings rate always makes me feel a little nervous. Compared to, well, everyone I know, my savings rate is obscene. I’m pretty sure the other lawyers look at me and wonder where my money has gone!

I kind of know in my gut that this is how you get out of the rat race. I don’t know anyone who got their wealth together by spending it all.

All the same, there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m going to need that spare cash in my account today, because you never know what might come up and I could always just add whatever is left at the end of the month back into the savings pot…

…except that when I used to do this, magically there’d be another thing I could afford to buy. Which is precisely why I deal with my money by paying myself first each payday.

Maybe a little nerves are a good thing?

My financial independence campaign continues!