Thoughts and reflections on the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat plan
Our sea trial is booked for the end of the month. Assuming we’re all happy to complete on the day or shortly after, she gets picked up by a boatyard for the essential repairs and should be ready for us in mid-July.
I’m currently paying £800pm to rent a basement room (which to be fair has an en suite) from my mother in law. She’s lovely, but the lack of independence and vitamin D is grating. A July-August move out would be welcome!
Distractions and detours
My bosses at work don’t know about this blog. We talk about investing quite a lot, but that’s not unusual for lawyers.
What I wasn’t ready for was the unabridged excitement of my workmates and all their connections when they found out about the liveaboard.
It’s probably because I live on a Channel Island that this is seen as an acceptable and awesome thing to want to do.
Apart from friends of friends suddenly inviting themselves to a boat party we haven’t proposed yet (how did that rumour get around?!), my highlight so far has been my boss using it to show off to a client.
No, really. Turns out not only does my boss think it’s an exciting plan but the clients – who work in finance – think so, too.
The lesson in this is that if you have weird plans you shouldn’t be afraid to share them. I thought my work would assume I was going to turn into a watery Stig of the Dump but the response to trying something different has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to like a story.
Non-FIRE goals
Guitar got harder
I’ve been playing guitar for almost three months now.
One thing my teacher pointed out is that while the grading syllabus gives difficulty settings for music, if you like a song you’re going to learn it faster and play it better.
We spent about 3 weeks working on Hey Joe by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I don’t dislike the band, but I’ve never really liked the song. I can’t think of a situation where I’d choose to put that on anywhere.
Fire, Voodoo Chile, the cover of All Along the Watchtower – love ‘em. Hey Joe, not so much.
Anyway, I struggled through it but my playing sounded and felt flat. With good reason. Turns out it’s hard to hide your emotions in music, your attitude comes across. So I told my teacher and he instantly told me we should switch song straight away. We laughed about it afterwards, but his question was “Why didn’t you tell me?! That’s no good, you’ll just get depressed and quit!”.
We’re now learning the intro to Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns n Roses. It’s got a great opening riff. Anyway, turns out that I’m learning this one faster.
I guess the lesson here is to find the joy in what you’re doing.
Published post on robo-investors
The guitar thing made me think about my use of robo-investors. It’s an idea I’ve been building up over time, which has inspired my recent post on whether a robo-investor could be right for you.
Financial independence forums have a lot of talk about people who claim they’re in the “boring middle” or others who just want to know where to start with investments.
I think it’s important to have something else going on that isn’t directly related to financial independence. Sure, if you focussed all your energy on investing you’d probably get to your goal faster, but you’d feel every second of pain getting there. By having other project’s though my progress has been running much more smoothly.
The problem is that your time and energy are finite. I couldn’t learn guitar, archery, keep fit, write on this blog, read books, walk my dog, actually spend time with my partner, progress the boat plan and work in law (that stereotype about long days is accurate) and keep optimising my investments and budget. Some things have to give.
Back in the UK, it was the guitar, archery, fitness and dog walking that gave. I don’t miss the life theft that was commuting at all.
So instead I’ve automated my public equity investments entirely to my pension provider and robo-investor. A purist would argue that this was sub-optimal in the long run, and when I started this blog I was that guy. However, my hobbies are fairly cheap but rewarding. If I spend my days doing stuff I enjoy that’s lower cost than, say, another night out, I could be adding more to the investment pot anyway.
This is a bit vague and I’ll develop my thoughts in a full post later. I just wanted you to see where the change in direction had come from.
I still do my other investments manually, but to be fair I see most of those as “supplementary”. If gold doesn’t do much more than sort-of track inflation, it won’t affect my plans. If my Crowdcube investments don’t do anything, whatever – I enjoy making those. If crypto fails… I’ve already made a positive from rebalancing gains back into equities, so actually that’s not a big deal.
My financial independence campaign continues!
