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

This week we had a family emergency that required me to fly back to the UK at short notice. I don’t want to go into what this was on the blog, but I’m about £500 down due to the last-minute flight booking, accommodation and convenience food.

Thankfully my emergency fund is here if I can’t absorb than hit in my current account.

I’m probably going to live like a hermit for the rest of the month to lessen the damage.

Progress on my goals

Boat life

We have a freshwater leak *somewhere*, but haven’t/ can’t isolate it.

Fortunately, freshwater isn’t the concerning leak. The boat won’t sink because of a freshwater leak, and the bilge pump could easily deal with it if it was severe.

Saltwater is the bad one: if it was saltwater, we could be sinking.

It’s not the stanchion posts because they’ve been re-bedded in, and similarly it’s not the hatches. We’ve checked those. There’s an odd leak somewhere but damned if I know where it is.

Hopefully it’s not the water tank, because that’s a faff to replace.

Distractions and detours

Caffeine detox

Day 30 is today!

I can have my first coffee tomorrow.

What I’ve learned from this experience is that:

  • Caffeine free is hard
  • You still miss the coffee
  • I was definitely overcooking the coffee, because within two weeks of stopping my mood improved and the weird twitches I’d developed completely stopped.

I also realise how much I relied on coffee to get through the absurdity of my working day. Without it, I’ve quickly realised that I actually can’t maintain the demands of my job, which brings me to the next point.

I resigned from work this week

My job is full of frustrations. Lawyers have a concept of “billable hours”, which is basically a way to say that if your working year didn’t contain X amount of hours that we charged the client for, you’re a waste of space.

The problem?

One hour of sprinting to get something done on time and in budget – I.e. being effective – is less valuable to you than doing a mediocre job and taking twice the time.

This means that although I’ve been working hard for my clients, as far as my firm is aware I have bags of unused spare capacity to put towards other meaningless non-billable drivel that doesn’t develop me as a lawyer and gets in the way of me actually boosting my billable hours.

Things came to a head when I was yet again working at 1930hrs to do something that wasn’t even fee paying work, this time because our client onboarding system is so bad that we needed to redo some data entry that our onboarding team had sat on for a month.

Dude. Self-generated work by the firm has been eating my days, and it’s not even relevant for the business. The firm could put a stop to this, but after months of pointing things like this out they haven’t made any changes. That’s when I realised:

I don’t need to be here.

My job isn’t that bad. My complaints are a first-world problem, and I’m grateful – but it’s OK to just want a better deal.

Benefits of the FI Campaign

I did the sums that night and realised that I could basically do nothing but finger painting for over five years without any real repercussions. I’d be back to square one on the FI Campaign, but my pension is still OK.

At the start of this blog it was unthinkable that I could take any time off work. I’d have needed to find a replacement job straight away. With my three month contractual notice period, that’s sometimes a hard sell, and I’d be panicking if I got to the last month without any job offers.

Not so now.

With the progress I’ve made already, I can negotiate confidently. My employer doesn’t own me, we have contract terms. If the terms no longer suit, I don’t need to accept them: I can simply offer my services elsewhere.

What now?

My firm is keen to keep me and has mentioned things like “flexible hours”, “reduced time” and so on. Things that could’ve been offered before are suddenly on the table.

I’ve been honest with them and I’m continuing to work through my notice. The people are nice, but their systems and processes mean that I can’t have a life outside of the office, and that’s the bit that’s grating on me. There’s a reason I can’t get to archery practice, and it isn’t lack of wanting.

If they offer me a better deal then I’ll of course consider it.

In the alternative, I’m thinking of earning money differently. My plan at the moment is to try to freelance as a writer and to draft commercial contracts (subject to what the SRA say about my plan…), with potential side hustles and/or temporary jobs over winter being used to top up the pot.

I’ve floated the temping idea past recruiters and the initial response was “that won’t be a problem with your CV”.

Impact to the FI Campaign

At the moment my savings rate exceeds 50%. Obviously, if I work reduced hours, this will drop.

However, I intend to use the time gained back to explore more side hustles. The reason for this is that I get joy out of working for myself that I can’t replicate at work, so a hobby business on the side is actually not bad.

If I have a hobby business built up, I may actually get to a degree of financial independence faster, because you can leverage businesses/ products/ services you own in a way that you can’t when working for someone else.

I guess then the worst case is that my FI Campaign takes a bit longer, but the upside risk suggests I might actually get there quicker by taking ownership now.

Smartphone addiction

I checked this morning and the dumbphone I ordered has been delayed by 2-3 weeks, so no progress here.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

We picked up on Under the Bridge this week to develop my knowledge of chord progressions. It’s a great song, I’m not expected to master all of it, but it’s a good learning tool.

I’ve also done a bit more research and talking to my teacher about last week’s confusing lesson. Seems that the best thing for me to do is to actually just learn my scales the hard way, so I’ve bought an exercise book for scales to add into my regular guitar practice.

Fitness

The emergency killed off my fitness for the back end of this week. I’ve had one gym session and one run, and on top of that eaten too much junk food to be healthy. I’ll get back on form next week.

Final thoughts

A hard week. An emergency, a bit of workplace burnout.

However, I’m hopeful for the future. It’s sad that I can’t maintain the intensity of my job because it was a sure route to success, but this situation is forcing me to push for new conditions and should – however it happens – result in a better work-life balance for me.

My FI Campaign may take longer, or it may not. I don’t honestly know. What I do know is that pursuing the FI Campaign effectively and with purpose has given me the power and opportunity to make these kinds of bold decision.

Also, living on the boat. Being mortgage free is an incredible power. Your mortgagee has power over you, so when that’s no longer a compulsion you gain more control.

My financial independence campaign continues!