Thoughts and reflections about the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Lady SierraWhiskyMike arranged for the engine servicing this week. We have the skills to do a user service ourselves, but the engine is under warranty for the next four years as long as we get the professionals to do the servicing.
The engineers were surprised because we only have 20 working hours on the engine. No joke. I mean, it’s a sailing boat, we tend to sail it when we’re out. If it hadn’t been for that tasty warranty, we could have just done a simple service ourselves and cracked on.
In hindsight, that engine maintenance course we did was a little premature. By the time we’re doing the repairs ourselves I’ll have forgotten most of it!
Lady SierraWhiskyMike also decided that now was the time to take the companionway hatch off (I.e. we have no front door). She’s re-glued some of the separating batons, taken the hinges off and applied a generous coat of teak oil. We need to replace the hinge pins which have degraded but then that ought to last another few years.
We’ve successfully borrowed/stolen an angle grinder so I guess that’s next weekend’s fun.
Further decluttering
“Decluttering” feels like the wrong word now that we’re down to things that are actually sad to get rid of.
I’ve never actually seen Marie Kondo – her brief stint in popular culture happened and was over during a six-month deployment to the Falkland Islands, so I missed it – but I’m dimly aware that the idea is “this doesn’t spark joy, so get rid of it”. Well, the things we’re getting rid of now generally do spark joy. Like my drums.
I have a potential buyer coming to view the drum kit tomorrow. I’ll be sad to see it go, but it won’t be sad to have less stuff in the storage unit. It’s a big old beastie and it’s not like I get enough free time during the week to take it to a practice room or anything like that.
Distractions and detours
London calling
Work sent me on a business development trip to London, which is basically sales coffees for lawyers.
Seems to have gone well, and one of our clients has offered me a free ticket to a big finance event in the city next week, so there’s a non-zero chance I’ll be heading back over again Thursday…
…and the week afterwards I’m being sent to New York. Hard life, I know!
Carbon emissions and green charity
All this travel is making my carbon emissions seriously rack up this year. Probably a good time to raise the cause of my charity of choice, Cool Earth.
This project is essentially there to make sure it’s economically viable for indigenous communities living in rainforest areas to not flatten the lungs of the planet for beef farming. I learned about them after reading Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (here’s my Amazon affiliate link if you want to buy that book).
I pay regular monthly donations to this charity and have done so for about two years now. Basically, I’m in a ridiculously fortunate position to have a low-cost lifestyle and be able to save so much of my income for investing so that I don’t have to work forever. I figured that the least I could do was throw a few hundred pounds a year at a charity project that is actually keeping us all alive on this floating rock that hurtles through space.
Sure, I whinge about my job – not without reason – but as problems go it’s hardly like I’m destitute. I’ve been broke and it was a lot harder than the life I live now.
I pay a little over 1% of my take-home into this charity. Over a year, that really adds up and is probably more than I’d raise from, say, baking cakes or running a car boot sale. It’s easier to just be a bit mindful about spending than it is to organise generic-charity-event#1942472917667276 and probably more cost-effective on the whole.
Does it compensate for my share of the world’s aircraft emissions? Well no, probably not. But I’m going to do the flights anyway for work, so I can find a 1% efficiency in my spending to contribute to a project that at least lessens the damage. Doing a bad thing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also try to do some good things too.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
This week was some chord theory. I’m already able to play the open string major chords, and now we’re going a bit deeper into things like suspended seconds and dominant sevenths.
I’ll probably have to revisit this a few times as I keep learning.
For now though, I’m trying to think about chords as a deliberate selection instead of blindly following the tab for any song.
Fitness
Fitness largely took a back seat this week because I was travelling for work. I should probably get my fat bum out on a run.
However, I’ve looked at my activity stats and apart from getting a fat boy curry down Brick Lane with a few client beers I’ve racked up a lot of activity just by walking.
This month is generally going to be a hard month for me to get exercise in, what with travelling and a tattoo colouring session, so I guess walking will be my main thing for the next week and a bit. The artist said to avoid exercise for two weeks last time, but I reckon I could return after a week as long as it’s just things like pull-ups and calisthenics where I won’t sweat too much or add much weight to my legs.
Final thoughts
Lots of stuff has happened to me this week but there’s not really much to report for the financial independence campaign.
The perk of doing all this work travelling – as far as financial independence is concerned, anyway – is that most of it is paid for as “expenses”. I get out of the office for a couple of days and it doesn’t really cost me anything, albeit technically I will end up running a credit line for my employer while my expenses claim is processed.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike is doing more stuff on the boat now, which is helpful. I’m not overly happy about having to pay a lot of money for a basic engine service that was way overkill for what we need, but the boat engine was around £13k and we definitely want the warranty after paying that.
My financial independence campaign continues!
