Thoughts and reflections about the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Massive distraction: 10th Anniversary trip!
So the reason this is a combined weekly update with the one I should’ve published last week is that it was our 10th wedding anniversary.
We celebrated in style with a long weekend city trip to Paris. Much culture, very nice.
I loved Paris. Despite all the talk I’d heard about it being quite a mean city to tourists, we found it welcoming and friendly. It’s also super convenient to walk and/or catch the metro around all the obvious tourist spots, which is pretty much what we did.
City breaks can be expensive and we did things like see the Moulin Rouge ballet, go to the Eiffel Tower, trek around Sace Coeur and the artists’ district in Montmatre, and visit the Louvre. Food is pricey for UK standards but cheaper than Channel Islands: I’d say average London prices. That being said, the quality of the food and wine was consistently good.
In case you’re wondering: the reason you’re not seeing the touristy stuff in the photos above is because a lot of those photos had my face or Lady SierraWhiskyMike’s face on them. We’re not secret but I try to keep things a little discreet.
Probably not a city to be a vegan in, mind you! Everything comes with beef, butter or cheese. Everything. Lady SierraWhiskyMike is dairy intolerant and we had to bring a lot of digestive supplements because knowledge of dietary conditions in France is limited to “there’s no added flour in this”.
As this is ostensibly a personal finance blog: yes, we saved up for this trip, and we paid for everything in cash. We came in a little under budget but it was still a big spend.
Anyway, it was fantastic and worth saving up for. I’m sorry that I didn’t post sooner, and I freely confess that I had shamefully neglected the blog while I was swept up in the joy of the moment.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
From glamorous Paris to the cold wet Channel Islands. So glamorous.
Well, storms hit us hard and are still hitting us hard as I type. So hard in fact that several of the elastic toggles that hold the very corner of the canopy you can see in place finally gave up and snapped.
So this morning I DIY’d it with some elastic I’d bought on Amazon to make the cargo nets.
Hopefully this will hold for a while. It’s not outdoor elastic but I reckon it will hold for a while and I already had that whole roll of it.
By the way, only slightly related: I absolutely, 100% recommend Leatherman multi-tools over any other brand I have tried, for both military and civilian use. I use the older model Wave and Lady SierraWhiskyMike has a newer Wave+. I’ve broken Gerbers in fairly light use, I’ve savaged Victorinox Swiss Army knives, but I’ve only ever damaged Leatherman tools by doing things they’re not designed to do, like using the small screwdriver bit to try and lever some aluminium windows – and even that worked!
When we go sailing it is our standard operating procedure to carry them with us in our jackets in case we need to cut away lines or trapped materials in an emergency, such as if the boat rolls over. I literally trust these tools with my life.
I am not being paid to say this. I have an Amazon affiliate link for the ones we’re using but you should shop around because they come up on sale sometimes at local shops.
We’re going to order the replacement water tank this weekend, too. It should turn up in January. The quote is something like £1,800 and it’s coming out of the boat’s own budget.
Bitcoin boost continues
So I haven’t rebalanced just yet, but that’s largely because I haven’t sat down and worked out what I want to allocate those funds to. I’m not in a rush and reasonably expect the current prices to be sustained for a week or two.
Chances are that I’ll sell the little I still have on exchanges and just add a few pennies to my normal investment funds, but as I wasn’t expecting such stellar growth I might try to use some of that for another project. The rest I’ll probably leave for another four years.
Distractions and detours
Interesting client call update
So I followed up with the tech start-up guys and made a few connections to people around the islands.
The Channel Islands, by virtue of the fact that they’re not too different from the UK mainland and have a lot of well-paid people in a concentrated space, make a great testing ground for tech startups. They’re a little underused for this purpose because the cost of things like real estate and personnel is of course high, but in principle if you think you’re building a serious SaaS company there are a lot worse places to run your alpha test than a small island with tons of financial capital where you can quickly establish a local market dominance.
I reckon there’s a solid opportunity for these guys to use the Channel Islands as a test bed and proof of concept so that they can then pitch to the really interesting markets and do serious fundraising.
Anyway, it was great to help them out and I got a big kick out of using my lawyer powers and network for good.
Writing club
This week included our third session of meeting up since the writing course at the start of the year. We’d brought along some homework following the prompts we’d had at the last session and read those out.
We’re all getting a lot better. I know most of the gang don’t want to write short form but the quality of what we produce now is a lot higher across the board than anything we did at the start of that writing course. I guess what we’re doing is getting the reps in, like you would in the gym. We shouldn’t be too surprised that we’re making gains.
Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested, so I’ve put my homework assignment below as a PDF.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
I added my guitar teacher to a Spotify playlist I’d made that’s basically an aspirational guitar playlist. I’m not good enough to play most of the songs on there but the idea is that we can use some of the ideas from some of the songs as part of my lessons.
Last week we did the first riff to Master of Puppets and this week we’re playing with Cowboys from Hell by Pantera.
That’s pretty damn cool. I don’t practice often enough to get the results I’d like from guitar but I’m now playing bits of songs that I know to learn techniques that will help me somewhere else.
Fitness
Last week was pretty good and I got three decent gym sessions/runs in before Paris. I only managed one distance run of 8 miles this week because I’ve been working all day then continuing to work in the evenings (seriously).
The FitBit tells me that we were walking 20,000-30,000 steps per day in Paris. Turns out that doing walking tours and beating the pavements to get a vibe for the city adds up. I don’t feel too bad about all the wine I drank!
Final thoughts
So we had an expensive weekend last week with our big 10 year anniversary – but I don’t regret a thing.
We saved up for it and I never feel bad about spending money I’ve deliberately saved towards a goal. So, yes, we did have champagne at the Moulin Rouge show and I had the nice Cotes de Rhone with my meals.
Now we’re back home we have a couple of cheaper weekends lined up. the Christmas period is likely to be a big spending month and because of that we’re clamping down on having too many treats for the inevitable build up of corporate beers that will start next month.
My financial independence campaign continues!
