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

Progress on my goals

De-Nazi-ing my portfolio

After a whole post about this twat, I have successfully de-Musked my investment portfolio. Or, at least, the bit that isn’t with pensions providers that I can’t readily re-instruct.

In place of my (former favourite) Vanguard Developed World ESG-filtered fund, I’ve now gotten the following:

I might write a fuller post on how this was all chosen, but for regular readers it’s probably enough to explain that I still wanted to have a diversified portfolio but I found a way to not pay the bankroller of far-right groups across the Western world.

Fuck that guy.

Payday!

Got paid again and instantly made the investments I said I would.

Gold has almost gotten to the break limit I’d set for myself. In fact, I bought a gold sovereign instead of a quarter ounce coin because with the latest surge in gold prices I can’t actually afford a quarter ounce under my £600 limit any more.

As readers may remember from the 2025 Campaign Plan, if I can’t buy a sovereign or a quarter ounce coin for less than £600 each month, then I change to setting aside a pot of £350 each month and simply buying when that pot can afford to.

This is obviously happening a lot faster than I was expecting.

My suspicion is that it’s not asset prices that are overvalued so much as there just being way too much cash in circulation. When there’s too much cash, it devalues compared to everything around it. Right now, everything around is still looking like a better buy than holding cash.

Which means the prices of everything are still being driven up and absorbing that abundant cash. Whether it’s an “everything bubble” that will pop or whether we’re just searching for the “new normal” is anyone’s guess.

My intention is to just keep on with my investing plans. Even if the “everything bubble” pops, I don’t see holding onto a load of cash as having any potential upside.

Boat life

Water tank is here!

So our water tank is here and we spent yesterday scrubbing the hole ready for fitting.

Unfortunately, today’s Weather Surprise has been strong winds and rain, which isn’t giving me any comfort that we won’t screw up the fitting. It’s realty easy to drop things and break them (like £1,500 custom-moulded water tanks) when your home doesn’t think it can maintain “level” for more than a second or two.

If the weather calms down we might dry-fit it in today, but if not it will wait another couple of weeks. Importantly, the end is in sight!

One thing we won’t have after fitting it is a water depth sensor. That’s not a major problem, it just means there’s the minor inconvenience of not being able to check our water supply using the nav desk gauges until we fit one in there. Will have to do water management the old-fashioned way by just topping up each week for now.

Distractions and detours

Writing club

We assembled for writing club again.

I don’t think many of us were up for writing, we spent most of the meeting talking about books we’d read over Christmas. This ate into our practice and we did a speed-writing exercise with the prompts after the classic bit where we read out our homework.

One of the stories another person read from their homework was badass. The prompts included “one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse” and he’d reimagined Pestilence as a demon in rural Spain that needed to feed on decay to survive. That description doesn’t do it justice, but it was fantastic.

My story this month was a bit flat. I reused the steampunk characters from the week before and took the opportunity to play around with them a bit more because I think I like writing in that setting.

iPod update

It’s been two weeks of using the old iPod and I’ve loved it. The sound quality with those in-ear monitors is so intensely good that I haven’t bothered to open Spotify at all since I got them.

So that’s a win?

I haven’t (and won’t) cancel Spotify for now, largely because Lady SierraWhiskyMike is still using it and I still like it for discovering new music, but when the time inevitably comes I don’t think I’m going to have any problems with owning my own, curated music library.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

This week my teacher put me on a Grade 6 exam piece. Not because I’m actually capable of sitting my grade 6 exam, mind you!

The point of this one was to put in deliberate pinch harmonics into a melody. I currently suck at pinch harmonics.

For non-guitarists: a pinch harmonics is a way of playing a note with a distorted (dirty) guitar to make it sound particularly squeal-y on that one note. It’s something you can only really do on electric guitars, so it’s important to learn to do it even if it’s nails to get the hang of.

So after this blog post I might have to spend a windy afternoon trying to make squeal noises with my guitar. I’m sure Lady SierraWhiskyMike and our dog will love that.

I haven’t been practicing guitar as often as I’d like. I need to get on that. It’s all well and good talking about guitar but it’s an instrument you have to actually play if you want to improve.

Fitness

It’s not been a great week for training., but I’ve still put time in.

After last update, I went straight out and did a little over 9 miles in sub-8 minute miles. That’s pretty good.

Then I didn’t get time to do any meaningful training until Thursday. That was a structured treadmill session of about 45-minutes of running.

Yesterday, faffing about trying to fit the water tank took up most of my daylight, but I still got time in for an 8-miler.

So I guess fitness isn’t going badly, but I really should’ve had at least one more session in.

Final thoughts

I solved my particular political problem, so that’s a big win. He might be the world’s richest man, but I’ll be damned if I’m giving him my money.

Running water is so close! I’ve missed it. It’s going to be awesome.

Both guitar and fitness suffered this week due to work pressures, although I managed to get my writing in on Tuesday.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike is of the opinion that I “want to do too much stuff”, but I suspect my time difficulty is actually because I work until 1900hrs most weekdays. That’s not an insubstantial amount of time lost compared to working until, say 1730hrs. Pretty sure an extra 6 hours in my week would provide at least some opportunity to get more guitar practice time, or to add an extra few minutes to a gym session for a slightly longer run.

Still, I can’t complain. I’m pushing on and getting better all the time, and my portfolio is getting added to every month.

My financial independence campaign continues!