Thoughts and reflections form the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat plan
We’re wiring the control panel!
After some serious wiring… everything I fixed worked. Hooray! I even got two devices to talk to each other that didn’t talk before!
Unfortunately, the stuff I didn’t mess with isn’t working. This is a major problem because that includes the lights we need to comfortably live aboard.
Bugger.
Fortunately there’s only a few likely culprits for the lights not working and they should be easily fixed.
We’ve also paved the way to connect our sexy new Chartplotter into the binnacle (that’s the standing bit our helm is screwed into). More parts have been ordered so that we can achieve this dream of an uber-powerful navigation system that actually works. Hopefully. Soon, maybe.
We’ve told the marina we’re ready to go back into the water and live back on the boat again. About damn time. It’s been nice living on land but I wouldn’t want to do it forever.
Payday
Salary in, same old…
…but wait, no it isn’t!
Lady SierraWhiskyMike has had a business venture idea. We need to talk to a few people to see what the cost of setting up a prototype is, but if that’s a thing then we might follow it up as a legitimate venture.
So this month’s investment contribution went into cash savings.
If we do our research and it’s a go: we’ll want the cash to start up.
If we do our research and it’s another dead end: oh well, lump sum into the pot.
I don’t want to get too excited because I’ve been excited about this kind of thing before and it hasn’t worked out. Then again, it hasn’t hurt to suddenly drop a few month’s cash contributions into the investment accounts either.
Distractions and detours
Return to work pressures
My return from a week away has been soundly punished by several “time critical” requests – by e-mail, the worst way to give anyone a time critical request – that absolutely had to happen before the end of Friday.
They’re all nonsense, by the way. When I looked at them the deadlines were entirely arbitrary. Wow. I’ve made my life harder to make a few rich people marginally closer to being barely wealthier.
So I missed out on my writing club that I’d looked forward to because I was pulling another after hours shift.
The great thing about corporate law is that the salary is high, so my savings rate has been pretty good. The costs of this are that you get messed around for no good reason and now I’ve missed out on something that gives my life meaning in exchange for something that means absolutely nothing and provides no further upside. The upside belongs to my employer and doesn’t affect my salary.
Which is why we keep exploring self-employment. I know that self-employed people also lose a lot of their free time for meaningless client demands, but they do at least profit from any upside.
I hit 3 years’ post-qualification experience soon, which means that being a freelance solicitor becomes an option for me. I might look into this further. There’s a bit of an obstacle in that I live offshore, which causes regulatory concerns, but if I can make it work then I might have to for my own peace of mind.
Bitcoin on a tear
I didn’t get round to selling my Bitcoin and now it’s on another tear.
Having worked out that I’m basically CoastFI if I keep living on my boat – which I plan to! – I may just leave it another 5 years.
There’s a lot of institutional adoption and purchasing right now. I offer digital assets legal services and since planting our flag in September last year not a day has passed without a client enquiry of some description.
OK, some of those enquiries have been start-up ideas that have totally sucked, but some big players are making some massive over-the-counter purchases to hold over 5-10 years.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
This week is Lenny Kravitz Are You Gonna Go My Way?, which is a technical step up from where I’ve been playing before.
The riff is… OK. I mean it sounds badass, but it’s got a note bend technique that requires more control than I’ve had to show before. It’s a finger workout!
Buuuut then there’s a solo I have to learn, too.
This is my fault. I asked for more solos so that I could learn to write them. Guitar solos are badass. The fastest way to learn anything is by imitating and then intuitively taking on ideas and motifs that could work in other places, so now I’ve basically got to learn a few more solos.
Which is hard. It’s a bit of music deliberately designed to show off. Obviously it’s not simple.
This might take another week or so.
Fitness
Fitness sucked this week.
I’m still getting stronger on the calisthenics workouts and fitted the mandatory one in, but the fates conspired against me to give me the choice of workout or sleep tonight? and unfortunately I can’t operate on less than five hours’ sleep.
So not much exercise for me during the week. I’ll probably get some walking in this bank holiday weekend to sort-of counterbalance that, but I’ll need to be more intentional about it.
Final thoughts
This week was mainly spent at work. Yay…
I can’t shake the feeling that if I’m already at CostFi – ish – then I should be able to resolve that situation so that I can get a better work-life balance. It bothers me that I haven’t done that yet.
I guess if I’m honest it’s because my earning power is so good right now. Oh, not good enough to afford a normal life in the Channel Islands where a two-bed house is £600,000, but enough that I could probably return to the UK in a few years and buy a flat or be financially independent after a 10-year push and a return to the mainland.
So yeah, letting go of a big salary is a scary proposition. I know that realistically I could survive a few years without any income, but going from employed earning big(ish) money to earning less money or risking it by being self-employed would be a leap of faith and I haven’t been able to let go and take it yet.
My financial independence campaign continues!
