We suffered a setback in our financial independence campaign this week. Nothing ever goes smoothly.

Why are you writing about setbacks? I came here for investing and moneysaving

So far, I’ve written about stuff that I’ve learned as I try to save and invest my way to success. Writing these posts means that I need to do my research, which reinforces what I know and keeps me well equipped on my own financial independence campaign.

That’s a winning situation if ever there was one. I like writing, I like learning, I leverage this knowledge for my own (nefarious?) purposes.

However, lest I become one of those shallow “finfluencers” (I learned a new word this month. Thank you, Guardian newspaper. You do indeed have a use.), I wanted to point out that things don’t always go the way I’d hoped.

Starting with a positive

This month started with good news in the SierraWhiskyMike household: both my partner and I are receiving a significant pay rise. Hooray!

For the next 12 months, we’re both gaining a 20% income boost. I figured that this would offset the fact that I now have to return to the office (boo!) and allow me to maintain a COVID-era savings rate.

Unfortunately, this may not be the case.

The issue

Sadly, the vet diagnosed our German Shepherd dog with arthritis.

The treatments and hydrotherapy for him won’t break the bank, but will absorb the majority of our pay boosts.

Easy come, easy go, I guess.

We did have a rethink of our decision to get rid of the car. We really didn’t want to sink our emergency fund into another substantial liability. Fortunately, it turns out that pet taxis are a thing in our area, which is substantially cheaper than maintaining a car we don’t need.

For anyone who is wondering: we live within walking distance of three parks and the vet surgery. The dog doesn’t suffer because we don’t have a car. You can also hire cars that allow pets for long journeys.

How much does this affect the campaign plan?

Ok, so paying around £200-300 a month for a dog to have treatments is going to be a bit of a drain. However, he’s our dog, we try to do our best by him.

He doesn’t seem to care that he has arthritis, by the way. His pastimes include sleeping on the sofa, sleeping on his various mats around the house, and sleeping on the decking in the garden. He recently discovered that he can bark at the postmen to scare them while still lying on the sofa, which he seems annoyingly pleased about. Canine research at its finest. His lifestyle pretty much hasn’t changed, but he’s now adding “swimming” to his list of hobbies.

Once we’d solved the initial problem of transportation to a canine hydrotherapy pool, we did an assessment of our campaign plan.

Fortunately for us, very little has changed. Over the long term, the dog costs won’t be part of our retirement budget, so although they stop us upping the savings rate as we hoped to this year, they don’t add to our FIRE target number. As much as I love my dog, he’s middle aged and sadly won’t see us achieving CoastFI unless he discovers the elixir of life from my sofa.

A general observation on the financial independence campaign

Things don’t go smoothly.

I don’t think that this obstacle will dramatically prevent us from our goal of achieving CoastFI in 10 years (now 9-and-a-bit), but we’ll need to account for it in our planning. It’s something I’ll consider for the 2022 campaign plan.

The great thing about the financial independence campaign is that there is no downside. Even if we miss our goal, we’ll still end up with a big pot of assets that we can build up from. We’ll still be able to retire and live a life of sort-of luxury. Whether I get financial freedom in 10 years or not, I’ll still be most of the way towards earning my freedom and it will eventually happen.

I’m also amazed at the progress we’ve made to date. Thanks to deliberately pursuing our financial independence strategy, the question of “can we pay for this?” never came up. We had our emergency fund ready in case we needed to buy a car or pay for treatment. We’re fortunate that we shouldn’t need it, but it’s there. We also have a pretty meaty bit of capital in assets that we could have used if we’d needed to.

Despite this considerable cost burden, I have no plans to put my campaign on hold, nor see any reason why I should.