It’s been a while since my last post. I have been overwhelmingly busy at work. Evenings and weekends are really hitting me hard. It’s hard for me to get the time to come home and write. I logged in to WordPress to see the number of hits this morning and realised that while I was taking a break from writing you guys have been reading a lot so I decided to finish up one of the many posts I had in draft. Enjoy! Things are easing up so I will be publishing more content. And more updates on my progress towards FatFIRE – some interesting revelations to come… I’m going to sound a little controversial ..read more

Happy New Year to all! I hope that everyone has a healthy 2021. This year I realised that I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to save and invest enough money to eventually retire early. I am fortunate enough to obsess about savings rates and SVRs. I’m fortunate enough to hunker down through black swan events and continue chipping away at my goal. This year I realised who I was doing it for: family. And this year I realised that I’m not the head strong, ‘throw anything at me’ person I thought I was. I got scared. I feared for my family: especially my parents and my in-laws who are vu ..read more

It’s the season to be jolly! And its also the season to spend a lot of money and end up broke by January. Then spend some money on January Sales and end up in serious unrecoverable debt by February! However much I try and keep tight with a budget during the year, I always end up spending far too much money in December. The gifts, the parties, the drinks events, the holidays! It all adds up to a big fat hole in your future net worth. But surely, you can have all the trimmings and still manage to FatFIRE, FIRE or whatever FI denomination you follow? For this we need the help of the Ghosts of Chr ..read more

My company is one of the few companies that pay out bonuses in December. It’s great because it goes towards Christmas. But it’s also bad because it goes towards Christmas! I (having run my own business for most of my career) have never really received a bonus. All my friends in the City on permanent salaries, used to tell me about the anxiety, joy or discontent during bonus season. I did have some anxiety in the lead up to comp day. But it actually feels special and I was grateful to receive it; although total compensation, after tax, is half of what I was earning from my consultancy business ..read more

If you asked me 4 years ago what I wanted to do when I retired, I would have said “nothing”. My priorities would have been chilling, travelling and spending as much time as possible with my young family. I had dreams of leaving work on my 41st birthday, clearing out my desk and handing in my ID card. Saying bye to the reception staff one last time and turning my back on Corporate Life in the City of London. This Pandemic has challenged that goal. I have been working from home since around January this year. The client I was working for had a change in strategy over their office policy last yea ..read more

I have been tracking a FatFIRE age of 41 for the last 3-4 years! As far as I could tell, my models predicted that on my 41st birthday I would retire or be ready to retire. I had been running a small IT Management Consultancy Practice for 11 years. I had a handful of clients and was providing advisory services to them fairly successfully. This was producing just over £153k a year after tax. It’s a significant amount of money and I was very grateful to be in such a fortunate position to receive it (although they did work me to the bone in the process)! My expenses were high-ish but I was still a ..read more

Net Worth is a wonderful subject. Everyone in the FIRE community talks about it fairly uniformly as the total amount of assets that are in your investment accounts (stocks and shares ISA, brokerage account, SIPP, Pension etc). In my case however, I’m fairly heavily invested in Property (although I want to track more towards a 1:2). Do I declare that? How would someone actually discuss property investments in a FIRE driven portfolio? My current situation From a pure “Financial Statement” perspective, I have just over £1M net worth and that includes the equity in my residential property and my p ..read more

Provocative title, I know, but I had to catch your eye some how! This is a short thought experiment in response to some readers questions about forecasting Net Worth. Plus, as always I have some useful spreadsheets that you can download the can help you Magic Number 40 This is the holy grail (was for me anyway). It’s a good 25 years earlier than normal retirement and you are still at the peak of your life, albeit a little more mature. Some people aim for earlier either because they have a higher income and savings rate OR because they are happier with lower expenses. Start Early Start Now Eit ..read more

That’s an oxymoron! How can you be frugal with a budget and enjoy business class luxury at the same time. My last post on How much do I need to FatFIRE in the UK was contraversial. Some of you wrote in with a desire for me to tear up my blog as you didn’t think that I was being frugal enough and then others wrote in to say that they were finding it hard to drop their luxury spend. So here is a guide to finding that balance. “…if you go all out MMM style and save like a mofo, it may not be sustainable for everyone.” If you spend all you earn you’ll net out at zero or go into Debt (bad deb ..read more

£1M, £2M, £15M? FatFIRE isn’t a defined accounting term. It’s something that means different things to different people. But how much is enough? Quick Rant: I don’t like it when, usually higher income, people quote that LeanFIRE is <£50k, FIRE is £50k>£100k and FatFIRE is £100k+ FatFIRE should really be based on your own perspective of what Fat actually means to you. If you are starting your FIRE journey on £30k a year but want to be able to retire on £45k a year and you live in a Low Cost of Living area/country. That could be your FatFIRE. And conversely if you are starting out with an ..read more