I’ve been thinking a lot recently about something that comes up occasionally in FIRE circles, but I don’t think we put nearly enough value on... the faff factor in different asset classes. We spend an awful lot of time comparing returns. Is property better than the stock market? Should you invest in individual shares, Global Index Trackers, dividend stocks or Crypto? Should you leverage yourself up with Buy-to-Lets? Obviously returns matter, and if one investment returns 3% and another returns 8%, that’s quite important! But I think there’s another cost that doesn’t appear on any of the FIRE spreadsheets: how much of your time and headspace does your investment take up? This is increasingly important to me because the older I get, the more I realise that time is the thing I’m actually trying to accumulate here, not money. Money is just the tool that hopefully allows me to get more of it. Time with my family, time with my kids while they’re still kids, time to go away during the...
Summer holidays 2026 was a blast! Using 6 weeks of my UPL across the summer meant I didn't work a single day in August, essentially swapping a month's salary for a month's worth of family time. For this month I'm gonna swap the Finance / Non-Finance sections around as I think the Non-Finance one might be a bit rambly! Finance update Breakdown for the month: ISA up £3k Pension up £8.5k GIA /easy access up £0.5k Crypto up £12.5 House price up £18.5 Total : up £45k Green across the board in August, and a healthy bump up especially in Crypto and house price! New money wise, I've obviously not been paid much at all for August given the Unpaid Parental Leave. My pension payments continue, but aside from that it has just been a bit of a tax rebate on the PAYE assumption for this month as well as the bank holiday. So only around £2k of new contributions went in to Pension and savings, however the market gain from those were around £12k, so not bad! With that increase in...