Dad on FIRE

Hello and welcome back to the second instalment of Reel Freedom , where I take films I’ve watched far too many times and try to extract something useful about money, freedom, work/life balance and meaning from them. With Christmas approaching, it felt wrong not to tackle A Christmas Carol. Obviously it’s based on a book - as was Fight Club in my previous blog post - but hey ho (ho ho), there are some absolutely fantastic film versions of it, my personal favourites are either the Albert Finney version (who played Scrooge when he was 33 years old!), as well as of course The Muppets Christmas Carol version. It’s one of those stories that gets retold so often we forget how brutally honest it actually is, especially when viewed through a FIRE lens. Because at its heart, A Christmas Carol isn’t really about Christmas. It’s about money, fear, time, and what happens when you get your priorities wrong, a cautionary tale that has the same sort of andedote to extreme FIRE mindsets as the...

  Finance update Breakdown for November: ISA  up £4k Pension  up £6k GIA /easy access savings up £1.5k Crypto down £25k House price  flat Total : down £9.5k My waterfall chart this month looks like someone climbing the stairs only to open the door at the top and step and fall outside of the house! Crypto absolutely kicked my ass in November, but given how long I've been in crypto this is par for the course and doesn't worry me at all, I'm a long term HODLer.   2025/26 tax year: Total change since the start of the tax year has now dropped slightly to +£164k. Interesting that I'm still up on Crypto for the year, important reminder to zoom out for better context. Non-Finance update Trip to Paris - Surprise for wife's 40th My wife turned 40 this year back in August, as part of her gift I got her a trip over there during the October school holidays. She used to live in Paris for a year during University so thought it would be an ace idea to do some reminiscing a...

Finance update Breakdown for October: ISA  up £6k Pension  up £6k GIA /easy access savings up £2.8k Crypto  up £2.5k House price  up £4.5k Total : up £25.5k A good lift up in October again, with gains across all assets, especially surprised that house prices seem to keep ticking up. One quick addition to a thing I mentioned last month , some of you might remember that I've swapped a chunk of my easy access savings from Chase to Cahoot as the Chase rate was dropping and the Cahoot one seemed decent (5% up to £3k). If you do decide to go with this then if you go through TopCashback then you'll get an additional £25 , making it effectively 5.83% 2025/26 tax year: Total change since the start of the tax year is now +£173k. Really happy with how the year has been so far. With Winter approaching, I'm aleady making a few plans for what to do in the next few months and analysing the cashflow around the end of the tax year. Here's how it looks: At the minute I've got some od...

Hello and welcome to a series of thought pieces I’ve been meaning to do for a while, “Reel Freedom” will explore what films can teach us about Financial Independence, anti-consumerism, and the search for meaning beyond the nine-to-five. Each piece looks at how the film in question reflects our struggle to live freely in a world built on consumption, and how the FIRE movement offers a quieter, more intentional rebellion. This article might contain a few film spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Fight Club then what are you waiting for, it’s an awesome film! “The things you own end up owning you.” //Fight Club When I first watched Fight Club in my twenties, it felt like a wild, subversive middle finger to consumer society; a film about liberation, chaos, and breaking free from the suffocating grip of capitalism. It’s probably one of the many reasons I became so libertarian in my beliefs, and so disillusioned with mainstream society and finance, graduating on the eve of the GFC and pissed off...