Dad on FIRE

  Back to routine after 6 weeks off. Back to school and back to work. Finance update Breakdown for the month: ISA up £5k Pension up £3k GIA /easy access up £4k Crypto up £10k  House price  down £5.5k Total : up £21k Nice uptick in September, with only the house price slipping down slightly. 2026/27 tax year: Up to £181k for the tax year so far I've been playing a bit with AI over the past few weeks, and given the decade worth of data I've got access to I've come up with some decent graphics. I'll be consulting these once or twice a year to review my finances. My particular favourite is this one below, showing 'Contributions vs Gains'. Unfortunately I don't have the concrete contributions going back further than this (although I could make an educated guess). This shows me just how powerful compounding is. Three years ago my contributions and gains were roughly equal, the year after it was double (despite contributing a similar amount), and the current tax ...

Welcome to the third iteration in my ‘Reel Freedom’ FIRE-related film series. It’s been a while since my previous ones but I'm back with a corker! Previously I explored consumerism in Fight Club and money vs meaning in A Christmas Carol. This time round I'm looking at what is probably the most obvious of FIRE-related films... ' Office Space'. This is a 90s cult classic that strangely I acutally only got round to seeing a few years ago. If you've not seen the movie I've no doubt that will have at least seen a few memes based on the film. This film tackles a number of topics associated with the FIRE movement, most notably: what would you do if you didn’t have to work for money? Peter, the main protagonist, is the relatable everyman, wrestling with that age-old exchange of time for money, especially when the money comes from a job he hates! As before, disclaimer here is that this will probably contain spoilers. All set? Let’s have a look! "It's not...

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...