Dad on FIRE

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...

  Feels like only yesterday I was writing last month's update, this summer is absolutely flying by! Having to consciously get this update out this week as we're off to France for two weeks from tomorrow, and it'll be September when we get back so time for the next month's post! As mentioned last month, June was absolutely insane busy, and July started out fairly quiet but soon became almost as busy! The first half was finishing off the last few weeks at school, and as mentioned last month, there seemed to be a lot of assemblies, sports days, matches, summer fairs to attend and this continued into the first bit of July. As most long term readers will know, we're big campers and have been doing it both before having kids, as well as a lot with the kids as well. In July we did camping twice.... Camping at Sherwood Pines This is one of our favourite campsites, facilities are excellent and you are right in the middle of Sherwood forest and all of the bike trails that com...