Part 259: Jobs, Food, Rockets, and Lego

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.  This week I discuss looking for a new job, and compare the cost of Gousto and shopping from the supermarket.  Also, a nerdy bit on rockets and technology.    

Weekly Update

It’s one of those times in life when everything just seems to be on hold.  It’s the final stretch of the calendar year, and the cold weather is starting to take hold.  Our apartment can get very cold.  Last winter it got to the point where we could see our breath indoors.  We made sure Poppy was nice and toasty, but we tried to hold off on using the heating (we’re all electric here) as much as possible due to the high cost.  We layered up and there was something fun about the whole experience.  This year we will not be quite so militant.

The final bits of admin relating to the BTL sale seem to be complete now.  We’ve settled all our bills, fees, and taxes, and closed our joint account down.  The last remnants of the Old Republic BTL experiment have been swept away.

There is one thing that has changed this week, with Oana leaving her job.  I fully support her decision even though it means I might have to pick up some work in the new year.  When you are in a long-term relationship, goals, priorities, and stress are all shared.  I don’t understand when couples have no understanding of their partner’s finances, and by extension, their joint finances.  

I’ve not had to look for a job for almost fourteen years, so this is all a bit foreign to me.  I’ve been tinkering with my CV and casting the net out there, and as expected I’ve been approached by several scammers.  One consequence of this is that I’ve got to start being a bit more sensible when I answer the phone to unknown callers because it might be a legitimate recruiter.  If it’s clear they’re not legit, then I still have my fun.  

“No hablo Ingles!”

A few days ago I had another one of those calls where they’re asking about the car accident I had…

Scammer: Am I speaking with David Scothern?

Me: huh?

Scammer: I’m calling about the car accident you had.

Me: I don’t speak English.

Scammer: You don’t speak English?

Me: Did I stutter?

Scammer: …

Me: …

Scammer: What language do you speak?

Me: No hablo Ingles

*call ends*

On Thursday I went to a viewing with my Dad for a place he was thinking of buying.  Yet again, it was an example of the listing having almost no relationship with the reality of the property.  I get that agents want to make a property look good, but all this does is annoy people when they get their hopes up and turn up at a place that is, to be blunt, a shit hole.  

Some people want a project to get stuck into, and other people want a place that’s pretty much ready to move into.  If listings were honest, it seems logical to assume that you might get fewer people viewing but at least they’ll know what to expect.  

I also had my follow-up dentist appointment, and it’s always uncomfortable because I struggle to breathe through my nose.  So when I’ve got multiple fingers, tools, liquid, and whatnot all in my mouth I pretty much have to hold my breath.  I also got to enjoy a few hours of the left side of my face being numb, which is not a pleasant experience.   

Food

Friday evening was good fun as we had some friends over for dinner.  Our guests were Romanian and I was in charge of the food.  I made a soup which went down a treat.  I’ve been asked for the recipe by one of our guests, so I figured I’d pop it in here as well, which you will find below. Our guests brought a few dishes including an amazing homemade apple cake. Apple desserts are some of our favourites, and Oana and I smashed through it.

It’s a spicy, garlic, chicken, and spelt soup, served with garlic and parsley oil.  It’s inspired by a Gousto recipe with a few added ingredients and tweaks to the process.

Ingredients (for four people)

Chicken breast (x 4)

Spelt (250g)

Baby potatoes (750g)

Brown onions (2 medium)

Carrots 500g(ish)

Green Pepper (1 medium)

Garlic (lots)

Red chilli x 1 (adjust to taste)

Spinach (200g)

Fresh parsley

Knorr chicken stock pots (x 2)

Soy sauce

Dried bay leaf

Ciabatta or baguette

Olive oil

Salt

Pepper

Cooking

You’ll need a big pan/pot to accommodate all the ingredients and a good amount of liquid; approx 2 litres.  Or, you can split it amongst smaller pans.  Also, preheat oven to 200c.

Chopping

• Onion finely diced
• Carrot diced
• Garlic
• Green Pepper
• Parsley
• Chilli
• Potato into bite-size pieces

Heat some oil in your pan(s) and add the onion, carrot, and some salt.  Cook over medium heat for five minutes.

Add the garlic and green pepper.  Cook for another five minutes.  

Boil two litres of water and add to the pan(s).  Then, add the stock pots and the fresh chilli, with a splash of soy sauce.  Stir through.  Then, add the potato and some fresh parsley and stir again.

Cover the pan leaving a small gap.  Let the soup gently boil/simmer.  Stir occasionally.  Cook for 30 minutes.  Depending on how much liquid you like in the soup you may need to add water throughout the cooking time.

Garlic and Parsley Oil

This is a Gousto recipe which elevates an excellent soup into something akin to a spiritual experience.

In a small bowl mix some olive oil, chopped fresh parsley, and chopped garlic.  Set aside until ready to serve.  

Bread

Slice the bread into approx 1cm thick slices.  Put them on a baking tray and drizzle with olive oil.  These will need approx 6-8 minutes of cooking.  

Chicken

Place the chicken breasts into an oven dish.  Season with salt, pepper, and olive oil, and mix around making sure the chicken is seasoned on all sides. 

Cook for approx 15 minutes, and then remove from the oven.  

Butterfly the chicken to see how it is cooking i.e. no uncooked sections.  Once the chicken is opened up, season the inside as you see fit with salt, pepper and olive oil.  Cook for a couple of minutes more.

Remove the chicken from the oven and use two forks to pull the chicken apart.  Once the chicken has been shredded in this way, add to the pot of soup.  

Once the soup is cooked, with the spelt and vegetables having the right amount of bite, you can add the spinach and cook for another minute or two.  The spinach will wilt almost instantly.  

Serve the soup with a few spoons of garlic and parsley oil on top, with a couple of slices of the toasted bread.

I’ve mentioned in recent weeks that I’ve enjoyed the coffee at 84 John Street, and although I wasn’t able to make it there this week for another coffee, I did discover another new(ish) place in the city centre that made me an excellent drink; 2323 Coffee.  It was pretty quiet when I popped in but they had a decent-looking selection of cakes and pastries, and the coffee I had was great.  The milk had been prepared with care, and it wasn’t overheated.  The coffee was mild, with a slight cereal taste.  I enjoyed it and would definitely go back, and maybe sit down and have a bit of cake too.

Zoomies

If you’ve ever had a cat, you should be familiar with zoomies.  It’s when a cat suddenly decides to sprint like crazy, with little regard for crashing into things.  It’s funny and utterly adorable.  Zoomies can be triggered by a variety of things and one of the common causes is when they’ve just pooped.  Why am I talking about this, you may be wondering…

At least several times a day I have random thoughts pop into my head that just make me laugh, and one of those was how life would be if people got zoomies after going to the bathroom.  The flush goes, and you suddenly have the urge to smash the door down as you come sprinting out of the bathroom with a crazed look in your eyes.  It would be amazing.  Strange, but amazing.

Diabetes UK Step Challenge

A massive thank you to those of you who have donated, and a reminder that I’m still accepting donations until the end of October.  If you’d like to donate, you can do so here.

Universal Limit for Technological Development

I recently read an article that suggested an explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which argues there may be a Universal Limit for Technological Development (ULTD).  The idea is that technology becomes increasingly advanced, and reaches a point where it’s impossible to advance it any further.  There are two primary reasons for this; firstly, because of the cognitive processing limits of the beings creating that tech, and secondly, because of the resources necessary to perform the experiments needed to advance our understanding of the principles underpinning such tech, like vast particle accelerators in space, or huge solar farms orbiting the sun.  

I think there are some interesting points made here, but I don’t think it’s the right answer to the Fermi Paradox in isolation.  I think there’s more going on here, and I think much of it has to do with our environment.  

Let’s talk about food for a moment and regional variations in diet.  We don’t have to go that far back in time to get to a point where people ate what they could grow in their immediate environment, and what was in season.  It’s a fairly new feature of society that we can get almost any ingredient at any time.  It was in my lifetime that Boris Yeltsin visited a typical American supermarket and had his whole worldview shattered by how this average store had such an abundance of food available.

How does this relate to the Fermi Paradox and ULTD?

Ok, let’s talk about space exploration and The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation.

If you want to launch a satellite into orbit you need to achieve a specific escape velocity, which in turn depends on what type of orbit you want i.e. circular, stationary, etc.  If you want to leave Earth behind and travel within the solar system you need to achieve a higher speed, sometimes called the second cosmic velocity (approx 11.2km/s).  The third cosmic velocity, that is needed to escape the solar system, is even higher (and also depends on your distance from the sun) at approx 42km/s from Earth’s orbit.  

Anthropic Principle

Our solar system seems perfectly suited for us and is often an argument put forward for a creator, but this ignores the anthropic principle i.e. we could only make this observation because we are here, and we are only here because the environment allows it.  If our system was just slightly different, or if Earth was slightly more massive, then it would be impossible for us to escape our planet’s gravity using chemical rockets.  I’m not saying it would be difficult; I’m saying it would be physically impossible.

Remember the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation?  This refers to the calculation completed to determine how a rocket will work in terms of weight, fuel, thrust, and so on.  Basically, you need more fuel for more thrust, but the more fuel you have, the heavier you are, and the heavier you are, the more fuel you need.  It’s a cycle, and if we were living on a world with just a fraction more gravitational pull, we would be stuck on the surface and not be able to escape using chemical rockets. 

Much like how we would eat what was locally available, technological progress follows paths that are open to us through circumstance.  If you live on a small island chain made up of flat, sandy land, you’re unlikely to develop extensive mining knowledge instead of fishing, for example.

Gravity…

If we imagine a planet in another solar system that has 1.6g, for example, and no natural satellites, it’s easy to understand why that planet’s inhabitants may not turn their attention to space travel.  Escaping the gravitational pull of the planet would be impossible without using something like nuclear pulse propulsion.  Not being able to put satellites in orbit would impact everything from weather forecasting to GPS networks.  Without a moon, there would be no stepping stone to the rest of space either.

So how does this relate to ULTD?

Although this hypothetical civilisation may not develop space tech as we understand it, it may advance down a different path.  Perhaps they develop fusion, or tech that allows them to explore oceans under greater pressure.  Maybe they develop advanced nanotech or genetic modification.  

So, whilst I believe there are limits to what technology can be developed, referring to it as universal limits our imagination, and may result in us giving up too easily.  

Can lessons from this be applied to FI?

I’m glad you asked.  Yes, they can.  

In some ways, the rocket equation and the impact of gravity are similar to working out what you need to achieve for financial independence.  The FIRE formula is so simple that I think it makes people doubt its validity.

25 x desired annual spending/cost of living.

That’s the number you need to hit in your investment pot for a retirement that will, in roughly 95% of scenarios, work.  

The biggest issue here, in my experience, is that people rarely know what they actually spend.  If your spending is more, you need more invested, but as a higher spender, you have less to invest from your salary each month than, well, if you spent less.  So it becomes a balancing act between how quickly you want to retire and what standard of living you want now and in the future.

Letters to Oana & Looking Back

It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to update these two projects but stay tuned for updates soon.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Death’s End by Cixin Liu (audible).

Watching: nothing at the moment…

I’m almost done with the third book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (what some people refer to as the Three-Body Problem series).  It’s my third time going through the audiobooks and I’ve enjoyed them just as much as the first two times. 

My favourite book is the second one; The Dark Forest, and I can’t wait to see what Tencent and Netflix do with their respective adaptations for television.  The second book has a couple of events that are just mindblowing and I really hope they do them justice.

In a few days, the second book in the Good Boys series by Jeremy Robinson will be released.  I’ll be downloading that as soon as I can.

Website Stuff

It’s getting to that time of year when I need to pay to renew my domain and plan with my site host.  I will probably never make money from this blog but I would like to reduce what it costs me to run.  There are a couple of ways you can help and it will not cost you anything.

Sharing

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Donations

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Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £15,100.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £92,865.67.

Fuck It Fund: £2,230.27.

Pensions: £86,293.43.

Residential Property Value: £237,447.00. 

Total Assets: £433,936.37.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £185,383.74. 

Total Debts: £185,383.74.

Total Wealth: £248,552.63.

The only noteworthy change is that the valuation held by our mortgage lender for our property has been updated.  I don’t think the valuation is entirely accurate based on how properties are selling in this area, and I think it’s a little on the high side.  That being said, it’s how I’ve always recorded the value in this blog so I’m going to stick with it.  Ultimately, the valuation is irrelevant unless we decide to sell.  

My total non-property investment value is almost at £200k, which is a huge milestone to hit.  

Lego and Gousto

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had separate conversations that did not seem to be linked, but the more I’ve thought about it the more connections I’ve drawn.  I’m thinking about Lego, the building block toy, and Gousto, a food delivery service providing ingredients and recipes.

Both companies provide a similar service in that they sell components alongside the instructions to turn those separate components into a whole object.  For Lego, this is supplying pieces of plastic that are combined to form a replica of something, be it the Titanic or a ship from Star Wars.  

It’s not just the raw materials…

When I was a kid, it seemed that Lego was an accessible toy that was not overly expensive but it seems as though it’s become a luxury item in recent years.  I’ve often wondered what the markup is on each set because the cost of producing each piece of plastic must be very low.  However, when you buy a set from Lego you are not just purchasing the materials, you are also paying for the intellectual property in the form of the design.  You are paying for the time and effort that went into designing the set, and the instructions, and if it’s a licensed set from Marvel, DC, Fortnite etc, then you are probably paying for that as well.

For Gousto it’s a similar concept.  The raw ingredients are almost certainly going to be cheaper if you source them yourself, but you are not paying just for the items of food.  You are paying for the time and effort that went into making the recipe, and for the recipe card which you can then use again.  In respect of the food, because it is all portioned out you are paying for that service as well.  For example, you might not use rice wine regularly and buying a bottle may cost a few pounds.  The recipe may only call for a splash of this ingredient, and buying a whole bottle could be wasteful.  As Gousto provide the ingredients already measured out, you are not experiencing that wastage.

The Comparison

So, what I’m going to do is a bit of in-the-moment research.  I’m going to pick five recipes from Gousto and then work out the cost of buying those ingredients from Tesco (it’s our closest supermarket).  To make life simpler, I’m going to try and use recipes that use mostly the same ingredients as it will make buying in bulk easier.  I’ll then compare this to the standard cost of a five-meal box for two people.  My prediction is that buying the food will be cheaper, but there are intangible factors you can’t put a price on such as being given a tried and tested recipe and having the food delivered to your door.  

A typical Gousto box for two people, with five meals, comes in at roughly £50 including delivery.  There are some factors which will cause the price to fluctuate, like selecting premium recipes.  £50 is a decent benchmark to use though.

Typical Gousto Box

I’m going to use the following five recipes, which I’ve tried to group as they use similar ingredients:

• Garlic mushroom and sage gnocchi
• All in one chicken breast and gnocchi cacio e pepe
• Mushroom pasta bake with cheesy truffle breadcrumbs
• Brazilian-style black beans with zesty lime chicken
• Warming chicken bhuna with rice and naan

Total Ingredients needed (not including seasoning, herbs, spices), with prices, assuming bought from Tesco are below.  Note, that some of the amounts of specific to the recipes and can’t always be purchased exactly in those amounts.  I’ve tried to align as closely as possible…

Shopping List

Gnocchi 700g x 2 (£3.70)

Chestnut mushrooms 330g (£2.20)

Cheddar cheese 120g (£2.50)

Pine kernels 30g (£1.90)

Roasted garlic paste 15g (£1)

Chicken breast 750g (£6.25)

Tomato x 2 (£1)

Soft cheese 100g (£2)

Grated Italian hard cheese 30g (£1)

Chicken stock x 3 (£2)

Pasta 200g (75p)

Flat white mushrooms 150g (£1.25)

Panko breadcrumbs 30g (£1)

Garlic (£1)

Black beans 390g (49p)

Rice 260g (50p)

Lime (24p)

Brown onion x 2 (£1)

Chipotle paste (£1.80)

Red chilli (70p)

Spring onion (65p)

Cherry tomatoes (£1)

Garlic naan x 2 (£1.85)

In total, I make that £35.78, but it doesn’t include all the things you have to buy periodically for your cupboard, like salt, pepper, dried herbs, oils, vinegars, and so on.  I’m surprised that the difference in cost is not bigger, and it makes me wonder what sort of markup the supermarkets are placing on certain items, and just what sort of deal Gousto get from their suppliers.  I think Gousto probably make a decent saving on their vegetables by sourcing ones that are rejected by supermarkets, and I have to say that the quality of some of the fresh veg we get from them is poor.

The quality of the veg is one of the major reasons why we’ve just binned off our subscription from next week.  The recipes are generally great, and how the various dried ingredients are organised is helpful.  It’s just that at least half the time we have to replace some of the veg with stuff we got from the shop.   

I think these services are a very good idea, but more care needs to be taken when it comes to quality control.

Competition

No one guessed correctly from last week, and I’m not going to give the answer as I may return to it in future.  If you think you know the answer, please leave a comment.

Here is a reminder…

Below is an image made up of two pictures; one from Four Lions and one from Game of Thrones.  There is a link between the two and it’s quite obscure, but the first person to correctly guess in the comments will receive a little gift from me (if they’re comfortable telling me their address, that is).

That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, or have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment below.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my employer, nor should they be considered advice.  

If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional.  If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:

StepChange

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