Part 301: When Rage Feels Real and £5,000 Does Not

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.  

Weekly Update

The one major drawback to my walking challenge is that it’s eating up every free moment of my time. Between this and work it leaves almost no time for anything else.  I’m not complaining, really.  I’m just pointing out that if my life seems boring right now, it’s because of this walking challenge.

Last Sunday I met up with a good friend and we had a catch up over a couple of coffees.  I really don’t understand how some people are so oblivious to hygienic practices though.  In the first place we went for a drink, the waitress picked up a large mat off the floor and started moving it around.  Then, she went right back to serving.  A little later, she came to the table next to us and sprayed it with cleaning liquid, which then blew over us.  

It’s safe to say I don’t think I’ll return there for a while.  

One potential positive for the Scothern household is that Oana is progressing well with a couple of job applications.  She’s had initial interviews which she’s passed, and early next week she has final interviews for two roles.  Fingers crossed we’ll be a two income household again soon; Poppy needs her catnip after all.

Gousto

We recently signed back up to Gousto as we had an offer for two boxes at 50% off.  So, we did the smart thing and ordered enough food for four people.  We’ve been making some great meals and then saving portions for the following day.  It’s worked out at about £1.50 per person, per meal.  Not bad at all.  

This week we’ve made;

Chipotle pulled chicken with lime slaw and tomato salsa.

Vietnamese style pork with sesame broccoli and brown rice.

Honey sesame chicken with potato and green bean curry.

Later this evening, as I type this, we’ll be making pork steak with garlic mash and mustard sauce, and we still have another recipe to make for Brazilian-style black beans with lime chicken (which we’ve made before and it’s amazing).  

If anyone wants to sign up for Gousto you can use my referral code below.  You’ll get 70% off your first box, and then 25% off for the first two months.

Referral Link

Sheffield Wednesday in Crisis

The news coming from SWFC seemingly gets worse by the hour.  For those who don’t know, the club is in crisis with a very real risk of going under completely.  Wages have repeatedly not been paid on time, and there’s been an exodus of players leaving.  We are left with the absolute bare bones of a squad, and there’s serious concern about our ability to fulfill our fixtures.  A few days ago the players were reported to have refused to play in a pre-season friendly.  It’s not looking good at all.

In addition to all this we have the safety concerns over our North Stand; the one that faces the camera when we are on TV.  These safety concerns have led to the stand being closed until repair work can be completed.  If there is one stadium in the UK that you don’t want to take chances with fan safety, it’s Hillsborough.

As things stand, I’m legitimately worried the club will go out of existence in the near future, and over 150 years of history will be gone.  

I don’t hold any ill will towards the players or staff that have left, as they need to look after their future.  Even if the club survives, I think we are in for a difficult few years.

The one sliver of hope is that Barry Bannan has signed a new contract.  The man is a club legend and has had plenty of opportunities to leave and get good money elsewhere.  He’s stayed through it all though.  

Diabetes UK Step Challenge – Update

As of the end of July I completed 519,183 steps.  This leaves me with a little under 1.2 million steps to complete across August and September.  I’m on track to complete it but it’s taking a lot of hard work.  It’s not the walking, as such, that’s difficult.  It’s finding the time to complete it.  At an average speed of 4.3-4.5kmh it’s taking around three hours walking a day.  When you’re working from 9-6 and factoring in the three hours of walking, that’s 12 hours of the day done.  

If you want to stay up to date with my progress or donate to the cause, please check out my JustGiving page:

Donation Page

What I’m Doing

Listening: The Future by Naomi Alderman.

Watching: Beef (Netflix).

Reading: Mickey 7

I tried to tell Oana a bit about what The Future was about.  I’m almost done with it and it’s been boring AF.  The main issue is that the main character has absolutely zero impact on the plot.  The whole thing could have been written with her removed and it would have made no difference.  The characters are bland, and the plot just sort of happens.  The “twist” was obvious a mile away.  It’s a shame because there’s a great idea here that has been badly executed.

Beef

We finished Beef this week and I enjoyed it whilst Oana found it annoying.  The more I’ve thought about it, and let it simmer away in my mind, the more impressed I’ve become.

Beef is marketed as a dark comedy about a road rage incident spiralling out of control. But it quickly became clear that the show wasn’t really about traffic, parking lots, or even revenge. It was about everything underneath and everything inside.  In a way, it was a critique on social media, and how we present our own edited highlight reel to the outside world, whilst internally we are often hanging on by a thread.  

It’s only ten episodes long, but it explores identity, rage, connection, and collapse, all through the lens of two strangers who, despite everything, might be the only ones who truly understand each other. 

Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun) are both high-functioning and deeply miserable. Amy seemingly has everything, like a successful business, a family, and a beautiful home. Yet, she’s hollowed out by the grind of wearing a mask of a modern success story. Danny is drowning in failure and shame, desperate to prove his worth but constantly sabotaged by bad luck and worse decisions.  He is also wearing a mask; the confident, responsible, business owner, but the mask is also hanging by a thread.

Their brief road rage encounter becomes a release valve for years of pent-up frustration.  It’s like the French phrase I mentioned a while ago; “la goutte d’eau qui fait déborder le vase.” 

But it’s not just anger. It’s resentment, self-loathing, regret, and deep, unspoken pain. Beef captures those emotions with brutal honesty. The further Amy and Danny spiral, the more we realise how fragile the line is between holding it together and falling apart.

Identity and the Asian-American Experience

The show is rooted in its characters’ cultural backgrounds. I don’t know much, if anything, about the Asian-American experience, but from an outside perspective it didn’t feel false or insulting (I’d be interested to know more about whether this is accurate).  Beef uses identity as a framework to explore deeper themes such as obligation, silence, community, and alienation.

Danny carries the weight of family expectations, cultural guilt, and a crushing sense of duty. Amy, though wealthier and seemingly more assimilated, is still playing roles to meet societal expectations; entrepreneur, wife, mother, success story. Neither of them feels seen, not really. And when they do finally see each other, it’s through a lens of mutual destruction that slowly gives way to something more honest.

One of the most biting critiques in Beef is reserved for capitalism itself. Amy’s curated lifestyle and wellness brand promise calm and control, but her internal life is anything but.  It’s no coincidence that a great deal of the plot revolves around Instagram, and that idea that people can wear a mask to the outside world which conceals what is hiding beneath.  

Danny’s obsession with making money, buying land for his parents, and building a business is rooted in a toxic idea that value comes from productivity and status.  On the face of it, his quest to look after his parents is a positive and wholesome effort, but the steps he takes to get there are anything but.  

Both characters are trapped in systems that sell happiness but deliver burnout. The show asks: What if we got everything we thought we wanted, and it still wasn’t enough?  It tackles the idea that, wherever you go, there you are.  

Loneliness and the Desperate Need for Connection

As much as Beef is about conflict, it’s also about intimacy. Danny and Amy connect in the strangest way through their mutual hatred, yes, but also through their shared pain. There’s a strange comfort in having someone who sees your worst self and doesn’t flinch. Over time, their feud begins to feel like the most real thing either of them has.  This is a classic theme in many great stories, where the hero and villain almost need each other to feel complete.  What is Batman without the Joker? Or Magneto without Professor Xavier?  

The show suggests that in a hyperconnected world, where appearances dominate and honesty is rare, even an enemy can feel like a lifeline.  If you can’t find connection through love, you can find it through rage, and hatred.  Their final moments together are some of the most vulnerable and human I’ve seen on screen in a long time.

Both characters are haunted by their past actions, things they couldn’t fix, and things they never dealt with. Whether it’s Danny stealing church funds or Amy cheating on her husband, these aren’t just random acts. They’re manifestations of deep, unresolved trauma. The show doesn’t excuse these choices, but it does contextualise them.

Beef understands that unaddressed shame doesn’t just sit quietly. It poisons. It erodes. And unless it’s acknowledged, it finds new ways to express itself often destructively.

What makes this show great is that it refuses to spoon feed the way you should feel about the characters.  Too often in modern storytelling, you are told who to root for and who to rally against.  There are few stories where people appear as complex beings, who make shitty choices, who are also victims, who you are frustrated by and who are unlikable, yet you can’t turn away from them.  Amy and Danny were not cardboard cutouts or agents of the plot, they were believable, flawed people, and that’s why this show will linger in my mind for some time.

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Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £19,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £118,328.26.

Fuck It Fund: £501.54.

Pensions: £100,728.55.

Residential Property Value: £239,368.00. 

Total Assets: £477,926.35.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £177,640.47. 

Total Debts: £177,640.47.

Total Wealth: £300,285.88.

The big news here is that I’ve passed the £300k mark for my total wealth.  It’s one of those milestones which is a great psychological boost, but when you break it down there’s little difference between £299,999 and £300,000.  

One of the most surprising, and often unspoken, side effects of the Financial Independence journey is how your relationship with money quietly, subtly shifts over time. It’s not just about earning more, saving more, or investing more. It’s about what those numbers start to mean, or stop meaning, to you.

In the early days of discovering FI, every milestone feels monumental. The first £1,000 in an ISA. Hitting £10,000 in your pension. Watching compound interest do its thing for the first time. You check your net worth spreadsheet like it’s a high-stakes football match. Every hundred pounds feels like progress. Every thousand? A mini miracle.

But then something strange happens.

Fast forward a few years. You’ve been saving diligently, investing monthly, tracking your spending, and living intentionally. Suddenly, you’re glancing at your portfolio and noticing it’s up or down by £5,000 in a day and you barely blink.

That same £5,000, which once would have been life-changing as maybe a deposit on your first flat is now just a fluctuation. A blip. An inconvenient dip or a welcome bump, but nothing more.

This isn’t arrogance. It’s adaptation.

Humans are brilliant at normalising. What once felt extraordinary eventually becomes the new normal. In the FI community, that often means becoming emotionally numb to the size of the numbers you’re dealing with.

The Psychology Behind It

This phenomenon is rooted in something behavioural economists call “the diminishing marginal utility of money.” The more you have, the less additional joy or meaning each new unit brings.

Early on, a £100 saving might give you a huge dopamine hit. Ten years in, that same £100 barely registers. Your brain has adjusted its baseline not just for how much money you have, but for what you expect.

Wealth becomes numbers on a screen. The emotional weight lessens. The excitement tapers. In some cases, motivation does too.

The Double-Edged Sword of Desensitisation

On one hand, becoming less reactive to money can be a good thing. It often means you’ve reached a level of financial security where you’re no longer driven by fear or scarcity. Market crashes don’t send you into a panic. A surprise bill doesn’t derail your life. That’s freedom.

But it also carries a quiet risk: detachment.

When numbers lose meaning, you can lose perspective. You might start to dismiss amounts that could make a genuine difference in someone else’s life, or even your own, simply because they seem “small” now.

You might also find that some of the early fire, purpose, or excitement you felt around money has faded. The spreadsheet still updates, the net worth still climbs, but… so what?

Finding Meaning Beyond the Milestones

So how do you re-centre? Here are a few ideas…

Reframe the numbers. That £1,000 you wrote off as “not much” could fund someone else’s emergency. Or buy six months’ worth of groceries. Or a flight to visit family. Give money meaning again by viewing it through real-life impact, not just percentages.

Celebrate the small wins again. Just because you’ve built wealth doesn’t mean you need to skip over the small victories. They matter. They still reflect discipline, intention, and progress.

Redirect some of that desensitisation. Use it as a tool. If you no longer feel nervous about investing £10,000, maybe you’re in a place where giving £1,000 away to charity feels doable too.

Reflect on your “enough.” Has your number changed? Have your values? FI is a moving target for some but chasing bigger numbers for their own sake can become hollow.

Sometimes we all need to take a step back and just think about how far we’ve come.  I had this conversation with a good friend who is also following a FI plan.  We’ll casually talk about amounts of money that, just a few years ago, we would have believed forever out of reach.  

On a related note, this is partly why I get so frustrated with people who look at the foundations of FI and scoff, stating that it takes too long.  Well, you can either spend the next five, ten, or twenty years building a financial future, or you can continue doing what you’re doing chasing one crackpot get-rich scheme after another.  

That’s all for this week.  Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great week ahead.

Please remember to share and subscribe, and if you have any thoughts on this post leave a comment.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, 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

MoneyHelper

Biolink 

You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:

bio.link/davidscothern.