Part 303: Sharks, Beards, Nukes, and Sauce

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.  This week, I discuss everything in the title, and the true cost of a holiday when you use debt to pay for it.

Weekly Update

I’ve been exhausted all week as my walking challenge is starting to grind me down, but that’s why it’s called a challenge.  Between working and walking, I’ve not had much time for other stuff.  Oana and I have done a few nighttime walks around Kelham Island, where we’ve had conversations with a few other residents.  There seems to be a real sense of community growing in Kelham, and it’s great to experience.  This community, and all the bars, restaurants, cafes, museums, and galleries, are all part of the reason why it was ranked in the top 51 places to live in the world.  Yes, not just the UK, but the whole world.  

Doing our part…

It was our turn to water the plants on one of the bridges leading into Kelham, and it was, as always, hard work and fun.  We’ve got a good routine going on with it, though.  I cast the flexitub into the river and then pull it up over the fence on the bridge, and use the water to fill the watering can that Oana uses on the plants.  It takes us roughly an hour as we make sure each plant gets a good amount of water.  After pulling up many buckets of water from the river, it feels like a good workout.  

Last time we did this, the bars were all busy and we had quite an audience.  This time, it was a bit more chill, although I still had a few people ask me what I was doing.  Whilst we were doing this, we saw a young woman walking a small dog off its lead.  It was some sort of terrier, and it was so old, and was happily, and very slowly, waddling down the road.  It was so cute that even the most cold-hearted person would have to stop and smile.

Neighbourhood animals…

Within Kelham, there are lots of dogs and cats, and over time, we’ve been introduced to most of them to the point we know their names and ages better than we do their owners. 

There’s one cat in particular that we’ve grown attached to.  I first spotted her a few years ago and thought she might be a stray, but then one time I saw her run into one of the houses.  Over time, we got to speaking with her owner and found out the cat is called Rosie.  She’s very vocal and always comes running over to us when she sees us.  She’s never let me pet her, which is fine, but on Saturday, when I saw her, I slowly reached down to her and she jumped up on her back legs to rub her face on my hand.  Then, she let me give her head scratches.  Cats are our favourite animal, and I’m so happy that Rosie has decided she can trust me now.

On Saturday, we went for some breakfast in town, and I identified as a person who does not have diabetes and ordered a stack of six pancakes with bacon, maple syrup, and raspberries.  It was amazing.  

This was a little celebration to account for the fact that Oana has been offered a job, and she starts in a couple of weeks.  It’s a job she had set her heart on, and it ticks all the boxes she had; home working, part-time, and a decent wage, even adjusted for the part-time hours.  The full-time salary was such that this part-time wage will almost be as much as her last full-time role, after tax and whatnot. 

Sauces

Ok, so we need to get a few things clear: there are rules when it comes to sauces, and pretending otherwise is pure chaos. Some foods have a natural partner, and straying from that path is culinary heresy.

Brown sauce is the king

Take the bacon or sausage sandwich. By default, that’s brown sauce territory. It’s the standard, the law, the tradition. If you’re desperate or the cupboard is bare, ketchup can be tolerated, but only then. Anything else is an abomination.  Also, when I say brown sauce, I’m talking about HP.  All other brown sauces are nasty.

Moving on to the sacred pork pie. Here, the rules are even stricter: brown sauce only. If you’re feeling fancy or running low, pickle can step in as a worthy substitute. But ketchup? Absolutely not. Salad cream? That’s a crime against humanity. Don’t even think about it.  How would one even look at a pork pie and think “this needs salad cream”. 

Chips (or fries, if you insist) are more flexible, but still not a free-for-all. What you dip them in depends on what else is on your plate. Burger and fries? Ketchup, brown sauce, mayo, and even mustard are all fair game. Chips alongside a salad sandwich? That’s where salad cream earns its keep. But let’s be clear: there’s still a line.  If you’re putting ketchup on poutine, for example, you need to fired out of a cannon into the sun.

Ketchup on pasta?

And then we get to pasta. If you’re the sort of person who smothers spaghetti with ketchup, then you probably also have a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign in your kitchen, and frankly, your taste buds aren’t just poor, they’ve abandoned their fucking post. 

In short: sauces matter. They’re not random, they’re ritual. Stick to the code, and life tastes better. Break the code, and you’re on your own.

Diabetes UK Step Challenge – Update

I’m still on track, even though it feels like I’m sometimes struggling to maintain the pace.  I need a few good days where I smash the daily required target so that I can bring the daily target down.  I’d love to go into the last couple of weeks where I only need to complete 10k steps or so each day, rather than almost 20k now.  

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

What I’m Doing

Listening: How To Win The Premier League by Ian Graham..

Watching: Breaking Bad (Netflix).

Reading: Mickey 7

Beards, Sharks, and Fridges: Television’s Turning Points

When we were watching Breaking Bad earlier this week, there was a flashback scene to Walter White with his hair and clean-shaven look.  It’s a huge departure from the classic Heisenberg look with the shaved head and goatee.  It got me thinking about the phrase “growing the beard” that describes how shows can improve with a little tweak here or there.  This then led me down a line of thought about language, television, and storytelling in general.

Television has its own secret language for when shows take a turn, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Over the years, three phrases have stood out: “growing the beard,”, which I mentioned earlier, but also “jumping the shark,” and “nuking the fridge.” They’ve become cultural shorthand for the rise and fall of long-running series.

Growing the Beard

This one’s the good news. A show that “grows the beard” finally hits its stride, often literally marked by a character sprouting facial hair. The term comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Commander Riker’s beard turned up just as the series grew in confidence and left its awkward first year behind.  I’m not saying the show was better because he grew the beard.  It just so happened to be a visual prompt of the time when the show was poor and when it was great.

It’s not just Riker. Deep Space Nine took off once Sisko shaved his head and grew a beard, matching the show’s shift into darker, more ambitious storytelling. And, obviously, Breaking Bad: Walter White’s goatee wasn’t just a style choice; it became the symbol of his transformation into Heisenberg. In each case, the beard signalled maturity, authority, and a leap in quality.  You can see a silhouette of a man with a goatee and a pork pie hat, and you know who it is.

Jumping the Shark

The flip side is “jumping the shark,” which means the moment a show runs out of ideas and starts flailing for attention. The phrase comes from Happy Days, when Fonzie, leather jacket and all, literally jumps over a shark on water skis. It was supposed to be exciting, but instead it became a symbol of desperation.

Since then, plenty of shows have had their shark-jumping moment. The Simpsons is often accused of it, with celebrity guest stars and increasingly outlandish plots overshadowing the clever writing of its earlier years.  One episode that a lot of Simpsons fans mark as the “jumping the shark” moment is The Principal and The Pauper, where the *real* Seymour Skinner returns. The Walking Dead is another example, piling on cliffhangers and recycled villain arcs until the original sense of danger and loss got lost in the noise.

Nuking the Fridge

A more recent entry in TV slang is “nuking the fridge.” It comes from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where Indy survives a nuclear explosion by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator. It was absurd, even by Indiana Jones standards, and fans instantly latched onto it.  I happened to see this at the cinema, and I facepalmed so hard at this scene that I had a headache for days.

In TV terms, it’s used when a show breaks its own logic beyond repair. Scrubs tried to reinvent itself in season nine with a new setting and cast and it never worked. Heroes is another case: the more it tried to outdo itself with bigger powers and tangled timelines, the more it lost the grounded charm that made season one so good.

Marvel is going down this route now with each film involving “the end of the multiverse” stories and consequences, when in the past, many of the strongest films have had much lower stakes.  The original Iron Man film was a very personal story of betrayal.  The first Black Panther, Spider-Man, and Captain America: Civil War all had much more grounded threats and consequences.  When everything becomes an “end of the multiverse” threat, it starts to lose meaning.    

How TV Shapes the Way We Talk

What’s fascinating about these phrases is how they’ve escaped the world of television. Fans coined them as inside jokes, but they’re now part of everyday speech. People say a brand “jumped the shark” when their identity changes and becomes unrecognisable.  A business can “grow the beard” when it finally finds its purpose.

It shows how television doesn’t just entertain us.  It can feed our language. Just like Shakespeare slipped new words and metaphors into English, modern TV keeps giving us ready-made ways to describe success, decline, and reinvention. These phrases survive because they capture something universal, in a way that’s funny, sharp, and instantly recognisable.

And that’s why we keep using them. They aren’t just about TV shows; they’re about how we make sense of change in the world around us.  When you start to think about it, there are many examples of phrases from TV that have entered popular language.  For example;

“D’oh” – Homer Simpson

“I love it when a plan comes together.” – The A-Team

“How you doin’?” – Joey

“Resistance is futile.” – The Borg

“I’m the one who knocks.” – Walter White

In addition to these lines of dialogue, there are many other phrases that, when you go down the rabbit hole, were founded or popularised from television, or television adaptations of books.  Phrases like “Catch-22”, “soap opera”, “cliffhanger”, or “big brother”.

If you are still with me at this point, thank you.  I could talk about this stuff for hours and I’ve not even touched on the idea of Villain Decay.  Anyway, let me know what you think in the comments.

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Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £20,500.000.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £118,248.69.

Fuck It Fund: £0.00.

Pensions: £101,090.64.

Residential Property Value: £239,368.00. 

Total Assets: £479,207.33.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £177,640.47. 

Total Debts: £177,640.47.

Total Wealth: £301,566.86.

It’s nice to see my total wealth value pop back above £300k.  I withdrew the funds in my Fuck It Fund because I had a message stating the interest rate on that savings pot was being reduced again.  It will be moving to a level so low it’s not even worth having money in there.  I moved some things around and dropped it into my Premium Bonds, where it will stay until the ISA window reopens.

I appreciate that, by the numbers, having money in a cash savings pot will earn interest, and Premium Bonds might not return anything.  However, Premium Bonds are easy access and quite safe as a means to store cash for future use.  Yes, I don’t get a set amount of interest, but there’s a small chance of winning a big prize.  I think it’s worth taking that risk.

How Not To Pay For A Holiday

Whenever we go on holiday, the payment goes on a credit card because of the extra protection and the reward points we earn.  However, we always pay it off before we start being charged interest.  If you can’t afford a holiday without having to use a credit card or loan, on which you will pay interest, I don’t think you should do it.  However, if you decide to book the holiday anyway, you should at least know what you are signing up for.

I did some Google-fu to look at a fairly typical week away in Spain for two adults.  Assuming mid-range flights, hotels, spending money, and so on.  The figure I was getting back, all in, was around £2,500.  The actual amounts don’t really matter as it’s the principle that’s important here.

You put that holiday on a credit card with a rate of 24.9% (according to a brief search, this seems to be a typical rate).  This is your first mistake.

Your second mistake is deciding to pay just the minimum payment.  Your holiday no longer costs £2,500.

Assuming the minimum payment is 3% of the balance, or £5, whichever is greater, it would take over 20 years to pay the debt pack.  In addition to the £2,500 debt, you would pay an additional £3,776 interest.  

It’s Madness

Assume for a moment that, instead of booking that holiday, you commit to investing £75 per month (3% of £2,500).  You achieve 6% growth over the 23 years and 4 months it would have taken to repay the credit card above.  In the end, you’d have just over £45,600.  

Like I said, it’s madness.  

As always, I’m not actually telling you what to do.  How you live your life is your business.  What I would like everyone to do is consider their actions.  I would like people to engage in more mindful spending, where they understand that debt can be a ball and chain you drag through life for years, if not decades.  

I appreciate it’s not this simple, but if most people were given the choice between a week away in Spain, or £45k in 23 years, I would hope most people would realise that the latter is the better choice.

You may be asking, Why are you bringing this up now, David, you paragon of financial wisdom?  Well, I was chatting with an acquaintance who likes to book holidays with debt because “you only live once”.  

I mean, I get it.  I understand wanting to maximise one’s time on Earth, but there’s a balance.  Taking on debt for a once-in-a-lifetime trip that you have a defined plan to pay back is one thing.  Routinely taking on debt to fund a holiday each year is a recipe for disaster.

Repeating the mistake…

In the example above, if that person repeats their mistake the following year, and they year after that, they’ll be left with thousands more in debt.  Let’s assume at that point they do “the sensible thing” and consolidate their debts into “one manageable monthly payment” *excuse me whilst I scrub my hands clean after typing that out*.

This person decides not to borrow just £7.5K to repay their three prior holidays.  They decide to borrow £10k so they can have another holiday.  Well, a loan is a slightly better option than a credit card, just from the APR perspective, but it’s still not great.  I’ve taken the following from Halifax’s website:

“You could borrow £10000 over 48 months with 48 monthly repayments of £235.86. Total amount repayable will be £11321.28. Representative 6.4% APR, annual interest rate (fixed) 6.22%.”

If you were, instead, investing £235.86 per month for four years at 6% growth, you’d have £12,759; enough for five holidays at £2.5k each instead of the four you funded with debt.  

Money is a game, and like any game, it has rules.  If you master the rules, you will find your financial life much easier to navigate.

Well, that’s all for this week.  I hope you enjoyed this post, and please remember to like, comment, share, and subscribe.  

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

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