Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week… well, this image sums it up best:
Weekly Update
The first full week of the new year is complete, and we have more insanity from the US to deal with, which I’ll come to later. The weather in Sheffield hasn’t been too bad, with only light snow for us. I can’t remember the last time we had proper snow; the sort that’s half a meter deep at least. I think it might be as far back as 2010. One downside to all the cold, wet weather is that we’ve not been able to get any bike rides in.
Although we’ve not been able to go on any rides, we have enjoyed some nighttime walks around our neighbourhood:
On Wednesday, I had an appointment to donate blood. It’s the first time in a few years I’ve been able to do so due to my various health issues. I may be able to donate platelets, and I’m just waiting to hear back from them. If you can donate blood, do it.
On Monday, I’ll be attending my Gran’s funeral and wake. It’s going to be a sad start to a busy week, but hopefully we’ll give my Gran a good send-off.
2026 Goals Update
I’m losing weight, which is good. I’m 115.7kg, and three months ago I was 120.8kg. That’s decent progress, I think. I’m aiming for 100kg by the end of the year, so just under 4kg every three months. Weight loss is always easiest at the start, though.
With my writing goal, I’m just about there or thereabouts with my weekly 3,500 word target. There’s been a lot draining my mental energy lately with the upcoming new job and the funeral next week.
I can’t invest anything in my ISA until the new tax year starts, but I plan to smash that goal as soon as I’m able.
Civilization and FI
I’ve been thinking about time again. Not in the abstract, philosophical way, but in that slightly nerdy, why is this suddenly obvious now I’m older way. And weirdly, the thing that finally snapped it into focus wasn’t a finance book or a chart. It was the game Civilization IV.
Civilization IV was always my favourite, with the expansion packs Warlords and Beyond the Sword. Not because it was flashy, but because it was brutally honest about constraints. You get 750 turns in Epic mode. That’s it. No extensions. No “one more turn” forever. Whatever you’re going to build, whatever strategy you’re going to commit to, has to exist inside that fixed window of time.
And one of the most unforgiving victory conditions in the game is the cultural victory.
To win culturally, you don’t just stumble into it at turn 600 and hope for the best. You have to lay the foundations early. Wonders. Great Artists. Cultural buildings. Decisions made in the opening turns that don’t look impressive at the time but compound relentlessly as the game goes on.
Miss that early window and the game doesn’t end, but it gets harder. You can pivot later. You can try to brute-force it. But you’ll always feel like you’re swimming upstream, desperately trying to recreate decades of cultural momentum in a fraction of the remaining turns.
And at some point, while replaying this in my head, it hit me that this is FI. Exactly this.
Time is the 750 turns. Compound growth is culture per turn. And early investing is building wonders before anyone else realises how powerful they are.
In Civ IV, the first 100 turns often feel inconsequential. You’re not winning anything. You’re placing cities, building infrastructure, and spamming workers and scouts. You’re making choices that don’t pay off immediately. Meanwhile, the AI is off conquering neighbours and racking up shiny-looking numbers.
Sound familiar?
That’s the FI phase where you’re investing a few hundred quid a month and wondering why nothing seems to be happening. The graph barely moves. The effort feels disproportionate to the reward. This is where people quit, not because the strategy is wrong, but because the feedback loop is terrible.
But here’s the thing Civ IV teaches mercilessly: Culture snowballs.
Every early wonder doesn’t just add culture once; it adds it every single turn thereafter. A Great Artist used early doesn’t just bump a city, it changes the entire trajectory of the game. By turn 400, the cities that committed early are untouchable. You’re not scrambling anymore. You’re coasting. The win condition is basically locked in; you’re just letting the clock run. You just have to be patient and wait for the growth.
That’s exactly how early investing works.
Someone who invests heavily in their 20s and early 30s doesn’t win FI because they’re cleverer later on. They win because money they invested years ago has been quietly generating returns the entire time. By the time most people are panicking about optimisation, the early starter is in “defend the lead” mode.
They’re not sprinting anymore, they are simply coasting.
Now compare that to someone who only pivots to FI later, say, mid-40s or 50s. This is the Civ player who suddenly decides at turn 500 that they’re going cultural. It’s not impossible. But it’s stressful. You’re rushing wonders. You’re burning Great Artists just to keep up. Every decision feels urgent because time is no longer on your side.
That’s late investing, and whilst you can still win, you’re fighting the clock instead of working with it.
And this is where a lot of financial advice goes wrong, because it pretends all starts are equal. They aren’t. Time is unfair. Ruthlessly so. Two people can invest the same total amount, but the one who invested earlier will almost always finish miles ahead not because they worked harder, but because their “culture per turn” was compounding for longer.
That doesn’t mean late starters are doomed. Civ IV doesn’t end at turn 300 just because you didn’t plan perfectly. It means you have to play a different game. More intensity. Fewer mistakes. Less room for error. The same is true in FI.
But here’s the part that really matters: Early investing doesn’t feel powerful when it matters most.
Just like early culture doesn’t look impressive on turn 50, early investments don’t look life-changing in year three. That’s why people delay. That’s why they wait for a better salary, a clearer plan, more certainty. In Civ terms, they keep saying “I’ll build wonders later”.
Later is always more expensive.
FI progress isn’t about brilliance. It’s about duration. It’s about deciding early what kind of victory you’re aiming for and quietly laying foundations while everyone else is chasing short-term wins.
You don’t need to min-max every turn. You just need to start placing the buildings that generate value over time and then not tear them down in a panic.
Once compound growth takes over, once your culture per turn is doing the heavy lifting, the game changes. Progress accelerates not because you got smarter, but because you gave the system enough time to work.
And the most sobering lesson Civ IV teaches is this: You can’t add more turns. You can only decide what to do with the ones you have left.
That’s why time is the biggest driver of FI. Not income. Not returns. Not optimisation theatre. Time.
Start early, build foundations, let it compound, and one day you’ll look up and realise the win condition was set hundreds of turns ago and you just had to stay in the game long enough to see it.
What I’m Doing
Listening: Callsign: Tripleshot – Chess Team Book 3.5: by Jeremy Robinson, Edward Talbot, David Wood, and David McAfee.
Watching: His and Hers (Netflix).
Reading: nothing at the moment.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £127,808.69.
Fuck It Fund: £1.61.
Pensions: £113,110.84.
Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.
Total Assets: £507,351.14.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83.
Total Debts: £174,692.83.
Total Wealth: £332,658.31.
“It is a gift…”
I keep coming back to this idea that the United States is the home of freedom, the greatest nation on Earth, that becoming American is some sort of moral upgrade, a gift (according to Ted Cruz), and every time I do, my brain just… crashes. Like a computer trying to process a file that’s obviously corrupted. I’m not even angry at first. I’m confused. Deeply, genuinely confused. What information are these people working with?
If this is freedom, it’s a very specific, conditional, liability-heavy version of it. Freedom to do what, exactly? Freedom to own weapons powerful enough to make schoolchildren practise lockdown drills as a normal part of childhood? Freedom to avoid calling an ambulance because it might bankrupt you? Freedom to work yourself into the ground because your healthcare is stapled to your employer like a hostage note?
Somehow, while all of this is happening, the mythology persists. Louder than ever. Flags everywhere. Chest-thumping declarations that America is the beacon, the example, the gold standard. Compared to what?
Look at gun violence alone, and just sit with it for a second before waffling on about constitutional amendments. Tens of thousands of deaths every year. A drumbeat of mass shootings so regular they barely interrupt the news cycle. This isn’t normal anywhere else. It just isn’t. Countries like Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia made different choices and moved on with their lives. The US didn’t. It decided this was the acceptable cost of freedom. Which tells you something very uncomfortable about what, and who, that freedom is actually for.
Then there’s healthcare, which feels like the cruelest joke in the whole performance. The US spends more per person than any country on Earth, according to the OECD. More than Denmark, more than Germany, more than France; all countries where healthcare is universal, boring, and largely free at the point of use. And yet Americans die younger, go untreated more often, and live with the constant background anxiety that getting sick might destroy their finances. This is not freedom.
Education follows the same pattern. In the so-called greatest country on Earth, getting an education often means signing up for decades of debt before your adult life has even begun. Student loan balances in the trillions. People delay having children and buying homes, not because they’re lazy, but because the system kneecaps them at the starting line. Meanwhile Finland quietly educates its population for free and tops international rankings.
And then we’re told this is the land of opportunity. Which is fascinating, because the data shows staggering inequality. A tiny fraction of people hold an obscene share of the wealth while tens of millions live one missed paycheque away from disaster. This is not a bug; it’s a feature of the system; it’s policy.
Countries like Norway made a different choice: tax wealth, invest collectively, reduce risk for ordinary people. The US chose to worship billionaires and tell everyone else to manifest harder.
Maybe you could still cling to the myth if the US behaved like a responsible adult on the world stage. If it genuinely respected sovereignty, international law, and democratic norms. Except then you have Donald Trump openly saying that his own morality is the only thing that limits his power. Not laws. Not treaties. Just him. His vibes. His internal compass. That is not reassurance. That is a flashing red warning light.
At the same time, senior US figures are floating the idea of annexing Greenland like it’s a strategic real-estate opportunity. Not because Greenland wants it. Not because Denmark is offering. But because the US “needs” it. Strategic value. Location. Resources. It’s imperialism showing its teeth and then acting surprised when Europeans recoil.
And then there’s Venezuela, where US leaders have stopped even pretending. Yes, they want influence. Yes, they want control. Yes, they want the oil. And they’re saying it out loud now, as if this is just how the world works. As if this isn’t exactly the behaviour the US claims to oppose when anyone else does it.
Imagine if Russia or China spoke this way. If their leaders said international law didn’t apply, that their own morality was the only check on power, that neighbouring territories were “needed”, that foreign resources were there to be “run” for their benefit. The outrage would be immediate and justified. But when the US does it, it’s reframed as leadership, strength, and realism.
This is where the idea of America as the home of freedom completely collapses under its own weight. Freedom isn’t forcing people to accept constant risk as normal. Freedom isn’t telling citizens they’re lucky while denying them basic security. Freedom isn’t exporting democracy at gunpoint or treating sovereignty like a suggestion.
Real freedom looks boring. It looks like not worrying about being shot. Not worrying about getting sick. Not worrying about debt before you’ve lived. Not worrying that your leader’s personal moral mood might dictate foreign policy this week.
The truly great countries don’t shout about greatness. They don’t need to. They just quietly produce better outcomes: longer lives, safer streets, healthier people, higher trust. They don’t wrap failure in flags and call it destiny.
So when someone says the US is the greatest nation on Earth, I’m left staring into the middle distance wondering how powerful a story has to be to override this much evidence. How loud a myth has to shout to drown out the data, the deaths, the debt, the dysfunction.
If this is freedom, it’s a fragile, conditional freedom, where the population is one medical bill, one bullet, one bad boss, one bad leader away from collapse.
Calling that a gift doesn’t make it one. Furthermore, believing that becoming American is a gift is just wrong and unjustifiable when the facts are considered. You can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.
I thought I was done. I genuinely thought I’d emptied my head of it all; the mythology, the slogans, the endless insistence that the United States is the home of freedom, the greatest nation on Earth, a gift to anyone lucky enough to be let in. I thought I’d said my piece. Closed the tab. Moved on.
And then I saw the story about the ICE agent.
And something in my brain just… snapped back open.
Because of course it happened. Of course it did. A federal agent shoots a woman during an enforcement operation. A woman who wasn’t storming a building, wasn’t armed to the teeth, wasn’t threatening democracy, and was simply existing in proximity to the machinery of the state. And immediately the language kicks in. Self-defence. Protocol. Split-second decision. The same vocabulary that always appears, pre-loaded, ready to launder violence into procedure.
And this is meant to sit alongside the claim that America is the land of liberty. That this is what freedom looks like. It’s at this point that the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Because freedom, apparently, means living in a country where the state can kill you and then argue about the optics. Where accountability is optional, depending on which badge someone was wearing. Where the default response is not grief or reflection, but narrative control. Get ahead of it. Frame it. Move on.
And if you point this out, if you even hesitate, if you say “hang on, this doesn’t feel like freedom”, you already know what comes next.
Why do you hate America? If you don’t like it, leave. Every country has problems. And so on, and so on.
That’s the part that really gets me. I don’t hate America. I hate the lie. I hate the lie because it gets people killed, quietly, routinely, and bureaucratically. I hate the lie because it’s used to excuse everything from domestic brutality to international bullying.
All this has happened before, where the state turned its machinery and bureaucracy against its own people. Where whole sections of the population were rounded up, blamed, persecuted, and killed.
While all this is happening at home, the same mindset is being projected outward. Leaders openly saying that international law doesn’t really bind them. That their own morality is the final check on power. Not treaties. Not norms. Not shared rules. Just vibes and conviction.
Again, all of this has happened before. The old Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Norway; they all know what it’s like to have another country come in and take over because a tyrant thought he knew better.
That is not freedom. That is power unrestrained by humility.
And then, as if on cue, you get talk of annexing Greenland. Not because the people who live there want it. Not because it’s being offered. But because it’s useful. Strategic. Valuable. Convenient. The same logic that’s been used by empires forever, dusted off and presented as realism. When people recoil, they’re told they’re overreacting. Too sensitive. Too European about it.
And then Venezuela. And suddenly the quiet part isn’t quiet anymore. Resources. Control. Influence. Oil. It’s all said plainly now.
And still we’re told this is the greatest nation on Earth. That this is freedom in its highest form.
I keep thinking about how aggressively this idea has to be defended. How loudly it has to be repeated. How hostile people get when it’s questioned. Truly successful systems don’t behave like this. They don’t need constant affirmation. They don’t panic when compared to others. They don’t treat scrutiny as an attack.
Because if America were genuinely the freest country on Earth, it wouldn’t need to explain away mass shootings as unavoidable. It wouldn’t need to normalise citizens being killed by agents of the state. It wouldn’t need to tell people they’re lucky while denying them healthcare, saddling them with debt, and demanding gratitude for survival.
If this is the greatest nation on Earth, then the bar has been buried somewhere deep underground.
Because real freedom would look boring. It would look safe. It would look like not being afraid of the people who are meant to protect you. It would look like accountability that doesn’t require protests. It would look like a country confident enough to hear criticism without reaching for a flag. It would not look like their leaders are using 1984 as a guidebook, rather than a cautionary tale.
Instead, we get a myth that demands constant belief and punishes doubt. And the longer I watch it unfold, the clearer it becomes: this isn’t a nation secure in its freedom. It’s a nation terrified of what happens if the story stops working.
And you know what, I bet there will be some people who read this and think that Renee Good deserved to be killed, because they believe almost hitting someone with your car is on a par with being shot in the face at point-blank range. These people need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and really think about the value they put on human life.
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:
Biolink
You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:
bio.link/davidscothern.