Part 328: Lifetime Earnings

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.  

Weekly Update

I had a face-to-face meeting with my new colleagues on Friday.  Although I’m self-employed, it is through a firm which has a few advisors working under it.  We met in Rugby, which is a little over 100km from Sheffield, but still involves three trains because our rail network is still catching up with the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.  

It was a good day meeting my new teammates.  We had a good laugh and some nice food.  It was a long day, though, as I had to wake at 6am to get ready to catch a train from Sheffield just after 730am, to make it to Rugby for the 10am start time.  Seriously, the rail network in the UK sucks.

The journey back threatened to get off to a bad start.  I had 12 minutes to change from train 1 to train 2 as it stood, but my first train was delayed by 20 minutes, meaning I would miss the connection.  Fortunately, there was a helpful guy in the ticket office who sorted me out with a new ticket free of charge, where I only had to get one train to Birmingham and then another to Sheffield.

Apart from working this week and getting used to new systems and processes, the week has flown by yet again with nothing much of note.

Cheese Wheel Maths a.k.a. How Dairy

Ah, Reddit, the place you can always depend on to provide fake totally legit stories of the lives of everyday people.  One of the most recent ones I’ve stumbled across is this beauty below:

So, this guy is confused that his girlfriend left him because he bought a whole wheel of 21-year-aged cheddar.  Now, he states in the post that it’s a 140lb wheel, for which he paid $18,500.  He then states he can cut it into 200g wedges and sell each for $60.  According to his maths, he could make $38,000.

Ok, this is one of those things where I need a deep breath and a good amount of coffee.

Mistake #1: confusing imperial and metric.  140lb is 63,502.9g.  For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say 63,500g.  

Mistake #2: 63,500/200 = 317.5 wedges of cheddar.  Let’s be generous and call it 318.  

Mistake #3: 318 wedges at $60 = $19,080

All that for $580 “profit”.

Mistake #4: Assuming that anyone would pay $60 for a wedge of cheddar from someone who carried it home in the back of his truck, and who you can’t be sure stored it correctly.  

Some people buy property, some buy index funds, this lad bought a wheel and a dream.

Will it ever stop raining?

So I recently rewatched Spartacus, and I do enjoy running ideas through ChatGPT so it can put something together in the style of a Batiatus rant.  In light of the incessant rain, here is the latest offering…

Gods above, are you drunk?!

Have I not suffered enough beneath your endless downpour? Day after day you empty the heavens as though the clouds themselves have burst a bladder and cannot find relief!

Streets flood. Clothes cling. Spirits rot. Even the earth squelches in protest, yet still you rain — unrelenting, merciless, spiteful.

What more do you demand?! Blood? Coin? A formal apology for some forgotten insult delivered in a previous life?! Speak plainly, you thunderous cowards!

I ask not for drought nor miracle — only that you cease. Close the skies. Swallow your tears. 

Give us one dry hour so a man might walk without feeling personally targeted by the heavens.

End this madness! Or know this — I shake my fist at you with full conviction, soaked to the bone and furious beyond reason.

Seriously, though, this rain needs to stop.

Being an asshole is hard work…

The older I get, the more I notice how much effort some people put into being unpleasant to those they’re interacting with.  Not to friends. Not to equals. But to people in roles. The waiter. The call-centre worker. The receptionist. The doctor. The adviser. The person who happens to be standing between them and the thing they want.

There’s a strange belief that being difficult in these interactions somehow produces better outcomes. That irritation sharpens service. That impatience speeds things up. That dominance gets results.  In reality, it does the opposite.

Being an arsehole to someone whose job it is to help you requires constant work. You have to adopt a tone. Maintain a posture. Decide when to interrupt. Decide when to escalate. You’re actively managing the interaction as a contest rather than a collaboration.

And the thing people don’t seem to realise is that the other person is doing the same calculation in real time.

They’re deciding how much discretion they have. How far can they reasonably go. How much effort this interaction is worth. Whether you’re someone they want to help or someone they simply need to process.

Most roles, whether it’s customer service, healthcare, advice, or trades, contain far more human judgment than people like to admit. There are rules, yes. There are procedures. But there are also grey areas. Workarounds. Favourable interpretations. Extra explanations. A bit more patience.  None of that is unlocked by hostility.

Being rude to a worker doesn’t make them more competent. It doesn’t make the system bend in your favour. It just moves you from the mental category of “person I want to help” to “person I need to get through without incident.”  At that point, you’re no longer getting the best version of the service. You’re getting the safest one.

The same dynamic shows up in healthcare. Being aggressive with a GP, a nurse, or a consultant doesn’t make them care more. It makes them careful. It narrows the conversation. It reduces trust. You still get treatment, but you lose the softer, human edges, the reassurance, the extra explanation, the sense that you’re being seen rather than processed.  And again, it takes effort. Sustained effort.

You have to stay angry. Stay sharp. Stay ready to challenge. You can’t relax, because relaxation would undermine the performance. You leave the interaction feeling tense, unsatisfied, and usually convinced that you were somehow wronged, which conveniently justifies doing it again next time.

Decency, by contrast, is remarkably efficient.  It doesn’t mean being a doormat. You can still be firm. You can still ask questions. You can still escalate when necessary. But you do it from a position of shared reality rather than imagined combat.  You frame the problem as something to solve together, not something to win.

When you do that, people open up. They explain things properly. They flag options you didn’t know existed. They make an effort, not because they have to, but because you’ve made it easier for them to do so.

I’ve spent enough time on both sides of these interactions to be confident about this: the nicest clients, patients, and customers consistently get better outcomes. Not preferential treatment; just fuller treatment.  They get more information. More care. More thought.

The irony is that people who pride themselves on being “no-nonsense” often end up creating far more nonsense for themselves. Longer interactions. More friction. More stress. More stories about how useless everyone else is.  Being decent isn’t naive. It’s easier, and generally more rewarding.

It recognises that most systems are run by tired humans doing their best within constraints. If you make their day harder, they’ll make your outcome smaller. If you make their day easier, they’ll often stretch a little further for you.

Being an arsehole in these situations isn’t powerful. It’s inefficient.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Omega: Chess Team Book 5 by Jeremy Robinson and Kane Gilmour.

Watching: Quiz (Netflix), The Rip (Netflix), The Anniversary (Netflix).

Reading: The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko by Derek Tyler Attico. 

We finished Spartacus, and although I’ve seen it a few times before, I appreciated it even more on this viewing.  If you strip away the over-the-top fight scenes and questionable acting from some of the background cast, it’s a surprisingly emotional story.  Perhaps the biggest accomplishment is the relationship between Spartacus and fellow gladiator turned rebel, Crixus.  At first, these two hate each other, but that slowly changes over time from hate to grudging respect to true brotherhood.  What makes this impressive is that neither character really changes from who they are.  Yes, they evolve as all well-written characters should, but they are still the same character at heart.  

After finishing up Spartacus, we watched Quiz on Netflix, which is a dramatised interpretation of the Charles Ingram scandal on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

For those who don’t know, former Army officer Major Ingram was convicted of fraud when it was decided he cheated to win £1,000,000 on WWTBAM.

The alleged scheme was, in a way, genius.  They had an accomplice in the studio, as well as Ingram’s wife, and they would cough when the correct answer to a question was said aloud.  

Once you go in with this knowledge, it becomes obvious upon watching the real footage.  However, is it a case of confirmation bias?  There were over a hundred coughs in the studio during Ingram’s time in the hot seat, so there is an argument about cherry-picking the coughs that coincided with the correct answers being spoken.  Now, there’s a lot more context I’ve not gone into, but I’m probably coming down 75/25 on the side that they probably did cheat.  However, I don’t think it’s quite the slamdunk some claim it to be.  

I think their biggest mistake was not quitting while they were ahead. Had they quit at £250k, no one would probably have batted an eye at them.

If you want to know more, I’d definitely check out the show on Netflix, as it’s only a three-episode show and is entertaining enough.

We also watched a couple of good movies this week: The Rip and The Anniversary.  I knew almost nothing about these films and only watched them on the strength of their casts: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Sasha Calle, and Kyle Chandler, in The Rip, and Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler (again), Madeline Brewer, and Phoebe Dynevor, in The Anniversary.

The latest Damon/Affleck project was a tense thriller about a team of cops who stumble across a huge sum of criminal money.  I won’t say much more, but it was good fun throughout, and competently written and directed.

The Anniversary was a complete surprise to me as I had absolutely no idea what it was about.  From the title, I expected some sort of romcom or something.  I did not expect a political, dystopian thriller, which left me reeling.  A very well-made film.  

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £129,613.27.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,880.79.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £510,925.67.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,531.44. 

Total Debts: £174,531.44.

Total Wealth: £336,394.23.

Lifetime Earnings

This idea has been rattling around in my head for a while.  It was sparked by a conversation with a good friend. We were talking about work, money, and time, as we often do, and at some point, the question came up: how much have you actually earned in your life?  Well, he’d worked it out, and I hadn’t.

Not net worth. Not what you earn now. But the total value of all the work you’ve ever done.  As I said, I didn’t know the answer.  So I decided to find out.  That turned out to be more involved than I expected.

For my years at Lloyds, things were mercifully straightforward. The pension portal gives annual salary figures going back year by year, which cover the bulk of my career. There were a couple of moments where pay changed mid-year, but in most cases, rises kicked in from April, so the numbers were close enough to reality to be useful.

Everything outside of Lloyds was messier. Old jobs, student work, part-time roles, early years where income was low enough that you barely noticed it at the time. For those, I went back through my National Insurance record and worked backwards from the contributions, with ChatGPT helping to sanity-check the estimates.

It’s not exact. It can’t be. National Insurance is calculated per pay period, thresholds shift, and some work, especially while studying, barely leaves a trace. But when I lined the numbers up year by year, they broadly matched what I remember earning. Nothing jumped out as wildly wrong. Which was good enough for me.

There are also some important gaps to acknowledge. I’ve had just under nineteen years where I’ve been eligible to work full-time, once you strip out the five years spent across two stints at university. I’ve also had just under six months of unemployment, split between leaving Lloyds and joining IMH, and then leaving IMH to start my current venture. 

In reality, that probably leaves me with something closer to eighteen years of actual employment.  All the figures here are gross. They don’t account for tax, take-home pay, or how expensive life felt at the time. There will also be years, particularly as a student, when I did some work that never breached National Insurance thresholds and therefore never really shows up. This is an approximation, not a forensic audit.

Still, once everything was added together, a number emerged: £498,146.37.

That’s my best estimate of how much I’ve earned from employment in my life so far.

Spread across roughly eighteen years of work, that comes out at an average salary of £27,674.80 a year. Which feels fine, I guess. No huge spikes. No dramatic leaps. Just slow, steady progression, and a lot of time. Some of my first full-time jobs I remember paying as little as £11k. My most recent paid position at IMH paid more than four times that amount.

What really stopped me in my tracks wasn’t the earnings figure itself, though. It was what came next.  At the time of writing, the total value of my assets sits at around £510,925.67. In other words, I now own more than I have ever earned from work.  That’s a strange thing to sit with.

Dig a little deeper, and it becomes even more interesting. The combined value of my ISA, pensions, cash savings, and Premium Bonds is £267,495.67. More than half of everything I’ve ever earned has, in one form or another, been converted into assets that still exist.

There was no windfall here. No inheritance. No crypto bullshit or lottery win. Just years of saving, investing, avoiding the worst of lifestyle inflation, and letting time do its quiet, unglamorous work.  This is also despite a gambling addiction that persisted from 2008 to 2018 in one way or another.

Compounding isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t feel like much is happening while you’re in it. But zoom out far enough, and the effect becomes undeniable.  Of course, these numbers don’t tell the whole story.

They don’t show what it felt like earning very little in the early years, or the anxiety that comes with redundancy, or the temptation to play it safe when change feels risky. They don’t capture inflation, either.  £20,000 in the early 2000s did not feel like £20,000 does today.  But even with all those caveats, I find this perspective grounding.

We spend so much time focusing on annual salaries, monthly budgets, and net worth snapshots that we rarely stop to look underneath it all. Lifetime earnings are different.  It’s a baseline that can’t be argued with.

It turns out that just under half a million pounds of lifetime earnings, handled reasonably well and with a bit of patience, can quietly build a life that feels far more secure than the numbers alone would suggest.  It meant that those months in between jobs with no income coming in were not spent in total panic.  

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.