Part 330: More FI Nonsense

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. More FI nonsense and some thoughts on financial priorities.

Weekly Update

It’s been the busiest week of work I’ve had in a long, long time.  I’m not complaining, though.  Although it’s been stressful at times, it still feels good to be working on my own initiative and having control over my workload.  In a lot of ways, being self-employed is a lot like the end goal of FI: having the freedom to choose.  

One of the other benefits of being mega busy is that I’m learning a lot as I go.  The downside of being self-employed in mortgages is that they are a slow-moving, low-volume product to sell.  From the initial query to the mortgage completing, months can pass.  As a broker, you’re only paid late in the process.  So, it’s going to take time for me to build my pipeline and start earning properly.  That can be a tough one to compartmentalise mentally, and it’s important to stay focused on the end goal.  Once the pipeline is up and running, mortgage completions will start stacking up.  

On Saturday, we joined another Critical Mass Cycle Ride around Sheffield.  It’s good fun as there’s a big group of us on all sorts of bikes, with speakers all hooked up and music blasting out.  The vast majority of people who see us stop, smile, and take videos or photos.  Then there’s the odd asshole in their car who likes to drive aggressively and beep their horn at us repeatedly.

Dinner Disaster

We are generally decent when it comes to cooking, but one thing we cannot get to grips with is an authentic-tasting curry.  We can do the whole thing with jars of sauce and whatnot, but it’s never as good as a top Indian restaurant. We’ve looked up many recipes and bought all the spices and whatnot, but we just can’t make it work. 

Now, when I say authentic, I’m not talking about food in India itself.  Our experience with that was not good.  We spent a couple of weeks in India in 2020, just before Covid kicked off.  The food was awful, more or less across the board.  We had one nice dinner in a small hotel courtyard, but that was it.  The rest of it was tasteless mush.  

Anyway, coming back from that tangent, we tried another curry, and it was pretty gross.  We followed the recipe, and it just didn’t work.  The timings and measurements seemed off, but we stuck with it, and the result was inedible, so we did what most people would and ordered pizza.

Do you want to help me earn a little cash for free? Of course you do!

Now that I’m self-employed, I’ve signed up with a few businesses that offer services that assist with getting a mortgage.  One such service comes from Check My File, which brings together your credit report from multiple sources into a detailed breakdown of your credit history.

Normally, there is a £14.99 monthly charge, but with my link, you can get a FREE 7-day trial.  My affiliate link allows you to create an account, get your report, and if you want to cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will not be charged.  If you want to keep the service beyond the trial period, the £14.99 monthly charge applies.  

By signing up for the trial period, you’ll help me out with a small commission even if you cancel within that trial period. 

Important points:

1. This code is for a free 7-day trial for those who have not had an account with Check My File before.

2. You can cancel anytime with no penalty.

3. If you do not cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will be charged £14.99 until you cancel.

4. It will ask for payment details, but if you cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will not be charged (assuming you have not had an account with them before).

5. I will earn a small commission from Check My File for each person who signs up for the free trial, whether they continue to a paid membership or not. 

6. I do not get to see your credit report.  It is private to you, unless you choose to share it. 

7. To make sure the code tracks, please complete your sign-up in one sitting i.e. don’t close the tab and start again later. Make sure you download your report or else the commission doesn’t register.

8. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but my last wage was paid in October.

Here is the link….

https://www.checkmyfile.partners/GZMJPSJ/2CTPL

Sometimes you are just prioritising the wrong things…

The UK minimum wage, according to Google, is £12.71p/h.  Assuming a 35-hour working week, and that you are paid for 52 weeks a year, your annual gross salary comes out at roughly £23,132.20. In turn, this results in a take-home of approx £1,647 assuming no deductions other than tax, NI, and 3% into a pension.

So far, so reasonable.  The post above loses any credibility, though, when we get a bit further down the numbers; £50pm phone bill? £200pm for car-related expenses?

If I had to boil down the root cause of so much financial hardship, it comes down to just one point: people mistaking luxuries for necessities.  

I’m not arguing that people should not have a mobile phone.  If you are on a low wage, though, the sad fact is you probably shouldn’t have the absolute latest iPhone when a slightly older model will be much cheaper and work just as well for daily use.  With a bit of care, phones can last several years, and SIM-only contracts have been around for ages.  

I pay £7pm for 25GB data with unlimited calls and texts.  I bought my phone outright, and there are offers now online where you can buy a Samsung A36 for £299.  Spread that out on a 0% deal, and it’s much cheaper than £50pm.  If you plan to keep this phone for three years, it works out at less than £10pm.  

The car is the big one that frustrates me.  I’ve made it to 42 years old and never owned a car because I have never needed a car.  There are some people who legitimately need a car, but most people confuse need with want.  Everyone, except the ultra-wealthy, has to prioritise their spending.  It would be nice to live in a post-scarcity world where everyone could just have everything they want, but we don’t live on Earth in 2426, we live in 2026.  So, the sad fact is that for many people, it does come down to a choice between a car or saving for a deposit.  If you want to spend £200pm running a car, plus all the incidentals that come with car ownership, then more power to you; your money, your choice. I reserve the right to ignore you complaining about always being broke, though.  

If you opted for public transport and saved £150pm into a Lifetime ISA, you would have invested (with the government bonus) £11,250 after five years; enough for a 5% deposit on a £225,000 house.  If you are able to save for nine years, you would have invested £20,250.  Depending on whether you opted for cash or stocks, you could have much more in your account by the time mentioned, but obviously, it could be less if the stock market takes a dip; investments in the stock market can go up and down.  

The main point of all this is that there are ways and means of improving your financial situation but you have to take control and stop confusing luxuries with necessities.  If you are truly in a position where you don’t have the cash to pay for the basics of living, then you need to contact one of the charities or support organisations listed at the bottom of this post. 

FI Nonsense 

So I was reading some stuff about FI, and I came across this tragic line:

“To be ‘independent’ of work can often mean being stripped of the very structures that provide a sense of place.”

The word that stood out to me here was “stripped”. As if Financial Independence is some marauding force kicking down the door of your life and stealing the only beams holding the roof up.

The implication is clear: without work, you float untethered through life, undefined and structurally homeless.

If that’s true, if employment is the only thing anchoring you to reality, then you have a much bigger problem than early retirement.

We have built a civilisation where human beings confuse their employer with their identity.

Work absolutely provides structure. Of course it does. You wake up at a set time. You log in. You perform tasks. You answer to someone. You measure your worth in targets, KPIs, and performance reviews. You receive validation in payslips and the occasional “great job” from your manager.

This is a structure, but it’s an outsourced structure. It is like rented scaffolding on a building that can’t support itself. If the removal of compulsory employment makes your world wobble, what that reveals isn’t the sacredness of work. It reveals how much of your internal framework you allowed to atrophy, because here’s the uncomfortable truth: Financial Independence doesn’t ban you from working. It removes coercion. It removes the gun from the table. It removes the silent “or else”.

You can still build, create and contribute. You can still have routines, deadlines, and ambitions. The difference is that they’re chosen.

Chosen structure feels very different to imposed structure. It’s the freedom to choose that is vital.

There’s a deeper fear buried inside that original quote. Without a job title, who are you?  This is a massive frustration of mine. Typical small talk generally starts with, “What do you do?”

The person asking doesn’t want to know what your hobbies or interests are.  They’re asking what your job is, because society has conditioned us all to pin our identity on the job we do, because without some absurd job title like “Senior Happiness Consultant” or “Sandwich Artist”, we, what, don’t have an identity?  

There’s an episode of Babylon 5, a fantastic sci-fi show that sadly hasn’t aged well, where one of the main characters is being interrogated.  The interrogator, Jack the Ripper, who was abducted by aliens and made to serve them (yeah, it’s weird in parts), simply asks one question over and over: “Who are you?”

This is one of the most difficult questions to answer when you strip away references to relationships or jobs.  Who are you?

And for many people, that’s the terrifying part.

Work provides a pre-written identity. It tells you where to sit. Who to report to. How to measure success. It hands you a ready-made narrative: you are progressing, you are climbing, you are valued because the system says so.

Financial Independence takes that script away. Not because it wants to strip you of place but because it invites you to write your own. If that invitation feels like a loss, it says more about how thin modern life has become outside employment than it does about FI itself.

For most of human history, “place” came from family, community, craft, land, tribe, and shared purpose, not Glorious Purpose, as that is just for Loki. Now it comes from Teams notifications and Outlook reminders. We’ve quietly accepted the idea that without a calendar full of meetings, we might dissolve into irrelevance. That isn’t wisdom. That’s corporate Stockholm syndrome.

And there’s an irony here that the critics of FI often miss. The people who pursue Financial Independence are rarely drifting existentialists waiting to be unmoored. They are planners. Trackers. Designers of systems. People who think in decades. People who care deeply about intentionality.

They don’t reject structure. They reject compulsory structure. They are not trying to remove the beams from their lives. They are trying to replace employer-owned beams with self-owned ones.

If someone reaches independence and feels lost, that’s not proof that work was noble scaffolding. It’s proof that they never built anything internal to stand on. And that’s not a moral failure, it’s a cultural one. We train people for careers, not for autonomy. We prepare them for interviews, not for self-authorship.

So yes, to be independent of work might mean losing the artificial rhythm imposed by someone else, but it also means discovering whether you ever built a rhythm of your own.

If your “sense of place” disappears the moment your payslip does, that wasn’t purpose.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Cannibal: Chess Team Book 7 by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: Katla (Netflix), Famous Last Words: Eric Dane (Netflix).

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

Eric Dane was one of those actors I’d seen in lots of different things, but only in the background.  It wasn’t until I watched The Last Ship that he really stood out to me.  A few days ago, he passed away following an ALS diagnosis.  On Saturday evening, Oana and I watched his interview as part of the Famous Last Words show on Netflix, and it was emotional.  ALS, more often called Motor Neuron Disease in the UK, is a horrible disease.  Stephen Hawking is probably the most well-known person to have experienced it.  

What was clear from watching Eric Dane’s interview is that he fought his illness with strength and dignity, and that’s about as much as any of us can do.  He’s at peace now, but I think we can all take something from his example.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £131,883.60.

Fuck It Fund: £5,001.62.

Pensions: £117,783.53.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £501,098.75.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,531.44. 

Total Debts: £174,531.44.

Total Wealth: £326,567.31.

I can’t wait to get some money coming in so I can actually start investing again.  It’s been ages since I had a wage, and I’ve recently had to cash in £20k of my Premium Bonds to subsidise my cost of living.  

I think I’m probably a month away from getting a decent sum hitting my bank account.  Mortgages take time to go through, but once the ball is rolling, I should be much more comfortable. 

I hope that I can start throwing money into my ISA when the window opens in April.  If I can’t, then it would suggest that my self-employed venture has failed.  I don’t think it will fail, though.  I’m confident enough in my ability to make a real go of this opportunity.  Yes, there’s no guaranteed salary, but there is much more potential and more freedom than working for a company like the one I left last year.  

Anyway, that’s all for this week.  Thank you for reading, and please remember to have a look at the Check My File offer I mentioned earlier in this post.

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.