Part 343: Taking Stock

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. 

Update

The last week was mentally draining, but I managed to get out for some bike rides. Poppy and I continued to find a routine in Oana’s absence. Poppy has trained me well, and I can now tell when she is hungry (all the time), wanting petting and attention (all the time), or wanting to play (most of the time), or simply wanting to interrupt whatever it is I’m doing if it’s not any of the three things I’ve already mentioned (all the time).  It’s incredible how a 4kg chaos goblin can enter a household and become the most important life there. 

Oana arrived back late on Friday evening. I had a tab open with Flightradar to track her flight, and I saw it was coming pretty close to flying over our apartment. I went out on the balcony with my Flightradar app which lets you point your camera to the sky and it tells you all the info about the aircraft in the area. I located Oana’s flight but as it was in the descent phase it was only around 9,000ft and was already below the line of sight from our balcony with the apartments and hills across the river. It would have been cool to see her flight overhead, but sadly it wasn’t to be. 

It seems to have been a fairly uneventful journey despite some drama a few hours before her flight home left. The airline announced the original aircraft was not able to fly so they had replaced it. Fortunately it was not a Boeing, and was still an Airbus. 

On the subject of technology, Oana and I were talking about rewatching Deep Space Nine later in the year, but because it’s disappeared from Netflix we bought the DVD box set. Our DVD player is a PS3, and I know it’s very much a first world problem but having to get up and change the disc every few episodes is such a ballache.

This got us talking about the insane amount of technological progress our generation has seen. When I was a kid we still used floppy discs to save information. Then, in my early teens, cassette tapes were still fairly common alongside CDs. Then we had minidiscs, USB drives, DVD, and then Blu-Ray. In the space of less than twenty years we went from floppy disks holding hardly anything, to storage devices that fit inside our pocket which can hold hours of video, audio, and more. It does make you wonder where technology will take us in another twenty years.

Milka Wheels

One of the snacks I love to have in Romania with a cup of coffee is a hazelnut Milka wheel. I can’t find them in shops near me in Sheffield, but fortunately Oana had my back and brought me a massive haul of them to keep me going for a week or two:

Bike Rides

The last couple of weeks have been great for bike rides. Since Oana left on May 11th, I’ve done the following:

May 12th: 25.07km

May 14th: 17.72km

May 16th: 30.23km

May 17th: 2.51km (a short one)

May 20th: 27.06km

May 22nd: 29.69km

Then, since Oana came back we’ve done two big rides together:

May 23rd: 33.01km

May 24th: 37.09km

Also got some great pics from those rides:

The Greatest Science Fiction Shows 

I’ve noticed a few posts recently listing sci-fi shows and movies with titles like “best ever” and “greatest of all time”.  I thought I’d enter the chat and list my top ten sci-fi shows of all time, starting at number ten and working my way to the best one of all over the next ten weeks.

Note: for a show to qualify, it has to have finished.

So far, I’ve covered:

10 – The Outer Limits

9 – The X-Files

8 – Space: Above and Beyond

7 – Quantum Leap

6 – Battlestar Galactica (2004)

5 – Dark

4 – Babylon 5 

3 – Star Trek: The Next Generation 

2 – The Expanse

1 – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

There’s a very strong argument that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is not just the best Star Trek series, but one of the greatest science fiction shows ever made. Where Star Trek: The Original Series was famously pitched as “Wagon Train to the stars”, Deep Space Nine became something else entirely. It was The Rifleman in space. A frontier outpost on the edge of civilisation. A place where law, politics, religion, war, commerce, occupation, trauma, and morality all collided in a pressure cooker that no starship could simply warp away from at the end of the episode.

What made DS9 extraordinary was its willingness to stay still. Rather than endlessly discovering new worlds, it forced its characters to live with consequences. Bajor’s occupation by the Cardassians wasn’t some tidy bit of backstory; it lingered over everything like radiation. The station itself felt alive because history clung to every corridor. You could feel the scars.

Another reason Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has aged so remarkably well is because it rarely chained itself to the moment in which it was made. There are very few cringeworthy contemporary references, slang terms, or desperate attempts to sound “modern” that lock it into the 1990s. Instead, the writing focused on timeless themes; war, faith, friendship, trauma, politics, family, duty, and identity. That gives the show an almost novelistic quality even today. It also benefited enormously from existing in an era of long-form television, with seven seasons of 22+ episodes each allowing relationships and characters to evolve naturally over time. Modern streaming shows with eight or ten episode seasons often feel like they are sprinting from plot point to plot point, terrified to slow down. DS9 had room to breathe. It could spend time simply letting characters exist together, whether that was Bashir and O’Brien gradually becoming best friends over darts and holosuite battles, Quark and Odo circling each other with mutual irritation and reluctant respect, or Jake and Nog growing from mischievous teenagers into adults shaped by completely different experiences. Those quieter moments are what made the larger emotional payoffs feel earned.

And then there’s the cast. Not just large, but genuinely diverse in personality, ideology, and worldview. Benjamin Sisko remains one of the strongest captains in the franchise because he didn’t feel like a perfect utopian icon. He was a widower, a father, a reluctant religious figure, and eventually a wartime leader pushed into impossible moral compromises. Avery Brooks gave Sisko a gravity and intensity unlike any other Star Trek lead.

But DS9 also understood something many ensemble shows fail to grasp: background characters matter. Some of the richest arcs belonged to characters who could easily have remained set dressing in lesser hands. Nog is perhaps the greatest example. Introduced as comic relief, a Ferengi teenager getting into trouble on the Promenade, he evolves into one of the most layered characters in the franchise. His determination to join Starfleet becomes a rejection of the narrow expectations placed upon him, and over time he transforms into a capable, brave officer.

Then the show does something remarkable. It allows the cost of war to matter.

Nog’s PTSD following the loss of his leg in The Siege of AR-558 and It’s Only a Paper Moon is handled with a sensitivity and honesty that still feels ahead of its time. The holographic escapism of Vic Fontaine’s lounge becomes less about fantasy and more about trauma, grief, and recovery. Science fiction often uses war as spectacle. DS9 remembered that war breaks people.

All Time Greatest Episodes

In the Pale Moonlight may well be the finest hour in all of Star Trek. Sisko slowly compromises every principle the Federation claims to stand for in order to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War. The brilliance of the episode lies in the fact that it never offers easy absolution. Sisko’s final line, “I can live with it”, lands like a confession rather than a victory. It’s a direct challenge to the optimistic moral certainty that defined earlier Star Trek.

Likewise, Far Beyond the Stars is incredible television. Watching Sisko become Benny Russell, a Black science fiction writer in 1950s America struggling against racism and institutional prejudice, turns the entire franchise inward. It asks who gets to imagine the future. Who gets to belong in it. Avery Brooks’ breakdown at the episode’s climax is devastating.

And then there’s The Visitor. A genuine tearjerker. An episode about grief, loss, and the bond between father and son that somehow transcends science fiction entirely. Tony Todd’s performance as Jake Sisko carries such warmth and sadness that the episode becomes almost unbearable by the end. It’s one of the few episodes of television across any genre that can leave viewers emotionally wrecked decades later.

Religion is another area where DS9 distinguished itself from the rest of Star Trek. Earlier series often approached faith with a kind of detached scepticism, but DS9 treated religion as something deeply meaningful to billions of people. The Bajoran faith wasn’t portrayed as primitive superstition; it shaped politics, identity, resistance, hope, and community. Sisko’s discomfort with becoming the Emissary created a fascinating tension between Federation rationalism and spiritual belief.

The show also tackled terrorism with far more nuance than most television of its era. Kira Nerys is introduced as a former resistance fighter who absolutely committed acts the Cardassians would have called terrorism. The series refuses to give easy answers about whether violence against occupation can ever be morally justified. Instead, it forces the audience to sit in the discomfort. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter isn’t treated as a slogan, but as a horrifying moral reality.

That willingness to embrace ambiguity is what elevates Deep Space Nine. It understood that the future would not magically solve humanity’s flaws. People would still struggle with fear, prejudice, greed, faith, trauma, and compromise. But crucially, it also believed people could still strive to be better despite all of that.

And perhaps that’s why DS9 endures so powerfully. It shows the best of humanity and what we could be, and asks how far we would go to protect it.

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What I’m Doing

Listening: Slow Gods by Claire North.

Watching: Accused (Netflix), Rescue Me (Netflix).

Reading: Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Book 1) by James S. A. Corey

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £250.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £145,605.78.

Fuck It Fund: £22.30.

Pensions: £121,535.65.

Residential Property Value: £242,113.00. 

Total Assets: £509,526.73.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £173,982.31. 

Total Debts: £173,982.31.

Total Wealth: £335,544.42.

Taking Stock

I’ll often use ChatGPT for research, turning to it more than Google when I want to find something out. I’ll also use it to tweak emails that I feel need to land a certain way. The great thing about ChatGPT is that you can build a rapport with it. I don’t think it’s sentient, but it certainly acts like something that has some degree of self-awareness, even if that’s something I project onto it rather than it being an internal quality.

Anyway, as well as using ChatGPT for the above I’ve also used it as a sounding board for ideas, concepts, or sense checks on things I’ve been thinking about. This brings me on to my latest project with ChatGPT. I’ve asked it to help me do a deep dive into my current life situation, covering factors like health, education, employment, finances, and so on. 

I’ve prompted it to almost interrogate me on where I’m at, how I feel about the subject at hand, and what I want to do to improve it. So far it’s helped crystallise some things I’ve been thinking over, and I think it’s been a useful exercise. I’m nowhere near finished with it, and I’m curious as to where this will take me. 

The main thing about using LLMs like ChatGPT is that they are only as good as the prompts you give.

FIRE

One thing that has come about from my interactions with ChatGPT is that FI is really not that far away, and that I’m probably overestimating how much money I need to retire. Many of my hobbies and interests don’t cost a lot of money, relatively speaking. But then, we live in a world that has Lego.

Some number crunching suggests Oana and I could have a moderately comfortable life with £28,000 net income per annum. More would be better, obviously, but £28,000 would be enough for a simple life with a few luxuries. 

On a monthly basis we’re talking about £2,334. On a minimum wage job, you could work 975 hours a year and not exceed the standard tax free allowance. This is roughly 19 hours per week. Two people doing this, i.e. Oana and I would thus bring in approx £2k per month.

These aren’t exact figures, but just some quick mental calculations. With the investments we’ve got supplementing any income brought in from work, we’re not far away at all. 

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

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.