Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update a.k.a. The Week That Wouldn’t End
By the midpoint of this week I felt like I had slipped into some sort of budget version of Groundhog Day. Seriously, this week has been absurd. I think this feeling dawned on me during half time of the England and Ghana match.
I’m not usually one to complain about the weather. We spend eleven months of the year in Britain moaning about rain, cloud and temperatures that barely scrape double figures. So when summer finally turns up, it feels a bit rich to immediately start complaining that it’s too hot.
But, yes, there’s a but…
There is “nice summer weather”…
…and then there’s waking up wondering if someone has quietly relocated Sheffield to southern Spain overnight.
The flat has basically turned into a giant storage heater. Every day it absorbs heat, and every night it politely refuses to give any of it back. I don’t generally find sleep restful; it’s just part of who I am. I exist in some sort of perpetual semi-awake state propped up by caffeine.
Sleeping has become even less of a restful experience and more of an endurance event.
Oana and I have actually moved our mattress into the living room. It’s the only room with direct access to the balcony, so we’ve been sleeping with the doors wide open in the hope that even the slightest breeze might wander through.
It actually worked, a little. Even Poppy has decided she’s had enough of the bedroom. Instead of curling up inside, she’s spent most nights stretched out on the balcony, looking far more comfortable than either of us.
It has been a struggle for her and there’s been a few times she’s been panting. We’re doing everything we can to keep her cool, and we’ve even opted against any bike rides this week as we want to stay with her to monitor her. At least we know that the weather will break, but for a cat or dog it must be stressful and confusing.
Then, just when I thought the week couldn’t feel any longer…
England played. Twice.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Winning football matches is generally considered a good thing. I’d much rather be writing after two victories than two defeats.
But fuck me ragged, those matches felt like they were being played at 0.5x speed.
I’ve had Teams meetings that could have been emails that moved quicker.
Whatever the explanation, they somehow managed to make an already endless week feel even longer.
The strange thing is that weeks like this are oddly memorable.
We just spent several days trying not to melt, relocated an entire mattress into the living room, watched the cat make consistently better life choices than we did, and sat through what felt like three hours of football compressed into ninety minutes.
And somehow, it feels like the most British week imaginable.
Until the next heatwave arrives, I guess. At which point you’ll find me dragging the mattress back into the living room without a second thought.
The other thing this week reminded me of is just how quickly the climate conversation gets polarised.
Someone, probably a Reform voter, inevitably says,
“We’ve always had hot summers.”
And they’re right. We have. Let’s all take a moment to salute their ability to remember this fact.
I mean, the summer of 1976 has almost mythical status in Britain. Anyone old enough to remember it will happily tell you about it. Heatwaves aren’t some brand-new invention.
It’s not really the point, though. The point isn’t that hot weather exists. The point is that it seems to be happening more often, lasting longer and reaching temperatures that used to feel extraordinary.
Every few years we seem to be saying,
“Well… that’s the hottest June on record.”
Or,
“That’s another temperature record broken.”
Or,
“The Met Office has issued another extreme heat warning.”
Eventually you stop calling them freak events and start wondering whether they’re becoming the new normal. That’s exactly what the Met Office says we’re likely to see: more frequent and more intense hot spells as the climate warms.
I think one thing that confuses people is hearing that the planet has warmed by “only” a degree or so. A single degree sounds like nothing.
If I turned my thermostat up from 20°C to 21°C, I probably wouldn’t even notice, but the Earth isn’t your living room.
That average increase applies across the entire planet. Oceans. Atmosphere. Ice sheets. Deserts. Forests. Mountains. It’s an astonishing amount of extra energy being added to the climate system, and it shifts the odds towards more extreme weather.
Think of it like loading a pair of dice. You can still roll a one and still have a temperate summer. But if you load the dice ever so slightly, you’ll start rolling sixes more often.
It’s not that the weather has necessarily become more predictable, it’s that the probabilities have changed. We’re dealing with a vast system with so many moving parts that it’s difficult for anyone to fully understand it. It’s not just a thermostat. It’s a fluid system. We will still have cold days in June, and warm days in December. A single point on a temperature chart doesn’t prove anything. It’s all about the bigger picture; and that bigger picture has a single message:
So no, this heatwave doesn’t “prove” climate change. Individual weather events never do.
But when the records keep falling, the heatwaves keep coming, and what used to be a once-in-a-generation event starts cropping up every few years, it’s probably worth paying attention.
The Number 10 Revolving Door
There comes a point where you stop asking whether politicians are learning from their mistakes and start wondering whether they’re speedrunning a civilisation collapse.
Let’s take a stroll through the last decade or so of British politics. Bring a strong drink.
David Cameron
The man who called a referendum because he wanted to settle an argument inside his own party. Imagine burning your house down because you couldn’t decide where to hang a picture.
Brexit wasn’t forced upon him by some unstoppable historical force. He chose to roll the constitutional equivalent of a D20 because he assumed he’d win.
He lost. Then resigned, taking his ball and going home, and leaving everyone else to deal with the consequences of the biggest constitutional upheaval in modern British history.
Outstanding leadership.
10/10 for delegation.
Theresa May
Inherited an impossible job and somehow made it even harder.
Her Brexit strategy appeared to consist of repeatedly driving into the same brick wall and hoping Parliament eventually apologised to the wall.
Three meaningful votes and three defeats.
An election she didn’t need and a majority she somehow lost.
Then, there’s the dancing like a Temu version of Disco Stu.
Boris Johnson
A Prime Minister whose administration managed to combine absolute confidence with spectacular incompetence.
“Take Back Control.”
Control of what? Certainly not Downing Street.
Partygate wasn’t really about cake. It was about asking millions of people to sacrifice weddings, funerals and seeing dying relatives while Number 10 apparently interpreted lockdown rules as optional DLC.
Trust, once lost, is incredibly difficult to rebuild. Johnson took a flamethrower to it.
His greatest achievement may be going down in history as the only PM to attempt to hide in a fridge.
Liz Truss
The political equivalent of downloading ransomware onto the economy.
A little over forty days.
That’s it. Some yoghurts have longer shelf lives.
Managed to terrify financial markets, crash pension funds and make a lettuce look like the stable option.
Historians usually need years to assess economic damage.
This one only needed September.
Possibly the PM with the funniest nickname; Daggers, as in Dagenham, three stops past Barking.
Rishi Sunak
Perhaps the most technically competent of the bunch but he inherited a house already on fire. Then spent most of his premiership insisting the smoke and fire was actually the aurora borealis. Yes, Simpsons references are the best.
He wasn’t driving the car. He was simply the last person holding the steering wheel before it went over the cliff.
The Conservative Legacy
Fourteen years of austerity. The Brexit clusterfuck. The NHS under extraordinary pressure.
Criminal courts with enormous backlogs. Local authorities flirting with bankruptcy. Public services stretched thinner than supermarket toilet paper in March 2020.
Record tax burdens and stagnant productivity. Flatlining living standards and housing that became steadily less affordable.
And after all of that they still wanted another term. It’s almost admirable.
Labour
Then came Labour, or rather, the version of Labour that spent years convincing itself that its biggest enemy wasn’t the Conservatives. It was Labour.
The treatment of Jeremy Corbyn divided the party for years. Supporters argue he was subjected to relentless media hostility, internal sabotage and an unprecedented campaign to undermine his leadership. Critics argue he was unelectable and mishandled serious issues including antisemitism within the party.
Whichever side you fall on, one thing seems difficult to dispute: Labour spent an extraordinary amount of time fighting itself while the Conservatives remained in government. That’s political malpractice.
Keir Starmer
Starmer won because the Conservatives imploded. It wasn’t because he was wildly popular with a cult of personality. You need a personality for that to happen.
He’s often presented himself as a safe pair of hands rather than a transformative figure, and sometimes that works. It’s a little like how some football managers are parachuted into struggling clubs. What they do isn’t pretty, but it’s effective. At least when it works.
Sometimes it looks like managerial politics in a country crying out for vision. His supporters call it pragmatism. His critics call it having the political charisma of an unplugged printer.
Then Along Comes Nigel Farage
Every election cycle Britain discovers Nigel Farage again, as if he is some sort of political cold sore.
It’s the same each time. He arrives and promises simple answers to staggeringly complicated problems.
He appears on television acting like an everyman and taps into genuine public frustration about immigration, public services and trust in politics.
Those frustrations are real and pretending they aren’t is one reason Reform has grown.
But frustration is not a governing philosophy and the solutions, and sometimes even the alleged problems, are not as simple as claimed.
Running a country isn’t the same as winning an argument on social media.
If fixing Britain were as easy as shouting “common sense” into a microphone, we’d have solved everything years ago.
The Bigger Problem
This isn’t really about parties. It’s about competence. The UK increasingly resembles a country where every incoming government blames the previous one, promises radical change, achieves remarkably little, then hands an even bigger mess to the next lot.
Meanwhile the public gets poorer and public services creak under increasing pressure.
Young people can’t afford homes as wages stagnate and house prices increase.
Infrastructure ages. Productivity stagnates. The NHS struggles.
Politics becomes increasingly performative. Everyone keeps shouting. Nothing gets fixed.
If your solution to fourteen years of Conservative decline is simply “more Conservatives wearing different coloured ties,” you’ve missed the point.
If your solution is assuming Labour automatically deserves endless patience, you’ve missed the point too.
And if your answer is believing that one charismatic populist is somehow going to bulldoze decades of structural problems with sheer force of personality, well, slap yourself repeatedly until you believe otherwise.
Britain doesn’t need another messiah. It needs competent adults. The fact that this now feels like an ambitious request tells you everything you need to know.
The Five-Year Delusion
Perhaps the biggest lie in modern politics isn’t one told by a particular party.
It’s the idea that any government can fix decades of decline in a single Parliament.
They can’t, and pretending otherwise just sets everyone up for disappointment.
Let’s look at the NHS. People complain there aren’t enough doctors and nurses.
They’re right. So what’s the solution?
Train more. It’s that simple. Simple doesn’t mean quick though.
The medical student entering university in 2027 won’t become a fully qualified consultant for well over a decade. Even becoming a GP takes years of training after medical school. It’s also important to recognise that the journey to studying medicine often starts in the early to mid teens as children start choosing a study path. You cannot order doctors from Amazon Prime. The estimated delivery from ordering a new doctor is, ballpark, a decade; or two terms of government.
The same applies to nurses, radiographers, paramedics, physiotherapists, pharmacists and every other skilled healthcare professional. Every political party promises to “fix the NHS.”
None of them can do it before the next election. It’s not because they don’t want to. It’s because biology and education refuse to obey election timetables.
Energy is no different. Everyone wants cheap, clean, secure, and reliable energy..
A new nuclear power station takes well over a decade from planning to generating electricity.
Offshore wind farms require years of environmental studies, planning permission, financing, manufacturing, installation, grid connections and commissioning.
New transmission lines can spend years trapped in planning processes before a single pylon appears. The electricity grid itself wasn’t designed for the world we’re trying to build.
Modernising it isn’t a weekend DIY project. It’s a generational engineering programme. You can’t just build a solar farm and hook it up to the grid as if you were plugging in a new flatscreen TV. The national grid has limited capacity, and when you build a new energy production facility, you need all the surrounding tech, equipment, and resources.
Housing? The same story.
You don’t solve a housing shortage by making one speech at a party conference. You need planning reform, and from the top of my head;
- Infrastructure.
- Construction workers.
- Surveyors.
- Engineers.
- Bricklayers.
- Electricians.
- Plumbers.
- Roads.
- Schools.
- GP surgeries.
- Water supplies.
- Sewers.
- Public transport.
Every new housing development is a giant logistical puzzle. It can take decades to create a new community of homes, because those homes need all the associated stuff; public transport links, roads, utilities, internet, and so on.
And here lies the problem. Our politics has become obsessed with instant gratification.
Governments announce policies designed to produce headlines before the next election.
Oppositions promise they’ll fix everything even faster. The public expects miracles.
Reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate because reality doesn’t care about polling day or manifesto promises.
Five-year election cycles encourage short-term thinking. The country, meanwhile, has problems that require twenty-year plans. No Prime Minister wants to spend billions on projects whose benefits will mostly be enjoyed by their successor.
So instead we keep reaching for sticking plasters like a tax tweak or a rebranded initiative. Meanwhile, the underlying problems continue ageing like milk in the sun.
Perhaps that’s the conversation we should be having. How we build a political system capable of making decisions whose rewards won’t be visible until today’s schoolchildren are adults.
What I’m Doing
Listening: The Traveller by Joseph Eckert.
Watching: Rescue Me (Netflix).
Reading: Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Book 1) by James S. A. Corey
I finished The Traveller just before finishing up this post. It’s one of the best stories I’ve listened to in the last few years. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The premise is that the protagonist starts travelling through time each morning, skipping a day ahead, then two days, four days, and so on.
I don’t want to say too much as I think the book benefits from going in with little information. In terms of vibe and tone, it reminded me of Replay by Ken Grimwood, one of my favourite novels of all time.
I also just finished Rescue Me and, overall, I’d say it gets an 8/10 score from me. There is a dip in quality in the middle seasons, but it ends with quality story telling.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £149,087.98.
Fuck It Fund: £321.16.
Pensions: £127,391.43.
Residential Property Value: £242,113.00.
Total Assets: £519,163.57.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,797.96.
Total Debts: £173,797.96.
Total Wealth: £345,365.61.
Top Ten Countdown – The Best Financial Advice
10. Know Where Your Money Actually Goes
7. Get Rich Slowly
If someone offered you a guaranteed way to become wealthy over the next thirty years, most people would politely decline. Not because they don’t want to be wealthy but because it takes thirty years.
We live in a world obsessed with shortcuts. We want six-minute abs, overnight success, viral fame, and investment returns that double our money by next Tuesday. We celebrate the lottery winner, the cryptocurrency millionaire, and the entrepreneur who sold a company for millions before turning thirty.
What we don’t celebrate nearly as much is the person who quietly invested every month for decades, and yet, that’s the path that is far more likely to work.
One of the hardest truths to accept in personal finance is that building wealth is, for most people, incredibly boring. There are no dramatic twists or secret formulas.
Building wealth is almost always thousands of small, sensible decisions repeated over and over again.
Spend a little less than you earn. Invest consistently. Avoid unnecessary debt. Keep your costs low. Stay invested.
Repeat.
It sounds almost disappointingly simple because it is.
The difficulty isn’t understanding these principles. It’s sticking with them when everyone around you seems to be getting rich faster. It’s navigating the boring middle when things seem to stand still.
Every few years a new craze appears.
Dot-com stocks. Property. Cryptocurrency. NFTs. Artificial intelligence.
The latest “can’t lose” investment opportunity. Suddenly everyone seems to know someone who doubled their money in six months, retired at thirty-five, or turned a small investment into a fortune.
It’s incredibly tempting to believe you’re missing out, and sometimes people really do make extraordinary returns.
The problem is survivorship bias, and I know I’ve discussed this before, but it is such an important concept that a regular reminder is wise.
For every person posting screenshots of spectacular gains, there are countless others quietly nursing losses that never make it onto social media. Nobody rushes online to announce they’ve just lost half their savings chasing the latest trend.
We mostly hear from the winners. That’s why slow investing feels so unrewarding at times.
There’s very little to talk about.
Nobody boasts that their globally diversified index fund faithfully delivered roughly what the market did this year. Nobody becomes an internet sensation because they made another monthly pension contribution. There are no exciting headlines announcing that someone once again resisted the temptation to sell during a market downturn.
But these are exactly the kinds of behaviours that build wealth over decades. The irony is that the slow approach often ends up being the fastest route to long-term financial success.
People chasing quick riches frequently jump from one opportunity to the next. They buy high because everyone else is buying. They panic when prices fall. They sell low. They chase the next big thing. In doing so, they often sabotage the very returns they were hoping to achieve.
Meanwhile, the slow investor simply carries on like a cargo ship on the ocean, never going particularly fast but moving relentlessly hour after hour, day after day, month after month, and year after year.
Market crash? Keep investing.
Boom? Keep investing.
Election? Keep investing.
Recession? Keep investing.
It’s almost boring enough to be a superpower.
One of my favourite sayings is that the stock market is a mechanism for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. The longer I invest, the more convinced I become that this applies to personal finance in general. Patience is an underrated financial skill.
It’s why compound interest is so powerful. Not because it works quickly, but because it works relentlessly, just like that cargo ship I mentioned.
Each year builds upon the last. Returns generate further returns. Small contributions become meaningful sums. What feels insignificant in your twenties can become life-changing by your fifties.
The challenge is that progress is almost invisible at first. It’s like watching a tree grow.
You don’t notice much from one day to the next, but look back twenty years and the difference is extraordinary.
This is also why I think the phrase “get rich quick” is so dangerous. It suggests that wealth is primarily about finding the right opportunity. In reality, it’s usually about becoming the kind of person who consistently makes good financial decisions over a very long period of time.
That isn’t exciting. It won’t sell many online courses. It won’t attract millions of views on YouTube.
But it has one enormous advantage over almost every “secret” investment strategy you’ll ever encounter:
It actually works.
So if your financial journey feels slow, don’t be discouraged. Slow isn’t the opposite of successful. For most people, slow is exactly what success looks like.
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:
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bio.link/davidscothern.