Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
The Eclipse
Oana and I took a walk up a nearby hill from which you can get amazing views of the city. Many others had the same idea, and so we watched the eclipse with a couple of hundred other people. It was a really chilled atmosphere, and there was only one asshole who tried to ruin the atmosphere by aggressively riding a dirt bike through the people sitting on the grass.
We were fortunate enough to have actual eclipse glasses to watch the event with. Although it wasn’t a total eclipse, it was still pretty amazing. It’s such a coincidence that we happen to have a moon that, with the relative size and distance, is able to almost perfectly cover the sun in the sky.
Our moon is unusually large compared to the size of Earth, and is actually bigger than Pluto. This might be one of the reasons why Earth has life. Our moon helps stabilise our axial tilt and potentially shields us from impact events, in a similar way to how Jupiter acts as a gravitational vacuum by using its huge mass to attract comets and other objects which might otherwise threaten the inner planets.
There were some people online saying the event was disappointing. I mean, that’s a fairly radical interpretation of a celestial event, but who am I to tell people what to feel?
The Heat
I know there will be people reading this who absolutely love the heat. The moment the temperature creeps above 25°C, they’re outside firing up the barbecue, drinking something fruity and announcing that it’s “just like being abroad.”
I, meanwhile, am slowly dissolving, and before someone inevitably says, “But it’s hotter in Spain!”, yes. I know. I have encountered the concept of other countries.
The problem isn’t simply that Britain gets hot. It’s that Britain is spectacularly ill-equipped for being hot.
We have built an entire country around the assumption that the weather will generally range between North of the Wall and The Fires of Mount Doom.
Our houses are designed to retain heat. Air conditioning in homes is still comparatively unusual. Many workplaces don’t have it. Public transport can become a mobile greenhouse. Even hospitals are struggling with overheating during extreme temperatures.
When you’re somewhere routinely hot, the infrastructure generally acknowledges the existence of heat. Buildings have shutters and shading. Air conditioning is commonplace. Daily life adapts around the temperature.
Britain’s response to 35°C is basically to open a window and hope for the best. Except sometimes opening the window just means inviting the outside inferno into your home.
So you close the curtains. You close the windows. You strategically position fans around the room like you’re planning a military operation, but inevitably the inside of your home reaches the temperature required to temper steel anyway.
Then night arrives. Lovely. Surely it’ll cool down now?
“Oh, my sweet summer child.” No.
Your walls have spent the previous twelve hours absorbing enough thermal energy to qualify as a small experimental fusion reactor, and they’re now releasing it directly into your bedroom.
So you lie there, sweating through the mattress, with a fan blasting hot air across your face, wondering whether sleeping inside the fridge would be physically possible.
Overheating in British homes is increasingly recognised as a serious problem. In London, for example, research being considered by the London Assembly suggests that without adaptation, nearly 92% of existing homes could be at risk of overheating by 2050. Which brings me neatly to climate change.
“BUT IT WAS HOT IN 1976!”
Ah yes. 1976.
Every time Britain has a heatwave, somebody on Facebook emerges from the shadows clutching a photograph of a paddling pool from 1976.
“We had hot summers when I was a kid!”
Yes, weather is not a millennial invention or utter woke nonsense. Nobody is claiming that hot weather was invented by Greta Thunberg.
The existence of a hot summer fifty years ago does not disprove climate change any more than the existence of a millionaire in 1932 disproves the Great Depression.
Climate is about patterns, averages, frequency, duration, probability, and extremes, and those things are changing.
The Met Office says extreme heat events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more intense, and that the increase in frequency, duration and intensity seen over recent decades is clearly linked to the warming planet and can be attributed to human activity.
Even more strikingly, research into the UK’s 2018 summer concluded that a summer that hot was around 30 times more likely than it would have been before the Industrial Revolution.
Thirty times. But don’t worry. Keith from Doncaster remembers eating a Mini Milk in his garden in 1976, so presumably the Met Office can pack everything up and go home.
2026 has been fucking ridiculous.
By July we’d already had three separate heatwaves. Temperatures of 35°C or above were recorded in May, June and July in the same year for the first time in the UK’s observational record. Then August arrived and said, “hold my beer.”
On Thursday 13th August, temperatures reached 38.1°C at Kew Gardens.
Thirty-eight point one. In Britain. I’ve never sat inside an active air fryer, but I’d imagine it’s a decent comparison.
All this considered, there’s another problem. Everything outside is dry. Really dry. Which brings me to the next group of people I’d like to discuss.
STOP SETTING FIRE TO THINGS
This really shouldn’t need saying. If the countryside currently has roughly the same moisture content as a Ryvita, perhaps don’t introduce fire to it.
And yet… here we are. Here we fucking are…
Wildfires in England and Wales have already passed the previous annual record of 1,017 fires set in the entirety of 2025. We’re only in August. The wildfire season is now expected to potentially continue into November.
In Stourbridge alone, a major grassfire spread into residential areas during the extreme heat, with homes destroyed and people requiring hospital treatment.
These aren’t abstract climate models predicting something that might happen in 2080.
People’s houses are burning down, and yet there are still people deliberately starting fires.
County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service attended 1,043 deliberate fires in just the first six months of this year. They specifically warned that deliberate incidents tend to increase during school holidays and warm weather, and pleaded with young people to understand that setting fire to grass and bins “is not a game”.
Police in Cheshire have recently investigated a spate of fires where young people were reportedly seen starting them before running or cycling away. In Wiltshire, police investigated an incident where three teenagers were reported to have started a fire in a field which then spread through crops and into bushes.
I’ve also heard claims that there’s some sort of trend among kids to see who can start the biggest fire. I went looking for evidence of this because, frankly, it sounded simultaneously insane and depressingly believable. I couldn’t find reliable evidence that this specific “biggest fire” competition is actually a widespread trend, so I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But the fact that emergency services are having to warn young people not to deliberately start fires during one of the hottest and driest periods we’ve experienced is already enough to make me stare silently into the camera and reconsider the entire human experiment.
“Do not deliberately set fire to extremely dry vegetation during a heatwave” should be somewhere around “don’t lick electrical sockets” on the list of things humans instinctively understand.
Yet apparently we’ve reached the point where this information needs to be distributed.
This is the bit that annoys me, because none of these things exists independently. That’s what seems to get lost.
Climate change doesn’t mean that every summer will simply be one degree warmer.
Small changes in average temperature shift the probability of extremes. Hot spells become hotter. Heatwaves become more likely. Dry periods dry the landscape. Vegetation becomes easier to ignite. Wildfires become more difficult to control.
That’s not the end of it, though. Infrastructure designed for a cooler climate starts struggling.
Homes overheat. Hospitals overheat. Railways struggle.
Fire services face incidents they historically didn’t have to deal with on anything approaching the same scale.
Eventually adaptation will become unavoidable, and the longer we wait, the more it will cost.
That’s the conversation we should be having. Instead we’re still stuck debating whether climate change exists because someone’s nan remembers the summer of 1976.
It’s exhausting. You don’t have to become an environmental activist. You don’t have to glue yourself to anything. All you have to do is acknowledge observable reality.
The climate is warming. Human activity is overwhelmingly responsible. Extreme heat is becoming more likely. Britain is poorly adapted to it. And when the country has spent weeks being baked until the grass resembles something you’d find at the bottom of a hamster cage, please don’t set it on fire.
That’s it. That’s my environmental manifesto. Maybe next week I’ll write about something more relaxing, like nuclear war.
If anyone would like to donate to my fundraising effort, you can find my Facebook donation page here:
https://www.facebook.com/share/1FAQQaTbw8
The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast
A quick update on the podcast I announced last week: we’ve now recorded Episode One!
Darren and I have officially made the leap from “we should start a podcast” to sitting in front of microphones and actually doing it. The first episode is currently in post-production and, assuming I don’t accidentally destroy it while learning how audio editing works, should be available very soon.
The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast brings together our two main areas of interest: Darren’s knowledge and writing around autism, and my background in financial services and financial independence.
We’re hoping to have the first episode out very soon. More details, including where you’ll be able to listen, will follow. Click the link below to see the Facebook page for the pod.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61593076251704
What I’m Doing
Listening: Biological War by Annie Jacobson.
Watching: The Last House (Netflix).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey
We sat down to watch The Last House, having been hooked by the trailer. It started well enough, but made a few mistakes. In the end, it was a disappointing experience. Based just on the trailer, we’d expected something with the tension of something like Signs but ended up more like Mars Attacks.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £153,244.05.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £130,399.27.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £529,683.32.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,447.84.
Total Debts: £173,447.84.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £356,235.48.
My pension and ISA balances are now at the highest they’ve ever been. Considering I’ve hardly earned anything in close to a year, that’s incredible.
I’ve got just under two weeks until my new role starts, and hopefully I can hit the ground running and start earning some money quickly. I want to start hammering the investments again, but I also want to be able to spend money without feeling guilty about it.
The Most Important Number in FIRE Isn’t Your FIRE Number
I had an interesting conversation with someone who has just discovered FIRE, and it followed a predictable opening question about what my FIRE number is. This is the question that tends to dominate everything when someone starts on their FIRE journey.
What’s my FIRE number? £500,000? £750,000? A million quid?
It’s understandable as we like tangible targets.
There’s something wonderfully satisfying about having a big number sitting at the end of a spreadsheet that tells us, once I get there, I’ve won capitalism and can finally go outside.
The thing is, your FIRE number isn’t actually the most important number in the calculation.
Your annual spending is. Your FIRE number is ultimately a consequence of how much money you need to live.
Using the traditional 4% rule of thumb (yes, I know it’s not perfect and there’s debate about it being too conservative; please don’t come at me for using an example), the calculation is incredibly simple. Take your annual spending and multiply it by 25.
If you need £20,000 per year, you’re looking at roughly £500,000.
£30,000 per year? £750,000.
£40,000? £1 million.
Obviously, reality is considerably messier. Taxes exist. Investment returns aren’t guaranteed. Inflation exists. Spending changes throughout retirement. The 4% rule itself comes with enough caveats to fill another blog post, as I mentioned a few sentences ago.
As a rough illustration, though, it demonstrates something incredibly powerful.
Every £1,000 of annual spending requires approximately £25,000 of invested wealth to sustain it.
Think about that for a moment.
If you’re spending £100 per month on something, that’s £1,200 per year.
Using our rough 4% calculation, you’d need £30,000 invested purely to support that £100 monthly expense indefinitely.
Suddenly recurring expenditure starts looking very different.
But, and this is important, I’m not suggesting you immediately cancel Netflix, stop buying coffee, and spend your evenings sitting in darkness because electricity costs money.
That’s missing the point of financial independence entirely.
The goal isn’t necessarily to make your spending as low as humanly possible. It’s to understand what your spending is buying you.
If spending £100 per month on something genuinely makes your life significantly better, then fantastic. Maybe it’s worth needing another £30,000 in your eventual portfolio.
But if that £100 disappears every month on something you barely notice, suddenly there’s an interesting trade-off.
You’re not simply choosing between spending or saving £100. You’re potentially choosing between maintaining that expense indefinitely or needing to accumulate another £30,000 before your investments can support it.
This is something I think gets overlooked when people talk about FIRE. Suppose your target expenditure is £30,000 per year.
At 4%, your theoretical FIRE number is: £750,000.
You could spend years obsessing over how to get from £500,000 to £750,000 faster.
Earn more. Invest more. Optimise your portfolio. Chase promotions, and so on.
But there’s another variable. If you discovered that you could live perfectly happily on £28,000 instead, suddenly the calculation becomes: £700,000.
You’ve effectively moved your finish line £50,000 closer without earning another penny.
Reduce sustainable annual spending by £5,000 and the theoretical portfolio requirement falls by £125,000.
Of course, the reverse is equally true.
Perhaps you originally thought £25,000 per year would provide the lifestyle you wanted, but as you get older you realise you’d actually prefer £30,000. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
However, those additional £5,000 of annual expenses potentially add another £125,000 to the portfolio required to support them.
This is why knowing what your life actually costs is so much more useful than picking an arbitrary FIRE number.
Top Ten Countdown – The Best Financial Advice
We’ve now finished the list of Best Financial Advice, and I’m going to start my new list a little further down. First of all, I just wanted to give people the opportunity to review the full list.
10. Know Where Your Money Actually Goes (Part 345)
9. Avoid Lifestyle Inflation (Part 346)
8. Don’t Try to Look Rich (Part 347)
6. Invest Early and Let Time Do the Heavy Lifting (Part 349)
5. Avoid High-Interest Debt (Part 350)
4. Build an Emergency Fund (Part 351)
3. Spend Intentionally (Part 352)
2. Live Below Your Means (Part 353)
1. Pay Yourself First (Part 354)
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
10. Flat Earth
Let’s start this list with one of the absolute titans of conspiracy theory: the Earth is flat.
Not metaphorically flat. Not “it looks pretty flat from my bedroom window” flat. Actually, genuinely, physically flat.
According to my smooth-brained friends who believe in this theory, thousands of years of astronomy, physics, navigation and mathematics have all been leading us up the garden path. The planet beneath our feet isn’t an enormous sphere but, according to the most common Flat Earth model, essentially a giant disc with the North Pole somewhere around the middle and Antarctica forming a gigantic ring of ice around the outside.
And everyone is lying about it, including but not limited to:
NASA
ESA
Scientists
Governments
Airlines
Shipping companies
Satellite operators
Meteorologists
Universities
Astronomers
The conspiracy required to hide the shape of the Earth would be immense. Just thinking about NASA, ESA, and airline pilots, we’re talking approximately 400,000 people. Taking into account all the other space agencies, like China’s, India’s, even North Korea’s, and all the other industries, professions, and so on, we’re talking millions of people needing to be involved in this conspiracy.
What’s that joke? Something like two people couldn’t keep a blowjob in the Oval Office secret?
The first slight problem: we’ve known the Earth is round for a very long time
One of my favourite things about Flat Earth conspiracy theories is the obsession with NASA.
“NASA lies!”
“NASA photographs are fake!”
“NASA uses CGI!”
Okay.
Let’s pretend NASA is lying about everything.
NASA was founded less than a century ago. Humanity worked out that the Earth was spherical more than 2,000 years earlier.
The ancient Greeks weren’t merely sitting around saying, “Looks a bit ball-shaped to me, lads.” They were making observations and using mathematics to test the idea.
Around the third century BCE, Eratosthenes famously compared the shadows cast by objects in two different Egyptian locations. By knowing the approximate distance between them and measuring the difference in the angle of the Sun, he was able to estimate the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy.
Eratosthenes was also the Chief Librarian of the Library of Alexandria, which is insanely cool but I digress.
**meme**
He had no satellites, electronic computers, CGI, or anything like that. He had two sticks and his brain.
More than two thousand years later, some bloke on Facebook has watched a seventeen-minute YouTube video and decided Eratosthenes didn’t know what he was talking about.
Some of the finest minds in human history -> The Earth is a sphere.
Bubba from Facebook -> BULLSHIT
Just look at the damn horizon
There are countless everyday observations consistent with living on a spherical planet.
Watch a ship travel away from you. It doesn’t simply become smaller and smaller until it’s too tiny to see. The bottom disappears below the horizon first, followed progressively by the rest of the vessel.
Go higher, and you can see farther. Right, it’s time for a little tangent, so everyone climb aboard the Tangent Train.
Years ago Oana and I were in York. We went to the top of the Minster, and the views were spectacular. It was busy up there, as you’d expect, but fairly quiet. Then, an American voice yelled across the roof, “Can we see London from up here?” Well, if the Earth was flat you should be able to with a powerful enough telescope.
This is precisely what you’d expect if you were standing on a curved surface.
Flat Earthers naturally have explanations for this involving perspective, atmospheric refraction and various other phenomena. And this highlights one of the fundamental problems with Flat Earth.
There isn’t really a Flat Earth model in the same sense that there’s a scientific model of a spherical Earth.
There’s a collection of individual explanations designed to deal with individual problems.
Explain the horizon and something else breaks.
Explain the Sun and something else breaks.
Explain seasons and something else breaks.
Explain Australia and the entire thing catches fire.
Australia is particularly inconvenient
The most commonly depicted Flat Earth map places the North Pole at the centre with the continents spread around it and Antarctica forming a giant ring around the outside.
At first glance, you might think, “Well, that looks vaguely map-like.”
There’s a reason for that; it’s basically a projection of the globe.
The problem comes when you start looking at distances in the Southern Hemisphere.
On this map, places like Australia, South America and southern Africa become increasingly stretched apart compared with their actual relationships on a globe.
Yet people fly between these places. We know how long those flights take. We know how fast commercial aircraft travel.
So now the airlines have to be involved as well. Not just pilots, but the people who design the planes, and the capabilities of these planes in general.
Presumably pilots take off from Sydney, disappear behind a curtain for fourteen hours, perform some elaborate aerial sleight of hand whilst playing Candy Crush and then land in Santiago hoping nobody brought a stopwatch or looked out of the window.
Then there are time zones Right now, somewhere on Earth it’s daytime while somewhere else it’s night.
On a rotating spherical Earth illuminated by the Sun, this is extremely easy to explain.
One side faces the Sun.
One side doesn’t.
Done.
Flat Earth requires something considerably more elaborate.
The Sun is generally described as a much smaller object circling above the disc, illuminating particular areas as it travels.
Except now we need this model to explain not only day and night but sunrise, sunset, the changing apparent position of the Sun, seasons, different lengths of daylight throughout the year and the extreme variations experienced near the poles.
This is a recurring theme. The globe doesn’t need a separate mechanism for each observation. They’re consequences of the same model.
Flat Earth continually has to bolt another piece onto the machine.
Occam’s Razor argues that the explanation that requires the fewest unnecessary assumptions is most likely to be correct, i.e. the simplest explanation is generally correct.
Considering how simple you have to be to believe Flat Earth, it’s bizarre that the theory requires such a complex house of cards to exist.
The Stars
Look at the night sky from different parts of Earth and you’ll see different things.
People in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres observe different celestial poles, with the stars appearing to rotate in opposite directions around them.
Again, this makes perfect sense if we’re standing on different parts of a sphere.
It’s considerably harder to explain if everyone is standing on the same side of a giant dinner plate.
At this point we’ve already implicated governments, NASA, scientists, sailors, airlines and probably half the telecommunications industry.
Now the heavens are in on it.
Gravity
Gravity presents another entertaining problem.
Some Flat Earth proponents reject gravity and instead talk about density and buoyancy.
Except density and buoyancy don’t actually explain why things fall down.
Buoyancy describes forces within fluids in a gravitational field. Saying something falls because it’s denser than the surrounding air doesn’t explain why the direction it moves is towards the floor rather than towards Birmingham.
Historically, some Flat Earth explanations have gone in another direction: perhaps the entire disc is accelerating upwards.
Constantly.
At approximately 9.8 metres per second squared.
Which certainly is one way of solving a problem. Unfortunately, it’s rather like explaining why your kitchen light won’t turn on by proposing that your entire house is being attacked by mini Cthulu monsters.
You’ve replaced a well-understood phenomenon with something vastly more extraordinary while explaining considerably less.
Forget astronomy, gravity, Eratosthenes, and flight paths.
Forget eclipses, seasons, stars, satellites and the fact that humans have literally travelled into space and looked back at the Earth.
I have one question: Why?
Why are they hiding it?
Suppose tomorrow somebody produces incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is flat.
What happens?
If the theory is true, millions upon millions of people would already have to know.
What’s more, all these people, spread across countries that have spent significant portions of history actively trying to kill each other, have apparently agreed that there’s one thing more important than geopolitics, ideology, religion or national interest:
Nobody tells the public about the disc.
Not one disgruntled NASA employee has walked out with the photographs. Not one Russian cosmonaut has blown the whistle. Not one airline pilot going through a particularly bitter divorce has decided, “Fuck it, I’m telling everyone about Antarctica.”
Millions of people would potentially have to participate in, accommodate or somehow remain oblivious to the greatest deception in human history.
Yet Brenda from Essex managed to crack the case because the horizon looked suspiciously flat on her holiday in Tenerife.
I’m convinced that some Flat Earther’s are in on the joke. I’m also convinced that some people out there are true believers. I need a drink.
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.