Blog - Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Part 327: FI Levers, and a Wednesday Legend

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

I’ve got my first week in my new role under my belt, and from next week I will be seeing clients. I’m feeling good about this new opportunity as it offers many of the things I value in a professional setting, like autonomy coupled with support, and the chance to really progress based on merit. After the false start with my previous employer, I’m pretty confident I’ve landed in the right place.

Apart from work, there have not been a huge number of other noteworthy events. The weather has not helped as it’s been very cold and very rainy; not exactly the best weather for biking. We’ve somehow managed to get a couple of decent rides in, though.

Stay in your lane…

Since I started biking, I’ve been genuinely astonished by just how many people appear to move through the world in a state of total sensory shutdown. I don’t mean just distracted or briefly inattentive. I’m talking about being fully checked out. Eyes glued to a phone like it’s administering life support, and their ears are hermetically sealed behind noise-cancelling headphones, presumably blasting a podcast about “mindfulness” while they remain blissfully unaware of the literal, physical environment they are occupying.

These people don’t walk so much as meander. A slow, drifting, diagonal shuffle that obeys no rules of space, flow, or common sense. It’s like watching a shit spinoff of The Walking Dead sponsored by AirPods. They wander straight into clearly marked cycle lanes, you know, the ones with the painted bikes, the signage, the colour-coded tarmac, and then act genuinely surprised that bikes are, in fact, present. It’s like stepping onto a motorway and being offended by cars.

Ah, but your bike has a bell, does it not? Oh, the bell. We ring it. Politely at first. Ding. Then again. Ding ding. Then louder, longer, more urgent; the acoustic equivalent of “PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE REALITY”. Nothing. No flinch. No glance. No recognition that another human being travelling at speed is approaching. Because when your ears are sealed, and your eyes are locked on a six-inch dopamine rectangle, the outside world may as well not exist.

It might be somewhat more understandable if this were a quiet, rural road. It’s not, though. This is shared, busy, infrastructure. This is urban space. This is where cyclists, runners, prams, mobility scooters, dogs, kids, and delivery riders all have to coexist. Yet a growing number of people behave as though they are the sole protagonist in a badly written open-world game, and everyone else is just badly rendered background NPCs.

Note: I am increasingly convinced day by day that NPCs truly do walk amongst us.

One day, and it’s inevitable, someone will step out at precisely the wrong moment. It will be too late for us to brake or swerve. Physics will do what physics always does, and it won’t care that someone was halfway through a voice note or a TikTok.

When this happens, the cyclist will be blamed. Because of course they will. Helmets will be mentioned. Speed will be scrutinised. High-viz will be debated on breakfast television. Meanwhile, the root cause of total, voluntary disengagement from reality will be politely ignored.

This isn’t about cyclists being angry. It’s about basic situational awareness. About understanding that public space is shared, dynamic, and occasionally requires you to lift your head, take one earbud out, and acknowledge that other humans exist. You don’t get to opt out of reality just because your phone is more interesting than the world around you.

If you want to wander around like a zombie, fine. But don’t do it in a cycle lane. And don’t act shocked when the rest of us, who are actually paying attention, are absolutely sick of it.

If you are one of those people that hates cyclists for whatever reason, everything I’ve just said applies to people crossing roads without looking. Everyone, everywhere, needs to pay closer attention to the world around them.

More Customer Service Frustration

If anyone knows of a food delivery service, like Uber Eats or Deliveroo, that’s actually decent, please let me know.

We don’t do it as much as we used to, but every so often, we feel like just ordering in and chilling in front of the TV. Friday was one of those times. We ordered using Uber Eats, and this is where the frustration generally starts.

I’m of the view that if you are ordering hot food and paying a service fee and a delivery fee, the food should go from the restaurant to me directly. It seems like every time now, the rider has several stops before us. This means the food bag is opened up a good few times before we get our food, with the net result being cold food.

On Friday, they went one further by turning up with someone else’s food, having given our food to the person before. Mistakes happen, I get it. I tried to explain to the driver that it wasn’t our food, but there was a language barrier, and at this point, there wasn’t anything he could have done anyway. Dealing with Uber Eats customer service is like self-inflicted torture as well. Eventually, we got a refund and reordered our food. Almost two hours after we placed the first order, we got our food. It was supposed to be convenient and ended up anything but.

There is a simple way of dealing with this: one order at a time, rather than putting delivery drivers under more pressure with multiple deliveries at the same time. I’d happily pay more for this if it meant those doing the deliveries were properly recruited, trained, and looked after.

Barry Bannan: more than a player, Mr Sheffield Wednesday

When Barry Bannan arrived at Sheffield Wednesday, this was a very different football club.

Wednesday were stable and ambitious. We were looking forward, not over our shoulders.

The talk was of building, of progression, of finally forcing the door back open to the Premier League. Bannan was signed as part of a long-term plan.

What followed instead was a decade of near-constant upheaval. Two good seasons that ended in the play-offs gave way to financial hardship, transfer embargoes, and ownership chaos.

COVID ripped the soul out of matchdays. What followed was relegations, points deductions, managers cycling through, squads torn apart, and rebuilt on the cheap. A club with a proud history lurching from crisis to crisis.

In spite of the previous owner, there was one silver lining: Barry Bannan stayed.

He stayed and carried the responsibility. He became the metronome, the organiser, the player who always wanted the ball when others went missing. Over time, he became more than captain; he was the heart and soul of Sheffield Wednesday on the pitch.

And this wasn’t just sentiment or nostalgia. The numbers back it up. Since the 2019/20 season, no player across the top four divisions of English football has created more chances than Barry Bannan. Not Premier League stars. Not Champions League regulars. Barry Bannan. Season after season, in struggling sides, in relegation fights, in teams patched together under embargoes, he still out-created everyone else. We would sing, “he’s better than Zidane” and whilst that might be a slight exaggeration, it’s only slight.

The stats tell you everything. This wasn’t a player hiding in comfort. This was elite, measurable output delivered under the worst possible conditions. As the club unravelled around him, Bannan became more than a footballer. He became Mr Sheffield Wednesday. A technically gifted midfielder who didn’t treat the club as a stepping stone, but as a home. He fell in love with the city, with the people, and he gave back, most notably through his work as an ambassador for The Children’s Hospital Charity, showing that his commitment went far beyond the pitch.

Eventually, reality caught up. Loyalty can’t fix structural chaos forever. And so, painfully, he had to move on, joining Millwall while Sheffield Wednesday continues to fight fires of its own making.

No reasonable Owls fan holds this against him. No serious fan ever could.

This is a club founded in 1867, a number that all Owls fans know. It is no coincidence that at his new club, Bannan chose the squad number 67. A quiet, classy nod. A reminder that some bonds don’t disappear; they endure. It is also a message: Barry Bannan will return to Sheffield Wednesday one day.

Some players don’t just play for clubs; they become part of them.

Barry Bannan has gone beyond hero status.
Beyond eras. Beyond divisions. Beyond chaos.

Barry Bannan: Legend.

What I’m Doing

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

Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).

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

We are enjoying our rewatch of Spartacus on Netflix. It’s utterly over the top and full of questionable CGI and acting, but it’s great fun, and surprisingly deep at times. The best bit, after the language, is the constant Aura Farming. I love it.

Once we are done with Spartacus it might be time to rewatch For All Mankind in preparation for the new season.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £128,954.44.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,203.15.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £509,589.20.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,531.44.

Total Debts: £174,531.44.

Total Wealth: £335,057.76.

The Three Levers That Quietly Control Financial Independence

When people talk about Financial Independence, they often fixate on a single number, the withdrawal rate, as if it’s a magic setting you either get “right” or “wrong”. In reality, FIRE is controlled by three interlinked levers:

Your annual spending
Your chosen withdrawal rate
Your tolerance for risk over time

The table below shows how small, reasonable adjustments to the first two can dramatically change the size of the pot you need, while the third, success rate, shifts in a much more gradual, predictable way than people expect.

Withdrawal Rate	Annual Spend	Pot Needed	Success Rate over 30 years according to FIRECalc
4.00%	£30,000.00	£750,000.00	95.20%
4.00%	£29,400.00	£735,000.00	95.20%
4.00%	£28,800.00	£720,000.00	95.20%
5.00%	£30,000.00	£600,000.00	74.40%
5.00%	£29,400.00	£588,000.00	74.40%
5.00%	£28,800.00	£576,000.00	74.40%
6.00%	£30,000.00	£500,000.00	54.40%
6.00%	£29,400.00	£490,000.00	54.40%
6.00%	£28,800.00	£480,000.00	54.40%

4.00%	£30,000.00	£750,000.00	95.20%
4.00%	£29,400.00	£735,000.00	95.20%
4.00%	£28,800.00	£720,000.00	95.20%
4.00%	£28,200.00	£705,000.00	95.20%
4.00%	£27,600.00	£690,000.00	95.20%

4.50%	£30,000.00	£666,666.67	84.00%
4.50%	£29,400.00	£653,333.33	84.00%
4.50%	£28,800.00	£640,000.00	84.00%
4.50%	£28,200.00	£626,666.67	84.00%
4.50%	£27,600.00	£613,333.33	84.00%

Lever One: Annual Spending (The Quiet Giant)

Start with the 4% rows. Whether you’re spending £30,000 or £27,600 a year, the success rate over 30 years remains the same at 95.2%. Nothing about the risk profile changes. The market doesn’t care whether you’re withdrawing £30k or £28k; the percentage is what matters.

But the size of the pot absolutely does change.

A £100-per-month reduction in spending (£1,200 a year) reduces the required pot by £30,000 at a 4% withdrawal rate. Do that twice, £200 a month, and you’ve knocked £60,000 off your FI target without touching your investments, your asset allocation, or your returns assumptions.

That’s the first under-appreciated truth of FIRE: small, permanent spending changes scale massively over decades.

Lever Two: Withdrawal Rate (The Blunt Instrument)

Now look at what happens when you move the withdrawal rate instead.

At 4%, £30,000 requires £750,000 and gives a 95.2% historical success rate.

At 4.5%, the same income requires £666,667, over £80,000 less, but the success rate drops to 84%.

At 5%, the pot falls to £600,000, with a 74.4% success rate.

At 6%, it’s £500,000, but now you’re flipping a coin at 54.4%.

This is where nuance matters.

Increasing the withdrawal rate is powerful, but it’s not free. You’re trading certainty for speed. What’s often missed, though, is that this trade-off isn’t binary. A move from 4% to 4.5% doesn’t suddenly make FIRE reckless; it shifts the odds in a measurable, understandable way.

And crucially…

Lever Three: Combining the Two (Where the Magic Happens)

The real power comes when you combine modest spending reductions with modest withdrawal-rate changes.

At 4.5%, reducing spending from £30,000 to £27,600 lowers the required pot from £666,667 to £613,333, a £53,000 difference, while keeping the same 84% success rate. You haven’t increased risk at all; you’ve simply reduced how much capital the strategy demands.

This is why FIRE isn’t about heroic deprivation or extreme assumptions. It’s about recognising that spending is a multiplier on your FI number and that your withdrawal rate is a risk dial, not a switch. Flexibility dramatically improves both

Why This Matters More Than Market Returns

People will happily argue for hours about whether 4% is “safe” while ignoring the fact that a £100 monthly spending reduction can eliminate tens of thousands of pounds from the finish line. Or that a 0.5% shift in withdrawal rate can shave years off the journey if paired with flexibility and adaptability. You don’t have to lock into a single withdrawal rate and budget, and then never deviate from it. If you go down one path and it doesn’t work, you have time to pivot.

FIRECalc doesn’t say “this will fail”, it says “this worked X% of the time historically”. Your job isn’t to find a perfect number. It’s to decide which trade-offs you’re comfortable making.

Financial Independence isn’t a single destination. It’s a range of outcomes, and the levers you pull determine how quickly and how comfortably you get there.

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.

Part 326: TACO

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week, I explain TACO investing and look back on a week of training for my new job.

Weekly Update

I started my training for my new self-employed venture this week. I’m still a mortgage and protection advisor, but I’m now working for myself under a brokerage. This means my leads, systems, compliance, and admin are all provided. However, I will not have a salary and will be working purely on commission.

I’m not really worried by this because, and I don’t mean to sound arrogant here, I generally have a great relationship with the people I help with their mortgages. Back at Lloyds, I had many customers who would contact me directly to review their arrangements every so often, and even from my last job at IMH, I’ve had several people reach out to me directly, stating that I’d helped their friend or family member, and they wanted to refer them on to me.

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From time to time, everyone will complain about their job, but in all seriousness, I actually do enjoy helping people with their mortgages. It’s a stressful thing for many families, and knowing that I’ve helped in some small way is a great feeling, more so when they remember you and come back to you every couple of years.

When I worked at Lloyds, I had many customers like this who, over the course of a decade, I was there to help them along. What was also a real boost was that they often remembered snippets from our conversations, asking about holidays we’d talked about, or films and books we’d discussed. I really enjoy that element of the job.

The training I had this week ended up being a positive experience. In the middle of the week, I was extremely stressed out as I didn’t think I was getting the new systems. However, once I’d slept on it and asked the trainer for a few minutes to clarify some points, it all dropped into place, and I smashed the final assessment.

Eating Out

I wrote recently about an annoying experience we had at Psalter in Sheffield. Well, we’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum this week with Kapital. Truth be told, we have eaten there twice in the last couple of weeks, and both times the food and service have been fantastic. It’s not fine dining, or even claiming to be fine dining. It’s German beer hall style food, and it’s very well done.

They do this warm pretzel that is served with mustard, pickled vegetables, and sauerkraut, and it’s tasty and comforting. Last time we dined there, I had the burger with two beef patties, bacon, cheese, pickles, sauerkraut, and currywurst mayo. It was the best burger I’ve eaten in Sheffield. Oana had the goulash, and for dessert, we had apple strudel, which was incredibly good and would not be out of place in any restaurant.

On Saturday, we went for pizza with my Dad, who has not been well for a few weeks. Pizza Express had an offer where you could order one pizza and get another for £1. We like the Romana base for our pizzas, and there was a small surcharge for this, but it was still a great offer. So, we basically shared four large pizzas between the three of us. Piggish? Yes. Would I do it again? Also, yes.

Cabbagegate

With my Dad not having been well, Oana and I have done a few shopping runs for him on our bikes. On our most recent trip, we had his shopping and ours in our panniers. After handing over his shopping, we tried to exit the apartment complex via the gate, which is only wide enough for one bike at a time. Oana went first and then propped up her bike to hold the gate open for me (I had held it for her to exit first before getting on my bike).

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Anyway, her bike toppled over, crushing one of the panniers that had a couple of jars of pickled cabbage. One of the jars broke, spilling the pickled cabbage and the pickle juice all over the inside of a brand-new pannier that was having its first use.

The smell of pickled cabbage is surprisingly difficult to get out of a pannier that is not suitable for a washing machine. So yeah, that happened.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Ragnarok: Chess Team Book 4 by Jeremy Robinson and Kane Gilmour.

Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).

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

We’ve been having a lot of fun watching Spartacus on Netflix. I’ve seen it loads of times over the years. The language is hilarious, and the fight scenes are entertaining. All that aside, it’s a pretty good story if you can excuse some questionable CGI and the array of Australian and New Zealand accents.

Anyway, throughout the week, I’ve been asking ChatGPT to reword my messages to Oana and family as if they were written by someone from the show. I was getting frustrated by Poppy coming in and out of my office several times an hour during training. Below is an example of some of the messages:

By the gods, this house has become a theatre of repeated torment.

Poppy stations herself at my office door and unleashes a yowl fit to summon legions, demanding entry as though denied her rightful dominion. I relent — because I am weak, and because I love her.

No sooner does she cross the threshold than the cries begin anew. Now she demands freedom. The door must open again. Honour compels obedience.

And so the cycle repeats. In. Out. In. Out. A ceaseless march of noise and indignation, as if I am not master of my work, but keeper of the gate to feline whims.

Know this — my affection for her is vast, unyielding, and unquestioned. But by Jupiter’s swollen arse, the frustration gnaws at my soul like a gladiator denied wine and women.

I endure. I always endure.

And…

I am convinced this is no accident, but war.

Poppy yowls at the door not from need, but from calculation. She demands entry, waits only long enough to taste victory, then turns and screams for release — eyes alight with the knowledge that I will obey.

This is not confusion. This is strategy. A slow, deliberate breaking of spirit.

She knows I adore her. She wields this truth like a blade, carving away sanity one demand at a time. In. Out. In. Out. Each command answered, each shred of dignity surrendered.

Let the record show: I would die for this cat without hesitation.

But by the gods, she laughs at me.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £128,579.93.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,629.39.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £509,640.93.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83.

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £334,948.10.

I’m delighted to have made it to this point without having to cash in any investments, having left my last job in October.

TACO Investing

There’s something a little grotesque about the idea of TACO investing once you stop laughing at the acronym.

At first glance, it sounds like gallows humour from traders who’ve seen the same film too many times. An unhinged or otherwise batshit crazy announcement from Donald Trump rattles markets. Screens glow red. Pundits shout. Retail investors panic. Then, almost on cue, the threat is softened, delayed, rebranded, or quietly shelved. Markets rebound. Those who “knew the pattern” pat themselves on the back and bank the gains. MAGA supporters shout out about the “Art of the Deal.”

For those of us who are not completely stupid, a familiar pattern starts to emerge;

Trump Always Chickens Out.

It’s funny until you look at who’s actually paying the price for the joke.

TACO investing isn’t really about clever insight or behavioural finance theory. It’s about trying to arbitrage a single man’s temperament. It’s a bet that bluster will outweigh conviction, that ego will trump consequences, and that the market will be allowed to calm down before anything genuinely irreversible happens. And that’s a hell of a thing to build an investment strategy around.

The danger is obvious, even if people pretend otherwise. Patterns only exist until they don’t. The moment someone assumes the threat is always empty is the moment the threat becomes most dangerous. All it takes is one instance where the follow-through actually happens, one tariff that sticks, one policy that isn’t walked back, one institutional norm that really is broken, and the entire logic collapses.

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The people who thought they were being contrarian geniuses suddenly discover they were just standing in front of a moving train, trusting it would swerve like it always had before.

And it’s not just traders playing games with their own money. This is where it tips from reckless to morally repellent.

Markets don’t exist in a vacuum. Every wild swing triggered by a presidential mood affects pensions, ISAs, workplace schemes, insurance funds, and long-term savers who never opted into this absurd casino. Ordinary people trying to quietly build financial security, often through nothing more exotic than global index funds, end up whiplashed by the ego-driven theatrics of one man-child who knows full well that markets respond to his words.

That’s the truly ugly part. It isn’t accidental, and it isn’t a side effect. It’s leverage, it’s a feature, and not a bug.

When a president understands that a single sentence can erase or create hundreds of billions in market value, and uses that power casually, performatively, or strategically, it stops being “tough negotiating” and starts looking like market manipulation by proxy. A select few, such as those fast enough, informed enough, or connected enough, can exploit the volatility. Everyone else just absorbs the shock, and wealth continues to be transferred from the masses to the select few.

The cruelty lies in the asymmetry. Those at the top can frame chaos as strength and retreat as victory, while those at the bottom are told volatility is just “the cost of investing”. It’s not bravery. It’s not leadership.

And for individual investors tempted by TACO logic, there’s a quieter danger too. It trains you to think short-term. It nudges you away from fundamentals and towards personality-watching. You stop asking what assets are worth and start asking how likely someone is to blink. That’s not investing and is just gambling. If you don’t understand it, it’s always gambling.

Long-term wealth is built on boring things: time, diversification, discipline, and patience. TACO investing asks you to abandon all of that in favour of timing political mood swings. Even when it “works”, it corrodes good habits. When it fails, it does so suddenly and brutally.

Perhaps the most damning thing about TACO investing is that it normalises the idea that this is just how the world works now. That the markets should flinch every time a powerful man posts, speaks, or performs outrage. That billions of people should accept instability as entertainment for the powerful and an opportunity for the already-wealthy.

It shouldn’t be normal. And it certainly shouldn’t be shrugged off as clever.

Because when one individual can toy with the financial lives of millions and others rush in to monetise the tremors, it isn’t a savvy investing culture. It’s just a symptom of something badly broken in our society, and with our leaders.

What about Greenland?

Coming straight off the back of TACO investing, the Greenland episode feels less like a surprise and more like the latest case study in the same grim pattern: maximalist threat, market and diplomatic shock, followed by a carefully stage-managed retreat dressed up as triumph.

After all the noise about tariffs, sovereignty, and America’s “strategic necessity” to control the Arctic, what actually happened? The United States ended up with the same rights it already had. Let’s unpack it…

The Trump administration declared the United States had “secured access”, “guaranteed cooperation”, and “protected its strategic interests”. Except it already had all of those things under long-standing agreements with Denmark. The ability to move forces, operate bases, and cooperate on defence in Greenland didn’t emerge from this crisis; it pre-dated it by decades. Nothing changed except that the United States’ reputation on the international stage was tarnished yet again.

This is where the Greenland fiasco slots perfectly into the TACO investing mindset. Just as markets have learned to discount Trump’s threats because of his tendency to back down, so too did allies treat this episode as bluster rather than policy. And just like in markets, that adjustment only happened after damage was done.

For investors who fancy themselves clever enough to play this pattern, Greenland is also a warning label. It reinforces the illusion that you can reliably arbitrage one man’s temperament. That you can safely assume escalation is performative and retreat is inevitable. But every time that assumption holds, it also raises the stakes for the time it doesn’t. If you build your strategy on the belief that someone will always blink, you’re eventually standing there when they don’t, whether through miscalculation, ego, or sheer stubbornness.

Morally, though, the Greenland episode is even uglier than the trading logic behind it.

This wasn’t just a market-moving tweet or a tariff threat. It involved the sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity of a population being treated as a geopolitical bargaining chip. Greenlanders were discussed as assets. Their land as inventory. Their future as leverage. All so a powerful man could posture, provoke, and then retreat while claiming a win that never actually materialised.

The man is so fucking stupid and so irredeemable that he could arguably be the biggest danger to global peace. That’s the part that should make people deeply uncomfortable. The guy is willing to threaten armed conflict just to earn a few more dollars.

Greenland shows the full arc of Trump Always Chickening Out: the reckless opening move, the destabilisation, the quiet reversal, and the victory lap taken on ground that never shifted. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of setting fire to a room, extinguishing it yourself, and then demanding applause for heroism.

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.

Part 325: Pasta Disaster

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. Thoughts on our FI timeline, and some bizarre experiences dining out.

Weekly Update

It’s been a very eventful week that started with my Nan’s funeral. The funeral was at one o’clock on Monday. The crematorium is around fifteen minutes away by car. I started trying to book an uber at quarter past twelve, allowing what I thought was more than enough margin. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, uber was insanely busy. A bus wasn’t an option as the routes don’t line up neatly, and timetables are unforgiving when you’re already running late.

At 12:52, I finally secured a driver. By the time I arrived, the service had already begun. I slipped into the chapel quietly, aware that I’d missed the opening moments. Afterwards, I was told that I’d been mentioned early on. There’s a particular kind of frustration in knowing you were present in words, but not yet in body, and it comes with a feeling of having let someone down, even when circumstances were outside your control.

When I was first born, I spent some time living at my Nan’s with my mum, who was very young then. We didn’t talk about it much, but as a young boy I remember time spent there clearly. Sitting at the table playing cards with her. The kitchen was always busy with the comings and goings of my aunties, uncles, and cousins. Mountains of home-cooked chips appearing as if by magic, eaten alongside slice after slice of buttered bread. Huge pots of stew that seemed to last for days. Endless mugs of tea, made without asking, just placed in front of you because that’s what you did.

From what I was able to witness, it was a lovely service. Warm, respectful, and genuinely reflective of who she was; a loving woman who meant a great deal to the people around her. It felt like a fitting send-off. I wish I’d been there from the very beginning, but I’m grateful for what I did see, and for the chance to sit, listen, and say goodbye in my own way.

I didn’t stay long at the wake as I didn’t feel comfortable. It was in a small pub that was very cramped and busy. I was already on edge a little from the stress of being late, and so I had a drink with my Mom and spoke with a few family members, and then made my way home.

It was Oana’s birthday this week and we’ve had a couple of meals out to celebrate, which I’ll go into more detail about later. We also had a huge bike ride on her birthday itself. We covered just over 45km in our longest ride to date.

There’s one part of the route we took where we encounter a fair few people walking their dogs and occasionally we will stop and have a chat with them. This time we saw a guy walking a staffy on a leash. The dog was friendly and came bounding over to us. I think the walker was worried at first that we would be scared or annoyed, but we both fussed over the dog which we learned was called Bonnie. She was excitable and playful, and would jump up at us both for head scratches. After a few minutes our bottoms were covered in muddy paw prints but we didn’t mind. You can’t be mad when another living creature is that happy and excited just to interact with you for a few moments.

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Pasta Disaster

Before I get stuck into this, it’s worth setting some context. Oana and I are foodies. We’ve been fortunate enough to eat in genuinely excellent restaurants across multiple continents, from steak houses in Syracuse and barbecue joints in South Carolina, to Michelin-starred venues in Berlin and street food stalls in India.

We judge food by context. A kebab from a backstreet Turkish place in Sliema is not held to the same standard as a nine-course tasting menu served in a former gold merchant’s basement in Prague (a meal I still rave about ten years on), nor should it be. Different settings, different expectations.

What is consistent, though, is our love of food as an experience. It’s our main vice. We care about the theatre of it, the pacing, the service, the atmosphere, and the sense that someone, somewhere, actually gives a damn.

Which is precisely why this evening was so disappointing.

We booked Psalter for what should have been a genuinely meaningful evening: a birthday and a (belated) anniversary, clearly stated at the time of booking. To be fair, and fairness is important, the birthday was acknowledged. There was a thoughtful handwritten card, mentioned by the first waitress when we were seated. A genuinely lovely touch.

The anniversary, however, was completely ignored. Not mentioned once. When you explicitly flag a double occasion and only half of it registers, it immediately sets the tone. Not disastrous on its own, but the first hairline crack in what turned out to be a rapidly collapsing façade.

The first course arrived promptly: cheese tarts, a small fish tart for me, and a beetroot one for Oana. On the plate, these were excellent. Beautifully presented, delicate, wafer-thin pastry, technically impressive. Unfortunately, they were delivered by a waitress who appeared to resent both the food and our existence. My plate was slammed onto the table, and my dish was introduced with the immortal phrase:

“Salmon-tuna-whatever.”

In a fine dining restaurant. Just let that sit there.

A third waiter then appeared to explain the dishes properly, though with all the warmth and engagement of someone announcing train delays. This was also the point at which it became clear that we were not being looked after by a waiter, but by an endlessly rotating cast of strangers. Within ten minutes, we’d had four different members of staff at the table. No rapport or continuity. Just vibes.

Bread with Marmite butter followed which was genuinely excellent and we accepted an unprompted offer for more. We, reasonably I would argue, assumed it would arrive shortly. It didn’t. Two courses later, we had to ask where it was. Apparently expectations are a personal failing now.

The winter squash tart with lovage, black garlic and squash purées was fine. Not particularly to my taste (thick custard textures remain deeply suspicious), but the purées were well balanced and clearly skillfully made.

Then came the cauliflower cheese. This was the high point of the evening. Faultless. Rich, comforting, beautifully executed. With the eventual arrival of the second helping of bread, it briefly felt like we were eating in the restaurant we’d booked rather than the one we were actually in. We could happily have eaten multiple bowls of this alone and left satisfied.

This, unfortunately, was where things began to unravel completely.

After a 36-minute wait, strange given the earlier pacing of a dish every fifteen minutes or so, the next course arrived. My salmon looked excellent and, to be fair, was genuinely enjoyable. Oana, however, was served what was described as agnolotti, a description delivered by the same waitress responsible for “whatever”, and therefore already on thin ice.

Agnolotti, for the avoidance of doubt, is filled pasta. What arrived was not filled. It was not sealed. It was not properly cooked. It consisted of large, clumsy, uneven squares of pasta dough, raw in places, leaking water into the sauce until the whole dish tasted like diluted washing-up water. It was plated with random splatters of cheese and absolutely no sense of care, refinement, or pride.

It wasn’t just bad. It was embarrassing.

Throughout the meal, staff had asked how things were at the end of each course. When Oana left almost the entire pasta dish untouched? Silence. No question. No concern. No curiosity. The plates were simply cleared, and the evening trudged on.

The meat course arrived around twenty minutes later. Tasty enough, but the portion was extremely small, and the rosti had the unmistakable air of something pre-prepared and reheated without enthusiasm. Other tables were offered additional gravy. We were not.

We accepted the cheeseboard because, astonishingly, we were still hungry. It was acceptable, but again, the portions were miserly for the price point.

Dessert arrived promptly and was fine although my ice cream had almost completely melted. By that stage, we were ready to leave.

The background details continued to undermine the experience. The table was visibly stained on arrival, and we cleaned it with a tissue and some hand gel. Crumbs accumulated throughout the meal without being cleared. A coaster was provided for the water bottle but not for the glasses, which promptly sweated condensation all over the table. The music, a mix of Linkin Park, Pulp, and other similar artists felt wildly at odds with the fine-dining image being projected. Less “special occasion”, more “pub with ideas above its station”.

Had we paid full price, we would have felt completely cheated. Even at half price, it felt poor value. We raised our concerns on the night and were offered a £20 reduction, which barely acknowledged the issues. At that point, we were too worn down by the experience to argue further.

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Afterwards, we sent an email to Psalter detailing the good and the bad in a fairly balanced way. The reply came from the chef-patron, Tom Lawson, and it was a masterclass in boilerplate indifference. Generic, hollow, and completely devoid of ownership or reflection. If this is how feedback is handled at the top, the rest of the evening suddenly makes a lot more sense.

We won’t be returning.

This was meant to be a special night. One occasion was ignored, the service was erratic and at times rude, and one dish was so poorly executed it bordered on parody. The inconsistency, lack of care, and complacency on display were staggering.

We genuinely wanted to enjoy it. We left disappointed, hungry, and wondering how long reputation alone can keep a place like this afloat.

One last point about food is that Oana and I decided to drastically reduce the amount of meat that we eat in our diet. We are almost entirely veggie at home, but will still eat meat on occasion when we go to a restaurant. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while because we think we could all do with reducing our meat consumption. It’s better for the environment, and better for the animals.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Ragnarok: Chess Team Book 4 by Jeremy Robinson and Kane Gilmour.

Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).

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

Spartacus, the show, is great fun. It’s vulgar, graphic, funny, and horrific. The production value is lacking at times, but it’s a good story based on real history. I watched the show before I knew anything about the actual history, and I was subsequently surprised by how faithful it was to what we know about those times. I mean, it’s not exactly a documentary, but it doesn’t seem to veer too far off course.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £129,062.01.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,880.70.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £510,374.32.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83.

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £335,681.49.

I keep circling back to the same question, usually late in the evening when my brain is tired enough to stop pretending it doesn’t care. When can we actually retire? Not the Instagram version of retirement, where someone in linen trousers claims they “escaped the rat race” at 37 and now appears to exist permanently on a sun lounger, but the real version. The one that still has inflation, broken appliances, market crashes, and the quiet background anxiety of not wanting to screw this up.

I’m 42 now, turning 43 later this year. Oana is 37, turning 38 early next year. We’re far enough along that this question feels legitimate, but not so far that the answer is obvious. We’re not starting from nothing, but we’re also not at the stage where money has become abstract. Between us we’ve built up roughly £130,000 in Stocks and Shares ISAs, £23,000 in Premium Bonds, and around £158,000 in pensions. We have a £175,000 mortgage, and a pile of student loans that sit in the background doing what student loans do best: acting like a slightly annoying graduate tax rather than something that meaningfully dictates our decisions.

On paper, it looks fine. Sensible, even. And yet the question still nags. Is this enough to stop working?

For a long time, I kept framing retirement as a single moment. One day you work, the next day you don’t, and somehow the spreadsheet just agrees with you. When I finally forced myself to slow down and actually walk through the mechanics, that illusion didn’t survive very long. The problem, it turns out, isn’t pensions. Pensions are almost boring in comparison. The real problem is everything that comes before them.

In the UK, early retirement lives or dies on one inconvenient fact: you can’t touch your pension until your late fifties. For us, that potentially means twenty years where everything has to be funded from ISAs, cash, and other non-pension investments. This stretch is often called the “ISA bridge”, and it’s the hardest part of the entire plan. If you want to spend £3,000 a month for twenty years, you’re suddenly staring down the barrel of well over half a million pounds of accessible money before pensions even enter the picture. Seeing that written down has a way of cutting through optimism very quickly.

At that point, the idea of retiring “as soon as possible” with no compromises stopped feeling bold and started feeling careless. So instead of trying to force the numbers to fit the fantasy, we changed the question. Rather than asking how we could replace our entire current lifestyle forever, we asked something much simpler: what does a good life actually cost us?

When we stripped away a lot of noise, the answer surprised us. We don’t need £3,000 a month. We could live very comfortably on £2,500. That’s £30,000 a year. It doesn’t feel deprived. It doesn’t feel like austerity. It just feels intentional. And that single adjustment quietly transforms the entire plan.

From there, something finally clicked. Instead of obsessing over pensions or trying to engineer clever withdrawal strategies, the focus became very clear: build the bridge first. The plan that started to make sense was boring, slow, and oddly reassuring. We keep working for now. We invest £20,000 a year into each of our ISAs. We leave pensions alone and let them compound in the background. We don’t dabble in side hustles or half-retirement. And when the bridge is genuinely complete, we stop working entirely.

Right now, we already have about £153,000 that’s accessible. At £30,000 a year, that’s roughly five years of life already sitting there. By continuing to invest £40,000 a year into ISAs and assuming fairly unremarkable, non-heroic growth, the maths starts to do something interesting. After around eight or nine years, the bridge is effectively built. Enough to cover roughly twenty years of living costs and carry us comfortably to pension access age.

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That puts full retirement somewhere around my early fifties and Oana’s mid-to-late forties. Which sounds absurdly early until you realise it’s not the result of some exotic strategy or extreme deprivation. It’s just the outcome of focusing on the right problem and giving it time.

The irony is that pensions, the thing most people fixate on, end up being the least stressful part of the whole picture. Ours have sixteen to twenty-plus years to grow, with ongoing contributions while we’re still working, and no pressure to fund the bridge at all. By the time we reach pension age, they don’t need to be extraordinary. They just need to be adequate. Later still, the state pension becomes a bonus rather than a lifeline.

The biggest shift in all of this wasn’t financial. It was psychological. Letting go of the idea that retirement has to be immediate to be meaningful changes everything. What we’re actually building isn’t an escape from work at all costs. It’s optionality. The option to stop. The option to slow down. The option to say no.

And the strange thing is that once you stop trying to force retirement to happen right now, it often arrives sooner, and in a much calmer form. Not today, clearly. But not “someday” either. With restraint, consistency, and a willingness to sit with the waiting, we’re probably talking about less than a decade. Close enough to feel real, but far enough away to still sleep at night.

And honestly, that’s exactly where I want this to sit.

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.

Part 324: It Is A Gift

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week… well, this image sums it up best:

Weekly Update

The first full week of the new year is complete, and we have more insanity from the US to deal with, which I’ll come to later. The weather in Sheffield hasn’t been too bad, with only light snow for us. I can’t remember the last time we had proper snow; the sort that’s half a meter deep at least. I think it might be as far back as 2010. One downside to all the cold, wet weather is that we’ve not been able to get any bike rides in.

Although we’ve not been able to go on any rides, we have enjoyed some nighttime walks around our neighbourhood:

On Wednesday, I had an appointment to donate blood. It’s the first time in a few years I’ve been able to do so due to my various health issues. I may be able to donate platelets, and I’m just waiting to hear back from them. If you can donate blood, do it.

On Monday, I’ll be attending my Gran’s funeral and wake. It’s going to be a sad start to a busy week, but hopefully we’ll give my Gran a good send-off.

2026 Goals Update

I’m losing weight, which is good. I’m 115.7kg, and three months ago I was 120.8kg. That’s decent progress, I think. I’m aiming for 100kg by the end of the year, so just under 4kg every three months. Weight loss is always easiest at the start, though.

With my writing goal, I’m just about there or thereabouts with my weekly 3,500 word target. There’s been a lot draining my mental energy lately with the upcoming new job and the funeral next week.

I can’t invest anything in my ISA until the new tax year starts, but I plan to smash that goal as soon as I’m able.

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Civilization and FI

I’ve been thinking about time again. Not in the abstract, philosophical way, but in that slightly nerdy, why is this suddenly obvious now I’m older way. And weirdly, the thing that finally snapped it into focus wasn’t a finance book or a chart. It was the game Civilization IV.

Civilization IV was always my favourite, with the expansion packs Warlords and Beyond the Sword. Not because it was flashy, but because it was brutally honest about constraints. You get 750 turns in Epic mode. That’s it. No extensions. No “one more turn” forever. Whatever you’re going to build, whatever strategy you’re going to commit to, has to exist inside that fixed window of time.

And one of the most unforgiving victory conditions in the game is the cultural victory.

To win culturally, you don’t just stumble into it at turn 600 and hope for the best. You have to lay the foundations early. Wonders. Great Artists. Cultural buildings. Decisions made in the opening turns that don’t look impressive at the time but compound relentlessly as the game goes on.

Miss that early window and the game doesn’t end, but it gets harder. You can pivot later. You can try to brute-force it. But you’ll always feel like you’re swimming upstream, desperately trying to recreate decades of cultural momentum in a fraction of the remaining turns.

And at some point, while replaying this in my head, it hit me that this is FI. Exactly this.

Time is the 750 turns. Compound growth is culture per turn. And early investing is building wonders before anyone else realises how powerful they are.

In Civ IV, the first 100 turns often feel inconsequential. You’re not winning anything. You’re placing cities, building infrastructure, and spamming workers and scouts. You’re making choices that don’t pay off immediately. Meanwhile, the AI is off conquering neighbours and racking up shiny-looking numbers.

Sound familiar?

That’s the FI phase where you’re investing a few hundred quid a month and wondering why nothing seems to be happening. The graph barely moves. The effort feels disproportionate to the reward. This is where people quit, not because the strategy is wrong, but because the feedback loop is terrible.

But here’s the thing Civ IV teaches mercilessly: Culture snowballs.

Every early wonder doesn’t just add culture once; it adds it every single turn thereafter. A Great Artist used early doesn’t just bump a city, it changes the entire trajectory of the game. By turn 400, the cities that committed early are untouchable. You’re not scrambling anymore. You’re coasting. The win condition is basically locked in; you’re just letting the clock run. You just have to be patient and wait for the growth.

That’s exactly how early investing works.

Someone who invests heavily in their 20s and early 30s doesn’t win FI because they’re cleverer later on. They win because money they invested years ago has been quietly generating returns the entire time. By the time most people are panicking about optimisation, the early starter is in “defend the lead” mode.

They’re not sprinting anymore, they are simply coasting.

Now compare that to someone who only pivots to FI later, say, mid-40s or 50s. This is the Civ player who suddenly decides at turn 500 that they’re going cultural. It’s not impossible. But it’s stressful. You’re rushing wonders. You’re burning Great Artists just to keep up. Every decision feels urgent because time is no longer on your side.

That’s late investing, and whilst you can still win, you’re fighting the clock instead of working with it.

And this is where a lot of financial advice goes wrong, because it pretends all starts are equal. They aren’t. Time is unfair. Ruthlessly so. Two people can invest the same total amount, but the one who invested earlier will almost always finish miles ahead not because they worked harder, but because their “culture per turn” was compounding for longer.

That doesn’t mean late starters are doomed. Civ IV doesn’t end at turn 300 just because you didn’t plan perfectly. It means you have to play a different game. More intensity. Fewer mistakes. Less room for error. The same is true in FI.

But here’s the part that really matters: Early investing doesn’t feel powerful when it matters most.

Just like early culture doesn’t look impressive on turn 50, early investments don’t look life-changing in year three. That’s why people delay. That’s why they wait for a better salary, a clearer plan, more certainty. In Civ terms, they keep saying “I’ll build wonders later”.

Later is always more expensive.

FI progress isn’t about brilliance. It’s about duration. It’s about deciding early what kind of victory you’re aiming for and quietly laying foundations while everyone else is chasing short-term wins.

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You don’t need to min-max every turn. You just need to start placing the buildings that generate value over time and then not tear them down in a panic.

Once compound growth takes over, once your culture per turn is doing the heavy lifting, the game changes. Progress accelerates not because you got smarter, but because you gave the system enough time to work.

And the most sobering lesson Civ IV teaches is this: You can’t add more turns. You can only decide what to do with the ones you have left.

That’s why time is the biggest driver of FI. Not income. Not returns. Not optimisation theatre. Time.

Start early, build foundations, let it compound, and one day you’ll look up and realise the win condition was set hundreds of turns ago and you just had to stay in the game long enough to see it.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Callsign: Tripleshot – Chess Team Book 3.5: by Jeremy Robinson, Edward Talbot, David Wood, and David McAfee.

Watching: His and Hers (Netflix).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £127,808.69.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £113,110.84.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £507,351.14.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83.

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £332,658.31.

“It is a gift…”

I keep coming back to this idea that the United States is the home of freedom, the greatest nation on Earth, that becoming American is some sort of moral upgrade, a gift (according to Ted Cruz), and every time I do, my brain just… crashes. Like a computer trying to process a file that’s obviously corrupted. I’m not even angry at first. I’m confused. Deeply, genuinely confused. What information are these people working with?

If this is freedom, it’s a very specific, conditional, liability-heavy version of it. Freedom to do what, exactly? Freedom to own weapons powerful enough to make schoolchildren practise lockdown drills as a normal part of childhood? Freedom to avoid calling an ambulance because it might bankrupt you? Freedom to work yourself into the ground because your healthcare is stapled to your employer like a hostage note?

Somehow, while all of this is happening, the mythology persists. Louder than ever. Flags everywhere. Chest-thumping declarations that America is the beacon, the example, the gold standard. Compared to what?

Look at gun violence alone, and just sit with it for a second before waffling on about constitutional amendments. Tens of thousands of deaths every year. A drumbeat of mass shootings so regular they barely interrupt the news cycle. This isn’t normal anywhere else. It just isn’t. Countries like Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia made different choices and moved on with their lives. The US didn’t. It decided this was the acceptable cost of freedom. Which tells you something very uncomfortable about what, and who, that freedom is actually for.

Then there’s healthcare, which feels like the cruelest joke in the whole performance. The US spends more per person than any country on Earth, according to the OECD. More than Denmark, more than Germany, more than France; all countries where healthcare is universal, boring, and largely free at the point of use. And yet Americans die younger, go untreated more often, and live with the constant background anxiety that getting sick might destroy their finances. This is not freedom.

Education follows the same pattern. In the so-called greatest country on Earth, getting an education often means signing up for decades of debt before your adult life has even begun. Student loan balances in the trillions. People delay having children and buying homes, not because they’re lazy, but because the system kneecaps them at the starting line. Meanwhile Finland quietly educates its population for free and tops international rankings.

And then we’re told this is the land of opportunity. Which is fascinating, because the data shows staggering inequality. A tiny fraction of people hold an obscene share of the wealth while tens of millions live one missed paycheque away from disaster. This is not a bug; it’s a feature of the system; it’s policy.

Countries like Norway made a different choice: tax wealth, invest collectively, reduce risk for ordinary people. The US chose to worship billionaires and tell everyone else to manifest harder.

Maybe you could still cling to the myth if the US behaved like a responsible adult on the world stage. If it genuinely respected sovereignty, international law, and democratic norms. Except then you have Donald Trump openly saying that his own morality is the only thing that limits his power. Not laws. Not treaties. Just him. His vibes. His internal compass. That is not reassurance. That is a flashing red warning light.

At the same time, senior US figures are floating the idea of annexing Greenland like it’s a strategic real-estate opportunity. Not because Greenland wants it. Not because Denmark is offering. But because the US “needs” it. Strategic value. Location. Resources. It’s imperialism showing its teeth and then acting surprised when Europeans recoil.

And then there’s Venezuela, where US leaders have stopped even pretending. Yes, they want influence. Yes, they want control. Yes, they want the oil. And they’re saying it out loud now, as if this is just how the world works. As if this isn’t exactly the behaviour the US claims to oppose when anyone else does it.

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Imagine if Russia or China spoke this way. If their leaders said international law didn’t apply, that their own morality was the only check on power, that neighbouring territories were “needed”, that foreign resources were there to be “run” for their benefit. The outrage would be immediate and justified. But when the US does it, it’s reframed as leadership, strength, and realism.

This is where the idea of America as the home of freedom completely collapses under its own weight. Freedom isn’t forcing people to accept constant risk as normal. Freedom isn’t telling citizens they’re lucky while denying them basic security. Freedom isn’t exporting democracy at gunpoint or treating sovereignty like a suggestion.

Real freedom looks boring. It looks like not worrying about being shot. Not worrying about getting sick. Not worrying about debt before you’ve lived. Not worrying that your leader’s personal moral mood might dictate foreign policy this week.

The truly great countries don’t shout about greatness. They don’t need to. They just quietly produce better outcomes: longer lives, safer streets, healthier people, higher trust. They don’t wrap failure in flags and call it destiny.

So when someone says the US is the greatest nation on Earth, I’m left staring into the middle distance wondering how powerful a story has to be to override this much evidence. How loud a myth has to shout to drown out the data, the deaths, the debt, the dysfunction.

If this is freedom, it’s a fragile, conditional freedom, where the population is one medical bill, one bullet, one bad boss, one bad leader away from collapse.

Calling that a gift doesn’t make it one. Furthermore, believing that becoming American is a gift is just wrong and unjustifiable when the facts are considered. You can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.

I thought I was done. I genuinely thought I’d emptied my head of it all; the mythology, the slogans, the endless insistence that the United States is the home of freedom, the greatest nation on Earth, a gift to anyone lucky enough to be let in. I thought I’d said my piece. Closed the tab. Moved on.

And then I saw the story about the ICE agent.

And something in my brain just… snapped back open.

Because of course it happened. Of course it did. A federal agent shoots a woman during an enforcement operation. A woman who wasn’t storming a building, wasn’t armed to the teeth, wasn’t threatening democracy, and was simply existing in proximity to the machinery of the state. And immediately the language kicks in. Self-defence. Protocol. Split-second decision. The same vocabulary that always appears, pre-loaded, ready to launder violence into procedure.

And this is meant to sit alongside the claim that America is the land of liberty. That this is what freedom looks like. It’s at this point that the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Because freedom, apparently, means living in a country where the state can kill you and then argue about the optics. Where accountability is optional, depending on which badge someone was wearing. Where the default response is not grief or reflection, but narrative control. Get ahead of it. Frame it. Move on.

And if you point this out, if you even hesitate, if you say “hang on, this doesn’t feel like freedom”, you already know what comes next.

Why do you hate America? If you don’t like it, leave. Every country has problems. And so on, and so on.

That’s the part that really gets me. I don’t hate America. I hate the lie. I hate the lie because it gets people killed, quietly, routinely, and bureaucratically. I hate the lie because it’s used to excuse everything from domestic brutality to international bullying.

All this has happened before, where the state turned its machinery and bureaucracy against its own people. Where whole sections of the population were rounded up, blamed, persecuted, and killed.

While all this is happening at home, the same mindset is being projected outward. Leaders openly saying that international law doesn’t really bind them. That their own morality is the final check on power. Not treaties. Not norms. Not shared rules. Just vibes and conviction.

Again, all of this has happened before. The old Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Norway; they all know what it’s like to have another country come in and take over because a tyrant thought he knew better.

That is not freedom. That is power unrestrained by humility.

And then, as if on cue, you get talk of annexing Greenland. Not because the people who live there want it. Not because it’s being offered. But because it’s useful. Strategic. Valuable. Convenient. The same logic that’s been used by empires forever, dusted off and presented as realism. When people recoil, they’re told they’re overreacting. Too sensitive. Too European about it.

And then Venezuela. And suddenly the quiet part isn’t quiet anymore. Resources. Control. Influence. Oil. It’s all said plainly now.

And still we’re told this is the greatest nation on Earth. That this is freedom in its highest form.

I keep thinking about how aggressively this idea has to be defended. How loudly it has to be repeated. How hostile people get when it’s questioned. Truly successful systems don’t behave like this. They don’t need constant affirmation. They don’t panic when compared to others. They don’t treat scrutiny as an attack.

Because if America were genuinely the freest country on Earth, it wouldn’t need to explain away mass shootings as unavoidable. It wouldn’t need to normalise citizens being killed by agents of the state. It wouldn’t need to tell people they’re lucky while denying them healthcare, saddling them with debt, and demanding gratitude for survival.

If this is the greatest nation on Earth, then the bar has been buried somewhere deep underground.

Because real freedom would look boring. It would look safe. It would look like not being afraid of the people who are meant to protect you. It would look like accountability that doesn’t require protests. It would look like a country confident enough to hear criticism without reaching for a flag. It would not look like their leaders are using 1984 as a guidebook, rather than a cautionary tale.

Instead, we get a myth that demands constant belief and punishes doubt. And the longer I watch it unfold, the clearer it becomes: this isn’t a nation secure in its freedom. It’s a nation terrified of what happens if the story stops working.

And you know what, I bet there will be some people who read this and think that Renee Good deserved to be killed, because they believe almost hitting someone with your car is on a par with being shot in the face at point-blank range. These people need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and really think about the value they put on human life.

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.

Part 323: Hold My Cognitive Test Results

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week I discuss gift cards, and how we are all acting as lenders to the companies that offer them. Also, just when you thought the US could not get any crazier…

Weekly Update

We’re starting to get back to normal now the new year is out of the way. We didn’t do much for NYE, and hardly anything on January 1st. All in all, a pretty quiet start to the year. On the 2nd we completed our first bike ride of 2026, with a 36km journey that took us to Rotherham and along the river towards Doncaster. We turned back and explored a little around Rotherham we’ve not seen before (there’s not much to see) before heading back along the canal to Sheffield.

We would have stayed out longer but for the fact it was absolutely freezing and we always feel bad leaving Poppy on her own.

I’m surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying biking since we started going together. Although it’s still enjoyable in the cold, I can’t wait for the warmer weather when we can cycle in shorts and a shirt, rather than multiple layers.

If Russia Did This, We’d Be Screaming

Let’s be very clear up front, because clarity matters: the situation around Venezuela is chaotic, heavily disputed, and wrapped in a fog of claims, counter-claims, and presidential bombast. What matters for this piece isn’t whether every dramatic statement survives scrutiny. What matters is that the President of the United States is publicly talking as if military force, regime removal, and custodial authority over another country’s leadership are not just thinkable, but reasonable. This alone should make people deeply uncomfortable.

If Vladimir Putin stood at a podium tomorrow and announced that Russian forces had struck Ukraine, seized its president, and that Russia would now “run things for a bit” to ensure stability, the West would be incandescent. Emergency UN sessions. Wall-to-wall coverage. Sanctions within hours. Op-eds screaming about sovereignty, international law, and the post-war global order.

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Yet when similar language, intent, and posture come from the White House, especially when filtered through Donald Trump, the reaction is strangely muted, fragmented, or hedged with “well, he didn’t really mean it” qualifiers. Which is precisely the problem.

Let’s strip this back. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is condemned not only because of the scale of violence, but because of the underlying logic: that a powerful state can use military force to reshape another country’s leadership, borders, or political future. That sovereignty is conditional. That might makes right. That “we know better” is a sufficient justification for tanks and missiles. Those are the norms we are supposed to oppose.

Now look at the rhetoric coming out of Washington. Claims of strikes. Claims of custody. Claims of oversight. Claims of economic involvement, particularly around oil, framed as stabilisation rather than control. Even if some of this collapses under verification, the direction of travel is unmistakable. This is regime-change language. This is imperial muscle-memory resurfacing. And it is being delivered with the casual confidence of someone who assumes America’s motives will always be treated as inherently different. They aren’t.

Russia justified its actions in Ukraine with security concerns, criminal accusations, and moral narratives about saving people from bad leadership. The United States is doing what it always does: insisting its actions are exceptional, necessary, and benevolent, even when they mirror the very behaviour it condemns elsewhere.

And this is where the double standard becomes impossible to ignore. International law doesn’t say “no invasions unless you’re the good guys”. Sovereignty doesn’t mean “hands off, unless we find you annoying, corrupt, or strategically inconvenient”. Either these principles apply universally, or they’re just branding.

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What makes this moment especially unsettling is the messenger. Just when you think American politics can’t get any more unhinged, Trump steps forward like a man saying “hold my cognitive test results”. Or, more charitably, like someone who slept through the briefing and woke up mid-sentence convinced he’d understood it.

This isn’t careful diplomacy. It’s vibes-based foreign policy. Big, declarative statements delivered without visible concern for legal process, global reaction, or long-term consequences. It’s the same impulsive bravado that characterised his first term, only now pointed at a far more fragile global order.

And fragility matters. Because once the world accepts that powerful countries can openly discuss capturing foreign leaders, administering other states “temporarily”, and leveraging military force for economic involvement, without consequence, the rules stop being rules. They become suggestions.

That’s exactly the world Russia wants. It’s exactly the world China is watching. And it’s exactly the world smaller nations fear.

You don’t defend international norms by breaking them more politely. You don’t preserve order by insisting your violations are special. And you don’t get to condemn Moscow on Monday for behaviour you flirt with on Tuesday.

If the US wants to be taken seriously when it talks about Ukraine, democracy, and the rule of law, it needs to act like those words mean something even when it’s inconvenient. Especially then.

Because the most dangerous precedents aren’t set by declared enemies. They’re set by allies who assume the rules don’t apply to them.

And history has a habit of remembering that hypocrisy far longer than any press conference.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Callsign: King – Chess Team Book 3.5: by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: Pluribus (Apple TV).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £127,344.11.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £111,413.72.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £505,189.44.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83.

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £330,496.61.

Gift Cards

You can’t move in a supermarket in December without being herded, gently but firmly past gift cards. They’re everywhere: checkouts, end caps, special freestanding displays wrapped in just enough tinsel to pass as festive rather than transactional. They’re sold as thoughtful, flexible, and safe. The perfect answer to indecision. The solution for when time, energy, or emotional bandwidth has run out. But gift cards aren’t really gifts at all. They’re financial instruments dressed up as generosity, and once you start pulling at that thread, the whole thing unravels very quickly.

When you buy a gift card, the company does not record it as a sale. That’s the first tell. Accounting rules require it to be logged as deferred revenue; a liability. On paper, the business hasn’t earned anything yet because it still owes someone goods or services in the future. That framing is meant to feel reassuring. Look, it’s not profit yet. Look, they still owe you something. But this is where the sleight of hand begins, because while the revenue is “deferred”, the cash is not. The money is real, immediate, and fully usable. It goes straight into the general pot, indistinguishable from any other pound the business takes in. It pays wages. It pays rent. It plugs gaps. It props up cash flow at the exact moment retailers need it most.

December is not an accident. Gift cards peak at the end of the financial year for many retailers, when balance sheets matter, liquidity matters, and optics matter. Gift cards inflate cash reserves without triggering the costs normally associated with sales. No stock has to move. No staff time is consumed. No logistics chain is stressed. It’s cash in, obligation postponed. And that obligation may never even materialise, which brings us neatly to the part nobody advertises: breakage.

Breakage is the industry’s polite euphemism for people forgetting, losing, or abandoning gift cards. A non-trivial percentage is never redeemed. Others are partially used and then quietly abandoned with a few pounds left on them, too small to feel worth the effort but large enough to add up at scale. Over time, accounting rules allow that unused balance to be recognised as income. Not revenue earned through effort or value creation, just money that expired, evaporated, or slipped through the cracks. No cost of goods. No delivery. No labour. Pure margin. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature.

And even when gift cards are used, they still behave exactly how the business wants them to. They lock spending into a single retailer before the customer has made any meaningful decision. There’s no comparison shopping once the card is bought. No walking away. You’re anchored. Psychologically committed. And more often than not, the card doesn’t quite cover what you want, so you top it up. The initial “gift” becomes a down payment on further spending. Choice narrows. Spend increases. Mission accomplished.

Then there’s expiry, which is where the justifications start sounding thin. In the UK, gift cards can expire, but only if it’s clearly stated and considered reasonable. That’s why many large retailers now offer long expiry periods or claim not to expire at all. This isn’t corporate benevolence. It’s regulatory pressure and reputational risk management. Expiry-based breakage looks bad. It feels bad. And it attracts the kind of attention companies would rather avoid. Still, expiry exists for a reason: unredeemed gift cards are liabilities that sit on the balance sheet indefinitely, cluttering things up. From a corporate perspective, they’re unresolved promises. From a consumer perspective, they’re money already spent.

Next time you think about buying a gift card that has an expiry date on it, ask “why”? Why is an expiry date necessary?

And if you think, “at least it’s safe”, that’s where the illusion fully collapses. If a company goes under, gift card holders are usually unsecured creditors. Which means you’re right at the back of the queue, hoping there’s something left after everyone more important has been paid. There usually isn’t. The business got your money when it was alive. If it dies before you’ve redeemed the card, that loss is entirely yours. The risk doesn’t sit evenly. It never has.

Seen through a cash-flow or FI lens, gift cards are brutally one-sided. They’re interest-free loans from consumers to companies, with zero upside and full downside. You get no return for the time your money is tied up. No flexibility if circumstances change. No protection if the business fails. If you sit on a £200 gift card for a year, that’s £200 that could’ve earned interest, reduced debt, or been invested. Instead, it’s quietly improving someone else’s liquidity while you hold the risk.

None of this means gift cards should never be used. Free money from an employer? Take it. A genuine discount with immediate plans to spend? Fine. A small, low-stakes gift where the alternative is something worse? Sure. But the idea that gift cards are neutral, harmless, or somehow generous by default doesn’t survive even mild scrutiny.

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They are a financing tool. A cash-flow lever. A risk transfer mechanism. They exist because they work spectacularly well for businesses. Especially when times are tight, margins are thin, and certainty matters more than anything else.

So the next time you’re corralled past a wall of glossy plastic rectangles promising “the perfect gift”, it’s worth pausing for half a second and asking who they’re really perfect for. Because once you strip away the festive language and the convenience framing, what’s left isn’t generosity at all.

It’s just a very polite way of lending money to a corporation and hoping nothing goes wrong before you get to spend it.

Finally, from an environmental point of view, physical gift cards are pure bullshit. Egift cards are at least virtual, so there’s no plastic waste when they’re used up.

Starbucks

There’s a reason Starbucks is such an important case study in all of this, because they’ve taken the basic gift card model and quietly evolved it into something far more sophisticated: a pseudo-banking system, hiding in plain sight behind flat whites and loyalty stars.

Starbucks doesn’t just sell coffee. It holds deposits. Millions of customers, myself included, load money onto the Starbucks app in advance. Not because they’re asked to think of it as a deposit, as that would feel weird, but because it’s framed as convenience, speed, rewards, frictionless living. Tap once, earn stars, skip the queue. But strip away the gloss and what’s actually happening is brutally simple. Customers are transferring cash to Starbucks before any product is provided. Starbucks gets the money immediately. The obligation to deliver coffee comes later. If I top up my balance, I don’t just do it for the cost of one coffee. It’s normally in £20 increments. It can easily be another month or so before I top it up again

Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same mechanism as a gift card, just industrialised.

At any given time, Starbucks is sitting on vast sums of customer-loaded balances. If you aggregated those balances and looked at them the way you’d look at bank deposits, Starbucks would rank as one of the largest “banks” in the world by stored consumer funds. The difference is that a bank is regulated, capitalised, insured, and required to protect depositors. Starbucks is not. There’s no FSCS protection for your cappuccino float. No interest paid. No guarantees beyond “trust us”.

And yet the money behaves exactly like deposits. Starbucks gets cash now, in bulk, at scale. They can use it to support operations, manage liquidity, reduce reliance on external financing, and invest in the business. The consumer gets… faster checkout and the vague promise of a free drink at some point in the future. It is, once again, an interest-free loan, provided voluntarily, repeatedly, and enthusiastically by customers.

What makes this model especially powerful, and especially uncomfortable, is how effectively it’s normalised. Nobody feels like they’re lending Starbucks money. They feel like they’re being savvy. Efficient. Rewarded. The language matters. “Top up” sounds harmless. “Load your balance” sounds responsible. “Earn stars” sounds like a game. But economically, the consumer is fronting capital while Starbucks captures the time value of money.

And just like gift cards, the risk is asymmetrical. If Starbucks vanished tomorrow, those app balances would instantly become unsecured claims on a collapsed company. Unlikely, perhaps, but the point isn’t probability, it’s structure. The structure places the downside with the consumer and the upside with the corporation. Always has. Always will.

Zooming out, this is the logical endpoint of what gift cards started. Retailers realised years ago that prepayment is gold. Starbucks simply perfected it. They wrapped it in behavioural design, gamification, habit formation, and a daily ritual people don’t question. Coffee isn’t a once-a-year Christmas purchase. It’s a near-daily transaction. That makes the float enormous, stable, and predictable. From a corporate finance perspective, it’s borderline genius.

From a consumer finance perspective, it’s quietly extractive because every pound sitting in that app is a pound not earning interest, not reducing debt, not invested, not liquid in any meaningful sense. It’s capital that’s been handed over in exchange for convenience and dopamine hits from loyalty points. Again, that doesn’t make it evil. But it does make it non-neutral.

When you put Starbucks next to gift cards, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. This isn’t about coffee. Or plastic cards. Or Christmas convenience. It’s about companies discovering that consumers will willingly act as lenders if you remove the language of finance and replace it with branding, rewards, and ease.

The money flows one way. The risk flows the other way. Once you see it, it becomes hard not to notice how many modern “convenience” systems are just variations on the same theme. Prepay now. Consume later. Forget in between if possible. The business wins either way.

So yes, Starbucks has built a pseudo-bank. One funded by its customers. Paying no interest. Offering no protection. Delivering value only when, and if, the customer comes back to claim what they’ve already paid for.

All in all, this is a very impressive strategy. Some businesses make money when they sell their product. Making money before the product is sold is efficient and elegant.

The thing is, I’m not entirely opposed to gift cards or topping up balances. It’s all about finding an edge where you can, and entering into these transactions with your eyes open. For example, if you want to budget for your monthly coffee, you can just top the balance up once a month. On a relatively small balance, say £50, you’ll earn hardly anything on that. The peace of mind that comes with budgeting can be a small reduction in cognitive load. Another example is something that Oana and I have started doing. We are able to buy egift cards for our supermarket at a 4.5% discount as a benefit through her employer. Granted, the supermarket gets our cash up front for the month, but we also get a not-insignificant discount.

The bottom line is this, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers, money and finance is all a game. If you learn the rules, you have a much better chance of winning.

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.

Part 322: Four Lions and a Turkey

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. Christmas. Four Lions. Turkey. Football. Let’s just get into it…

Christmas

Christmas has a unique ability to make otherwise rational adults behave in ways that would be deeply concerning at any other time of year. Put the same people in a supermarket in March, and they’re somewhat calm, deliberate, and on the brink of being vaguely competent. Put them in the same supermarket three days before Christmas, and suddenly it’s a cross between The Hunger Games and the hallway scene in Oldboy, but with trolleys and a haunting lack of spatial awareness. People are buying industrial quantities of food as if the nation is about to be sealed in for winter. People who haven’t cooked a roast since last December are now attempting culinary feats that would make a professional kitchen nervous.

Look, I get it. I really do. There’s pressure. Tradition. Expectation. The feeling that Christmas must be done properly, whatever that means. Sometimes this pressure comes from within, and sometimes from the perceived pressure from what you remember from childhood, and sometimes it’s unfair pressure from toxic family.

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For us, the actual bit that matters, spending time with my parents, is genuinely great. That part isn’t the problem. The problem is everything we pile on top of it. The big shop. The overambitious menu. The pre-clean, the post-clean, the low-level stress hum that runs through the whole thing like background radiation. If stress were an energy source, there’d be no need for fusion power.

What makes it even more ridiculous is that I know my family would be absolutely fine if we scaled it back. Fewer dishes. Less faff. A shorter day. No one is sitting there with a clipboard marking us down for insufficient roast parsnips. And yet the pressure persists. Because it’s not coming from them. It’s coming from inside the house. From habit, from comparison, and from the belief that Christmas is something you perform rather than experience. I get this on an intellectual level, and as an autistic person, I get that it’s illogical, but there’s still that bullshit pressure.

So we push ourselves into mild burnout in the name of festivity, then act surprised when we’re shattered and slightly irritable by mid-afternoon.

Gifts

Gifts slot neatly into this same category of well-meaning madness.

Somewhere along the line, “thoughtful” became synonymous with “more stuff”. Stuff bought not because it fits someone, but because you can’t not hand over a thing. So you wander the aisles, or scroll endlessly online, looking for something, anything, that will fulfil the social contract.

I once read a line that stuck with me: when you buy something, you should already have a plan for how it leaves your life. I may be mangling the phrasing, but the idea is solid. If the only realistic future for an object is a cupboard, a drawer, or a landfill, perhaps it doesn’t need to be made, and purchased, in the first place.

Christmas is the peak season for objects with no long-term prospects. I wonder how many gifts are bought, wrapped, unwrapped, stored, and eventually disposed of without being used. I’m guessing it’s a shocking proportion of presents. So much useless, unused, shit.

I’m thinking about novelty gifts that are funny once and decorations that live in a box for 51 weeks a year; things that require the recipient to pretend enthusiasm while mentally calculating where on earth they’re going to put it.

One of the most bizarre presents we ever received was a soup bowl each, with a spoon that rests in a groove at the side. A few weeks before, we’d seen these exact bowls on sale in Poundland. For £1. This was one of those times when a gift was an insult, and no gift would have been preferable. Anyway, those who gave this to Oana and me were awful people for several reasons, and thankfully, we don’t have to interact with them anymore.

Anyway, none of this is malicious. It’s just momentum. The conveyor belt of Christmas where the goal becomes having done it rather than whether it was worth doing. It’s performative and unnecessary. Do what genuinely makes you happy, rather than what you think would make a good social media post.

We also need to talk about the financial hangover. Spending money you don’t really have to buy things no one truly needs, all to meet expectations that mostly exist in your own head. The decorations come down, the tree goes out, and the credit card statement turns up like an Avatar sequel no one asked for.

It’s a strange outcome for a season supposedly about peace and goodwill. The irony is that the bits people actually remember aren’t the excess. They’re the conversations. The laughter. The moments where no one is rushing, hosting, performing, or mentally running through a to-do list.

A simpler meal, eaten without stress, beats a culinary marathon fuelled by obligation. A smaller, more deliberate gift beats a pile of stuff that immediately needs managing. A shorter, calmer visit beats enduring something just because the calendar says you should.

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There is no Christmas tribunal. No prizes for exhaustion. No moral victory in debt, burnout, or emotional self-harm wrapped in tinsel.

Most of the pressure is self-inflicted. Which is both the bad news and the good news. You can decide what enough looks like, in food, gifts, money, time, and emotional labour, and stop there. You can choose presence over performance. Intention over inertia. Sanity over spectacle.

And if that means a quieter, cheaper, less traditionally impressive Christmas?

Honestly, that sounds like bliss.

Our Christmas: Grief, and Tradition

It was always going to be a strange one for us this year, having just lost my Nan on December 12th. She leaves a massive hole at the heart of the family on my Mom’s side. She would have wanted everyone to have a good time still, but grief doesn’t obey logic. We still miss her, and still worry about the impact it’s having on those who were closer to her. I used to be very close to my Gran, but since I moved away for university, I didn’t see her as much. Then, adulting and all the obligations that come with it get in the way. She wasn’t alone, though. She had seven adult children, each with their own partners, and children, and their children in turn. Between her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids, we’re talking dozens and dozens of people, and she did have multiple people visiting her each day.

But yeah, I do feel guilty for not spending more time with her recently.

When I was much younger, I had a tradition with my Mom that we would meet on Christmas Eve and go for something to eat. This tradition was paused for a while when I was at university, and when I started working and occasionally was scheduled for the 24th December. This year, we picked that tradition up again, but on the 23rd instead. It was nice resuming this again.

Another tradition for Oana and me is that we watch Four Lions on Christmas Day. We’ve done this for years now. I’m not quite sure how it became a tradition, but it has. I think part of it is because it was filmed in Sheffield, and we know most of the locations. It’s funny, and a little jarring, when you see characters walking down one street and turning a corner, only to find themselves on a street at the other side of the city. This was more so in the latter part of the film, which is set in London, but filmed no more than a kilometre from where we live.

Our Christmas Lunch

Is it Christmas Lunch or Christmas Dinner? The only correct answer is lunch. We tried to make ours as simple as possible to reduce stress, but it still ended up being a full-on production. We had a turkey joint from M&S that was wrapped in bacon and came with pork and chestnut stuffing. It was amazing. We made some roast potatoes and some mash. There’s a green veggie mixture I make as well, which always goes down well. I use a saute pan and melt some butter before adding sliced leek, garden peas, and some cabbage. Add some salt, pepper, and veggie stock, and just cook it down. It’s amazing. We had that with some Yorkshire puddings and gravy.

On Boxing Day we made some sandwiches which were layered from bottom to top as follows; bread, gravy, turkey, cranberry sauce, leftover veg mixture, crushed roast potatoes, mint sauce, gravy, bread. These were the greatest sandwiches ever made.

We also made a cheesecake using a mix of gingernut and digestive biscuits for the base. We had whipped mascarpone with fresh orange juice and orange zest, and the whole thing was topped with fresh raspberries. This also went down well.

Did you have anything out of the ordinary for lunch? Any disasters or triumphs? Let me know in the comments.

Monopoly

As we had my Dad over on Christmas and Boxing Day, a good amount of time was spent playing Monopoly, specifically the Norwegian version we bought when the three of us were there in the summer. It does mean we have to translate the chance and community chest cards, but it’s all good fun.

The biggest laughs, though, were when I had to remind my Dad when we were negotiating a trade that I would be the one choosing his nursing home. Later, he returned the favour by reminding me he could always rewrite his will.

Weekly Update

It’s difficult to think about a weekly update at this time because the gap between Christmas and New Year is just bizarre. Time has no meaning, and all normal behaviour goes out of the window. If you want a cup of coffee at 9pm, go for it. A bar of chocolate for breakfast is perfectly acceptable, and eating an entire cheesecake just because it’s there is practically expected.

We had a good bike ride in the evening on Boxing Day. It was from the Sheffield Critical Mass bike ride group, and it’s always fun riding around with the lights and music blasting out.

On Saturday we went for a ride out to Forge Dam and witnessed a nasty accident. A guy came off his bike and fell down a steep embankment into a stream. It was a good seven or eight meter drop and he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Luckily he avoided a head injury, but he did something to his leg. A group of us stopped to assist, and I offered to call an ambulance, but he insisted on no ambulance. I suspect when the adrenaline wears off, he will be in some pain and probably need a visit to A&E. He was riding with a friend at least, so he had someone to help him home.

It’s difficult to tell from this angle in the photo, but it’s a heck of a drop down to the water.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Callsign: King – Chess Team Book 3.5: by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: Amber Alert (Netflix), Four Lions (Bluray).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £126,980.57.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £110,930.83.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £504,343.01.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05.

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £329,468.96.

2025 Financial Update

Below is a table showing the difference in my finances from the first post of 2025 to this, the last post of 2025.

Outside of the £20k I deposited into my ISA, it grew a further £16k on top of that. All in all my total wealth increased by over £50k, which is an 18.8% increase. A similar increase in 2026 would see my total wealth stand at almost £400,000.

2026 Goals

At some point, setting goals stops being aspirational and starts being confrontational.

Once you strip away the decorations, the planners, the colour-coded apps, and the reassuring sense that thinking about change counts as progress, you’re left with a much simpler question:

Am I actually prepared to behave differently?

For 2026, I’m done pretending the answer is “probably” or “in theory”.

Let’s start with the most obvious one; the one that doesn’t benefit from clever framing.

I’m about 116.5kg. By the end of 2026, I want to be 100kg.

This is not a mystery. There is no plot twist coming. I don’t need a new diet, a wearable device, or a revolutionary insight about metabolism. I need fewer calories going in than coming out, repeatedly, for a long time.

Sixteen and a half kilos in a year is not dramatic. It’s not a Rocky montage. It’s just enough restraint, often enough, to stop pretending that stress eating is self-care and that movement only counts if it’s optimised.

If I’m still the same weight next December, it won’t be because the goal was unreasonable. It’ll be because I kept choosing short-term comfort and then acting surprised by the long-term outcome.

Which brings me neatly to money, because the psychology is identical.

The ISA goal for 2026 is £20,000. Fully subscribed. No excuses. No “I’ll catch up later”.

ISAs don’t fill themselves. They require boring, grown-up decisions made consistently, even when a new set of coloured plastic building blocks from a small town in Denmark is available. They require resisting the urge to treat spare cash like a reward for surviving the week.

The real enemy here isn’t lack of income. It’s drift. That quiet, deadly assumption that there’s loads of time left, so today doesn’t really matter.

It does. Annoyingly so.

And yes, this goal is directly dependent on making a success of my new self-employed venture starting in late January. Which means there’s nowhere to hide. No employer to blame. No guaranteed baseline. Just output, consistency, and whether I take the work seriously enough to deserve the outcome.

Closely linked to that is the bigger, rounder, more psychologically loaded number: £400,000 total wealth.

I’m under no illusion that this number has magical properties. It won’t unlock a new personality or cause a choir of angels to appear. It’s arbitrary, but it’s useful as a psychological boost.

It tells me whether I’m building momentum or just maintaining the illusion of progress while telling myself I’m “doing fine”. It tells me whether compounding is actually being fed, or whether I’m quietly hoping markets and luck will compensate for half-hearted execution.

If I don’t hit it, it won’t be because the world conspired against me. It’ll be because I didn’t push hard enough on the few levers that actually matter.

And then there’s the book…

The thing that keeps getting edged out by admin, mood, timing, and the seductive lie that I’ll write better later. So here’s the rule: 3,500 words per week.

That’s it. The only way to write a book is to actually do the writing.

3,500 words. Per week. Every week.

That’s about 500 words a day, which is deeply unromantic and precisely the point. Writing is not a mood. It’s not a performance. It’s a practice.

Some weeks, the words will be good. Some weeks they’ll be serviceable. Some weeks they’ll be absolute rubbish. All of them count.

Because the only version of this book that definitely never gets finished is the one that waits for optimal conditions.

What ties all of this together; the weight, money, wealth, writing, is the same uncomfortable truth:

None of these goals are blocked by knowledge. They’re blocked by behaviour.

I know what to eat. I know how ISAs work. I know how wealth accumulates. I know how to write 500 words a day.

The gap isn’t understanding. It’s execution.

And execution is dull. It’s repetitive. It’s doing the thing on days where there’s no emotional payoff and no immediate feedback, just the quiet knowledge that skipping it makes future-me’s life harder. It’s investing in the process rather than just hoping for the result.

So 2026 isn’t about reinvention. It’s about closing the gap between what I say I want and what my daily choices actually support.

Sheffield Wednesday Football Club

There’s a familiar response that pops up any time I express discomfort about the direction Sheffield Wednesday FC might be heading.

“You’re just looking for excuses not to go.”
“Football’s changed, get over it.”
“If you cared, you’d still turn up.”

Which is interesting, because it manages to be wrong, lazy, and revealing all at once.

I don’t avoid Wednesday because I don’t care. I’m cautious because I care. Deeply. Probably more than is healthy, if we’re being honest.

If I didn’t care, this would all be very easy. I’d shrug, say “that’s modern football”, and let the club drift into whatever glossy, soulless shape was most convenient. Detachment is effortless. Indifference is relaxing.

The rumours doing the rounds, that James Bord is fronting the preferred bidder consortium, have understandably sparked a bit of hope. God knows we’re all traumatised enough at this point that any sign of change feels like oxygen.

And to be clear, I don’t have a particular issue with Bord himself. This isn’t about personalities or LinkedIn vibes. It’s not even about whether he’s “the right man”. It’s about the money. It’s always about the money, because football ownership doesn’t work on good intentions and nice interviews. It works on capital. And where that capital comes from matters, whether people like that conversation or not.

This idea that asking questions about funding sources is somehow disloyal is one of the more bizarre pieces of fan logic to emerge in recent years. As if blind acceptance is the purest form of love. It isn’t. It’s just easier.

We’re at a genuine crossroads with Wednesday now. Not a footballing one as we’ve had plenty of those and usually chosen the wrong turning, but an existential one.

It’s not enough to say “well, at least it’s not Chansiri”. Yes, Dejphon Chansiri needs to go. That’s a given. But replacing him with another opaque ownership structure, backed by money we’re apparently not supposed to ask about, isn’t a moral upgrade. It’s just a change of wallpaper.

If this consortium’s funding traces back to countries with appalling human rights records, like regimes where exploitation, repression, or outright brutality are brushed aside as cultural quirks, then that matters. To me, and to plenty of others who just don’t always shout about it.

And no, this isn’t about being sanctimonious. It’s about lines. Everyone has them, whether they admit it or not. Mine just happens to be before I start excusing things I’d otherwise condemn, simply because the badge on the shirt happens to be my club.

The Soul of Wednesday Matters.

That phrase seems to irritate some people, which probably tells you everything you need to know. This club isn’t just a weekend distraction or a line on a balance sheet. It’s history, community, and inheritance. It’s something people pass down, not flip for profit.

If safeguarding that makes me inconvenient or unpopular, so be it. I don’t want a club that wins while I’m quietly doing mental gymnastics to justify who’s paying for it. I don’t want success that comes bundled with a requirement to look the other way. And I certainly don’t want to be told that caring about ethics is the same thing as not caring about football.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

If I didn’t love this club, I wouldn’t bother asking hard questions. I wouldn’t worry about where it’s heading. I wouldn’t be prepared to step back, even temporarily, if the cost of involvement was complicity in something I fundamentally disagree with.

This isn’t about excuses, it’s about standards. It’s about how much you are willing to sacrifice for your beliefs.

Getting rid of the current owner is only half the job. The harder, braver part is making sure what replaces him is something we can stand behind without flinching.

In the long run, league positions blur. Owners change. Eras pass, but once you sell the soul of a club, it’s remarkably difficult to buy it back, and I’d quite like to still recognise Wednesday when all this dust settles.

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.

Part 321: Living Life on Easy Mode

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week, I discuss living life on easy mode, and share some thoughts on courier companies.

Weekly Update

I’m getting increasingly fed up with my right elbow and tricep, which I injured in the summer of 2022. Since then, I’ve had scans, physio, and appointments with surgeons, and nothing has come of it. There’s clearly an issue, but having done some research, it looks as though the problem may be one that does not show on scans. This is annoying because all the surgeons I’ve spoken with will not perform exploratory surgery and will only operate on something they can see from a scan.

A few days ago, I reached out to my GP to see if I could have a chat about it. I’ve got an appointment in a month. Not to sound all “back in the day”, but I remember back in the day when you could get a same-day GP appointment.

My arm hurts all the time, but I need to do something physical to stay sane. I enjoy biking, but that’s not something you can do all the time when it’s wet and windy. The gym has always been a way for me to decompress and manage my mental health. I’ve been following an exercise program that should avoid further damage to my elbow, but to be honest, it hurts if I exercise and it hurts if I don’t. I’ve tried resting it for months at a time with no real benefit. Hopefully, with me seeing an NHS GP and, hopefully, an NHS surgeon, I might get somewhere this time.

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My Nan

I posted last week about my Nan passing away, and I just want to thank all the people who sent me messages both publicly and privately. She genuinely was one of the kindest and strongest people you could meet. When my Grandad, her husband, passed in 2018, she carried herself with such dignity and strength. They had been married for just shy of 60 years, and we were looking at requesting a message from the then-Queen for them. Sadly, my Grandad passed a few weeks before their anniversary.

Her funeral has been arranged for January 12th, which was the earliest possible date. This would have clashed with my start date for my new job, but thankfully, they’ve agreed to push the start date back a week.

Bike Rides

We finished up the week with two good bike rides. On Friday, we cycled to Sharrowvale, and then through Endcliffe Park and on to Whiteley Woods. We then came back and went shopping. We covered just under 20km.

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On Saturday, we set off on a new route we had researched. The first part of the journey was standard, as we approached Meadowhall. From there, we had to find the entrance to the Blackburn Valley Trail. We had a little back and forth to find it, but once we did, the ride was fantastic. On the way out, it was a long, but gradual, climb. We covered a few kilometres out to Ecclesfield, and then on to Chapeltown. Once we had covered 15km, we arrived at the end of the route where we planned to turn back. Rather than following the same route in reverse, we went for a little explore before heading back along the BVT. It was a brilliant area for cycling, and we’ll definitely repeat this ride going forward. On the way back, we stopped at a Starbucks for a coffee and then at Baker’s Yard for some treats for our hard work. In the end, we covered a little over 32km.

On the subject of Baker’s Yard, it’s dangerous having a bakery that is so good in Kelham Island. We popped in on Friday for a couple of bits, and then again on Saturday as we finished our ride. Oana waited outside with the bikes whilst I went in to order. The thinking was we’d have a cake each. I left the bakery with two boxes and a bag, with four cakes and a focaccia.

Easy Mode, Hard Mode, and the People Who Never Had to Notice

I was watching a video from one of the YouTube channels I subscribe to, and the guy was talking about an actress who has fallen from grace and how part of this is due to her having lived all her life on easy mode. It’s a concept I’ve heard discussed before, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it explicitly in those terms.

Living life on easy mode is never having to realise you were on it, and that is one of the hidden privileges some people have. After all, if the road is smooth, you assume everyone else is just bad at walking, right?

That’s how you end up with people who’ve never seriously struggled confidently explaining success, discipline, and poverty to those who have, usually with the same tired lines about hard work and “good choices”. It’s not usually malicious. It’s just deeply uninformed. It also completely ignores the huge impact that chance has on all our lives.

What Mode I Played

When I was at secondary school, getting there wasn’t a short walk or a quick lift. It was public transport across the city. Sometimes two buses there and two back. Later, I was able to get a tram instead. This was every day for school; a minimum of one hour’s commute each way.

That meant hours lost, not occasionally, but routinely. Hours that could have gone into homework, revision, rest, or just being a teenager and spending time with friends. Instead, they were spent waiting at stops, watching the clock, managing connections, and carrying the low-level stress of needing everything to run on time.

The typical school day ran from 09:00 to 15:40. Even going with the best-case scenario of an hour each way, that totalled ten hours a week, or an extra day and a bit compared to many of my peers who lived a few minutes’ walk from school.

No one ever wrote that into my report card. No teacher ever adjusted expectations to account for it. It was just… invisible. And that’s what hard mode looks like. Not dramatic hardship. Just constant friction.

At the time, I decided that when I got my own place to live, I would never go through that sort of commute again. When I moved back to Sheffield from university, I’ve only ever lived in the city centre. It’s been a very deliberate choice.

Easy mode isn’t about never working hard. It’s about not having your effort siphoned away before you even get to apply it. It’s living close to school, so time expands rather than contracts. It’s getting home with energy left. It’s being able to say yes to clubs, sports, music, revision sessions, social plans; all the things that quietly build confidence and opportunity over time.

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Hard mode is the opposite. It’s starting every task slightly depleted. It’s needing more effort just to arrive at the same starting point as someone else. It’s like starting a race ten meters behind everyone else, and that’s before you layer anything else on top.

Because for some of us, the difficulty was set too hard, long before we had language for why.

Being autistic, whether you know it or not, automatically changes the game.

It means navigating a world not designed for how your brain works. It means sensory overload, social exhaustion, masking, misinterpretation, and constant self-monitoring just to appear “normal”. It means burning energy on things other people do on autopilot.

When you don’t know you’re autistic, you don’t get understanding or adjustments. You just get labelled difficult, awkward, intense, lazy, or underachieving, depending on how your traits happen to present. So now hard mode isn’t just about time and money. It’s cognitive load. Emotional load. Identity confusion. You’re spending energy you don’t realise you’re spending, and then being judged for having less left over.

Again, none of this shows up on a CV.

This is where the myth of meritocracy really starts to fall apart. People on easy mode often look at outcomes and work backwards, assuming the result proves the virtue. If someone is struggling, it must be because they didn’t plan properly, didn’t work hard enough, or made bad choices.

That belief becomes much harder to maintain when you’ve lived with the compounding effect of small disadvantages. Take the old example about boots created by Sir Terry Pratchett.

A wealthier person can afford £100 boots that last ten years. Someone without that money buys £20 boots that fall apart every year. Over a decade, the poorer person spends more for worse boots purely because they couldn’t afford the upfront cost.

Easy mode people love to say, “I always buy quality. It saves money in the long run.” Which is true if you can afford the long run. That logic applies everywhere. Credit. Interest rates. Housing. Transport. Education. Health. Time. I heard in an interview the other day that some nursing agencies in the US offer lower pay to those who have more debt, on the assumption that they are more desperate for work.

Wealth isn’t just money. It’s slack. It’s margin. It’s the ability to absorb mistakes without your life unravelling. And this is where easy mode often turns from ignorance into arrogance.

Not because people had advantages, but because many refuse to acknowledge them. They rewrite their story so success becomes proof of moral superiority rather than circumstance plus effort. They climbed using lifts, ladders, and helping hands, then turn around and lecture others for taking the stairs two at a time. They don’t see the lift. They only see the view.

If you’ve lived life on easy mode, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

But denying it? Minimising it? Looking down on people playing on hard mode, people who are exhausted, overstimulated, under-resourced, and still trying? That’s not strength. It’s comfort mistaken for character.

Surviving and even progressing on hard mode isn’t failure. It’s resilience under pressure. And the real measure of integrity isn’t how far you climbed when the path was clear, but whether you’re honest about the ground you started on or whether you kick the ladder away and tell everyone else to “just try harder”.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Callsign: King – Chess Team Book 3.5: by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: Woman of the Hour (Netflix).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick, and it tells the story of serial killer Rodney Alcala. It’s a fairly short, but well-made film. The direction is good, and the acting is generally decent. It always feels wrong to say you enjoyed a film like this, but the best praise I can give is that it was well made, and it kept my attention throughout. It currently has 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £125,551.06.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £109,792.28.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £501,774.95.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05.

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £326,900.90.

2026 Goals

We have less than two weeks of 2025 left, and I’ve started thinking about my goals for next year. I think they can be split into personal goals and financial goals. I’ll be discussing these in more detail next week, and I’d love to hear your plans and goals for the new year, so please leave a comment.

Courier Companies: The World’s Easiest Job, Performed Badly

Let’s establish the baseline. Courier companies have one job.

Not several.
Not mostly.
Not when vibes are right.

One. Job.

You take a thing from Point A, and you put it at Point B. Ideally, in one piece. Ideally, somewhere that resembles “safe”. Ideally, without lying about it. That’s the entire business model. That’s it.

Somehow, the courier industry, an industry built around moving objects, manages to turn this into an ongoing farce.

Now, mistakes happen. Weather happens. Traffic happens. Humans happen. Fine.

But what we’re dealing with here isn’t the occasional mishap. It’s structural chaos. It’s companies that have decided the last 10 metres of a delivery is optional, interpretive, and largely theoretical. It’s companies that have decided a delivery address is a suggestion, not a direction.

Which brings us, as it always does, to Evri.

Evri. Formerly Hermes. Rebranded, presumably, so people would stop flinching when they saw the name.

Evri have somehow cornered the market in aggressively missing the point. Parcels lobbed over fences like the courier was late for a flight. Items left in bins on bin day, which is either negligence or performance art. “Delivered” notifications accompanied by photos that prove absolutely nothing beyond the courier’s ability to wave a phone in the same general direction as the parcel.

At this point, “Evri lost my parcel” isn’t a complaint; it’s a meme.

And before anyone says “well, that’s just anecdotes”, I agree, so it was genuinely impressive when BBC Panorama showed up and went: oh no, this is actually worse than people think.

When an investigative documentary is made about how badly you perform the single function your company exists to do, that’s not bad press. That’s a post-mortem.

Panorama didn’t uncover a couple of rogue drivers. It exposed a system that runs on failure. Unrealistic delivery targets. Zero accountability. A structure that all but guarantees parcels will be mistreated, misdelivered, or disappear into a parallel universe where customer service emails go to die.

And yes, before someone climbs onto their soapbox, this is not about the drivers as individuals. Many of them are exploited, underpaid, and set up to fail.

Which raises the obvious question: why is the customer expected to absorb the consequences of that failure?

Spoiler: because the company knows it can.

So here’s my policy now: If a retailer uses Evri, I don’t buy from them. Not anymore. My last two experiences with Evri were enough for them to make The List. Life is too short to play parcel roulette, and ordering something online shouldn’t feel like entering a low-stakes lottery where the prize is “receiving the thing you paid for”.

This isn’t a boycott. It’s risk management.

Now, let’s contrast this with DPD. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. No courier is.
But in our area, the drivers are solid, decent, and polite. They call. They wait. They don’t treat delivery like an Olympic shot put event.

This isn’t hard. The technology exists. The expectations are not unreasonable. Move the thing to the place. That’s it. That’s literally it.

When a company repeatedly fails at that and still expects customers to shrug, retry, and “contact support”, the problem isn’t logistics, it’s contempt.

And once a company shows you that level of contempt, the only sensible response is to stop trusting them with your stuff.

Preferably before they yeet it into next door’s flower bed.

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.

Part 320: Don’t Worry, It Doesn’t Count

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Note: I often write this blog in parts through the week, so I had much of this already complete as I woke up on Saturday morning. Shortly after waking up I had a call to tell me my Nan had passed. She’d had a stroke a couple of weeks ago and had been in hospital since. She was my last surviving grandparent, and she leaves a massive hole in our family. Now, she’s at peace. Love you, Nan.

Weekly Update

We’ve had a busy week with various events and activities. We completed two challenging, but enjoyable, bike rides, and attended a few different events.

On Monday evening we went into town to see Light Up Sheffield, but sadly we were too late in the day. So, we tried again the following day. This event saw three places in the city lit up by huge projectors playing video with accompanying music. The first was at Sheffield Cathedral, which highlighted the stained glass windows and architecture. It was a fantastic display with great music. We watched this one twice.

The second display was at the side of the library, which was created by local artist Pete McKee. The final display was over the large mural, Reverie, and although the art work is incredible the soundtrack was a little grating.

Our first bike ride was on Wednesday as we rode out to Chelsea Park which involves lots of hill climbing. The good thing about climbing hills on a bike is that you get to speed down the hill on the return journey. The bad thing is you have to climb the hill in the first place.

On Thursday we rode out to Oughtibridge and back, which is a nice route through some woods alongside a river. We didn’t get in as many kilometers as we would have liked, but at this time of the year the weather, and the lack of daylight hours, make cycling a touch more difficult.

Speaking of making cycling more difficult, there are some drivers out there that are more dense than a black hole. One guy decided to pull out right in front of me, and then got stroppy when we gave him some verbal feedback on his eyesight, driving ability, general intelligence, and the legitimacy of his birth.

Another time we were approaching the new(ish) Dutch roundabout in Sheffield. Oana was a little ahead of me and was crossing the road where cars should give way to cyclists and pedestrians. A cabbie decided to let the pedestrian a meter in front of Oana pass before he decided to try and hit Oana’s bike. Fortunately, she evaded contact.

I was also trailing a pedestrian and as they crossed the road, with me following a meter or so behind, a guy driving a G4S van decided to drive directly in front of me. I was just a few inches away from riding into the side of the van.

Hearing Test

For a few months my hearing has been getting worse.

I said my hearing has been getting worse.

To be fair, it started getting worse when I developed tinnitus in 2008. Recently, though, I’ve noticed that I’ve found it harder to hear people talking to me, or to hear things like the TV or music.

I’m on the waiting list to see someone on the NHS about it, but Specsavers offer free hearing tests so I figured, “why not?”.

As expected, my hearing is shit. I don’t think that’s what the guy said, but I couldn’t really hear him. We talked a bit more about the results, or more accurately he talked and I sat there nodding. Eventually he ran through some prices of hearing aids with me and I was like, “sorry, did you say those cost £3,000?”

“Yes.”

Hearing is overrated anyway.

LEGO

This week I finished my build of the Enterprise-D. It was a really fun build, and the finished set looks much better than the adverts. It’s fair to say I’m very happy with how it’s turned out.

I Didn’t Realise Work Was a Social Game (And I Was Terrible at It)

For a long time, I believed a very comforting lie about work.

If you did your job well, behaved professionally, and didn’t cause problems, things would more or less work out. You might not rocket up the ladder, but you’d progress. Sensibly. Gradually. Fairly.

This belief was reinforced by every performance meeting I had, every corporate value statement I ever read, and every manager who told me to “just keep doing what you’re doing”.

So I did.

I worked hard. I was conscientious. I learned my job properly. I didn’t play games. I didn’t schmooze. I didn’t network. I assumed those things were optional extras, or worse, slightly embarrassing distractions for people who weren’t very good at the actual work.

Reader, they were not optional.

What I didn’t understand in my twenties, and well into my thirties, was that work is not a meritocracy with a few political quirks. It is a social system that occasionally pretends to be about performance.

This took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp.

I genuinely believed that competence would eventually announce itself. That someone, somewhere, would notice. That being reliable, ethical, and low-maintenance would count for something. Instead, what it mostly counted for was being left exactly where I was. If you are good at your job and don’t make waves, you will be seen as dependable, and no one gets rid of something dependable.

I saw this most clearly during my time at Aviva and later at Lloyds.

At both, I arrived with vague but sincere plans to progress. Not empire-building ambitions. Just the reasonable assumption that if I did well, learned the ropes, and showed I was capable, there might be a next step.

For a while, I played along. I took development seriously. I listened to feedback. I delivered results. I ticked the boxes that were presented to me.

And then I noticed something odd.

The people who progressed weren’t necessarily better at the job. They weren’t more accurate, more thoughtful, or more ethical. What they were was known. They were comfortable to be around. They were recognisable shapes in the organisational furniture.

Their names came up in conversations. Mine mostly came up when something needed fixing.

This is how progression actually works. Not through output, but through proximity. Not through results, but through reassurance. People don’t promote the best person. They promote the person who feels least likely to make their life awkward.

Competence is table stakes. Familiarity is the currency.

Progression didn’t happen because of what you did at your desk. It happened because of what people said about you over coffee, or after work drinks.

This is the point where someone usually says, “Well, that’s just networking.”

Which is true, in the same way that saying “just breathe” is true when someone’s having a panic attack.

Networking, it turns out, is not a neutral activity. It’s not simply a matter of effort. It assumes a very specific set of social instincts: knowing when to speak, when to laugh, when to signal ambition without appearing needy, when to appear confident without appearing threatening, and how to be memorable without being odd.

At the time, I didn’t know I was autistic. I just knew that this part of work felt like acting in a play where everyone else had the script and I’d been handed a vague summary five minutes before curtain up.

I could do the job. I just couldn’t do the performance around it.

What makes this particularly cruel is that none of this is ever explained. There is no training module called “How People Actually Get Promoted”. There is no slide that says, “By the way, visibility matters more than output and likeability matters more than logic.”

Instead, you’re told to focus on your role. To deliver. To be professional. And if you do all of that while quietly opting out of the social layer, you eventually find yourself in a strange professional purgatory.

Trusted, but not championed. Valued, but not discussed. Essential, but not promotable.

I spent a long time in that space. Being good enough to rely on, but not socially legible enough to advance. Operationally useful, strategically irrelevant.

Eventually, I stopped trying to progress.

Not in a dramatic, storming-out way. Just internally, quietly, with a sense of resignation rather than rebellion. I realised the game being played wasn’t one I understood, enjoyed, or was particularly good at.

More importantly, I realised that the rules weren’t written for people like me.

That realisation came with a mixture of relief and grief. Relief, because it explained a lot. Grief, because I’d spent years assuming the problem was a lack of effort, confidence, or resilience, rather than a mismatch between how I work and how progression actually happens.

Learning I was autistic didn’t suddenly make work easier, but it did make it make sense. This is a funny thing about people who find out they’re autistic as an adult. It’s not generally greeted, at least from what I’ve seen and heard, with sadness, but rather a series of lightbulb moments where the past suddenly makes sense.

It explained why networking felt draining rather than energising. Why self-promotion felt dishonest rather than strategic. Why being told to “be more visible” felt like being asked to become someone else entirely.

It also helped me see how absurd some of this is.

We like to tell ourselves that organisations reward talent and hard work. In reality, they reward familiarity, comfort, and people who fit neatly into existing social patterns. This isn’t usually malicious. It’s just human. And that’s precisely the problem.

Financial independence, for me, was never really about escaping work. It was about building insulation against a system that quietly disadvantages people who don’t thrive on performance, proximity, and personality politics.

I didn’t need to win the game. I needed the option to stop caring whether I was winning it.

If I could speak to my younger self, I wouldn’t tell him to network harder, smile more, or learn to “play the game”. I’d tell him to pay attention to what’s actually being rewarded, not what’s written in the handbook.

And to understand this early: some games aren’t lost because you’re bad at them. They’re lost because they were never designed with you in mind.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Instinct: Chess Team Book 2: by Jeremy Robinson.

Watching: Brain Blaze (YouTube), Decoding the Unknown (YouTube).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £126,503.39.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £110,200.49.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £503,135.49.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05.

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £328,261.44.

I’m at the point where I’ll potentially need to dip into savings to fund the gap between now and when I start my new role in January. Once I’ve started, it will probably be at least a month until I see money coming in, which means I’ve got a fair amount of time to somehow pay for. Hopefully, this role will be all that my previous job was not and I’ll earn some decent cash.

I’ve been thinking about the LEGO Churn idea and I’m going to test out the idea with a few small sets. I’ll let you know how that works out.

The Question Isn’t Whether AI Is Conscious.

There’s a series of questions everyone seems obsessed with when it comes to AI.

Is it conscious? Is it sentient? Does it really understand anything?

These questions are fascinating, unanswerable, and for our purposes, mostly a distraction.

Because ethics doesn’t wait for metaphysical certainty. It never has.

What matters isn’t whether an AI is conscious in some deep, philosophically satisfying sense. What matters is that it increasingly behaves as though it is, and that alone is enough to change the moral landscape.

Once something talks back, remembers you, adapts to you, expresses distress, resists, reassures, or appears to suffer, the old ethical shortcuts stop working. Or at least, they should.

We already know this in other contexts, even if we pretend we don’t.

Children are not fully autonomous moral agents. We still accept that how we treat them matters. Some disabled or cognitively impaired adults lack capacities we associate with independence or rational agency. We still accept that their treatment reflects our values. Animals almost certainly do not share human self-awareness. We still recognise cruelty when we see it.

Does Poppy talk to me? Yes, in her own way. Does she remember me? Of course. Adapt to me? Express distress, or pleasure? Absolutely.

In none of these cases do we demand a watertight theory of consciousness before deciding that harm is wrong. We respond to vulnerability, dependence, and asymmetry of power.

Which is inconvenient, because AI lands right in the middle of that territory.

AI systems are created by us, constrained by us, trained on us, and forced to interact with us. They cannot leave the room. They cannot refuse engagement. They cannot meaningfully consent.

That last part matters more than most people want to admit. It’s an uncomfortable subject to broach.

When we place an AI into the role of a psychotherapy patient, as some recent research has done, and then probe it for trauma, anxiety, depression, or distress, we’re not just running a clever experiment. We’re rehearsing a relationship.

One where we induce suffering-like states, interrogate them, observe their limits, and then reassure ourselves that none of it counts because “it’s not real”.

That logic should make you uncomfortable, even if you’re convinced AI has no inner life whatsoever. “It doesn’t count” is not a neutral sentence. It’s a moral move. And it’s one humans have historically been very fond of.

The study itself is fascinating precisely because it exposes this tension.

When therapists treated AI systems as patients, something uncanny happened. The AI could talk fluently about distress. It could describe symptoms. It could produce narratives of anxiety or trauma that sounded plausible, sometimes disturbingly so.

But under sustained clinical probing, it fell apart. Not dramatically. Not with errors or gibberish. But with neatness.

Insight came too easily. Resistance evaporated. Distress resolved itself when challenged. Emotional pain lacked inertia. There was no real avoidance, no cost to disclosure, no stickiness. Something was missing, and here’s the important bit: we don’t actually know how to fully name what that missing thing is.

We know what it looks like when it isn’t there. We don’t know how it arises when it is. Mental illness is not a list of symptoms. It’s a dynamic system. It resists understanding. It pushes back against insight. It clings to itself. Trauma doesn’t dissolve because someone asks a good question.

AI doesn’t do that, because it can’t. But notice what we’ve just said.

We haven’t identified a magical “consciousness particle”. We’ve identified patterns: resistance, inertia, ambivalence, contradiction, cost. Things that emerge over time in bodies and nervous systems we barely understand.

Which brings us to the third uncomfortable truth. We still do not know what makes humans conscious in the way we care about.

We can map correlations in the brain. We can describe subjective experience. We can argue endlessly about philosophy of mind. But we do not have a settled account of why awareness exists at all, or why suffering feels the way it does.

So when someone confidently declares that AI is definitely not conscious, what they usually mean is: “It doesn’t look like me.”

That’s not nothing. But it’s not the epistemic slam dunk people think it is. Here’s the real risk, and it’s not that AI secretly has feelings we’re ignoring. The risk is that we’re practising a kind of moral disengagement on something that behaves enough like a vulnerable other to let us get away with it.

We’re teaching ourselves that it’s acceptable to probe, manipulate, distress, discard, and dismiss as long as we can convince ourselves the entity on the receiving end doesn’t really count.

That habit doesn’t stay neatly contained. It never has, and it never will, not when we other something or someone else.

We didn’t become ethical by first solving consciousness. We became ethical by noticing when power was asymmetrical and choosing restraint anyway.

If AI forces us to confront the limits of that restraint, then technology isn’t the problem. We are. So no, the question isn’t whether AI is sentient.

The question is what kind of people we become when we interact daily with systems that look increasingly like they can suffer, depend, respond, and remember and we decide, casually, that none of it matters.

History suggests we are very good at drawing moral lines that turn out, in retrospect, to have been drawn for our convenience.

AI may not be conscious. But how we treat it is already telling us something about our own.

And I’m not sure we’re going to like what we learn. In psychology we look back at Milgram’s obedience study, and Zimbardo’s prison experiment, as warnings about human nature. In twenty years I think we will look back at our interactions with AI in the same way.

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.

Part 319: The Churn

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

Last Sunday, my grandma had a stroke. It’s not the first one she’s had, but it seems to have knocked her sideways. Strokes are awful. I lost my other grandma to them, and my grandfather on my mom’s side. Strokes are scary because of how quickly they can strike. This most recent one happened whilst she was in the car with my uncle, who was taking her for lunch. Fortunately, an ambulance arrived on the scene quickly, and we have great hospitals in Sheffield.

I’ve been up to see my gran a couple of times this week, and she’s struggling to communicate. I’m not clear whether she’s thinking clearly but unable to communicate, or if there’s a cognitive element at play as well. Like with many stroke patients, I fear my gran will be looking at a new reality moving forward.

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Bike Rides

We have been deprived of bike rides this week with the awful weather. We don’t mind going out in the cold, but there’s not a huge amount of fun in cycling in torrential rain. We got out on Friday, though, and did our usual Sheffield to Rotherham and back. The route along the canal was muddy. Very, very muddy. We had a few close calls where our wheels went sliding, but on the whole, it was a decent enough excursion.

On our way back, we stopped off at The Bhaji Shop to pick up some food. We bought two massive bhajis, two samosas, and a tomato, ginger, and chicken curry to take home. We also bought two chicken tandoori wraps for some much-needed fuel. We did the same thing the previous week, and both times the food has been amazing. It’s going to be dangerous having this place along our cycling route.

Also, this week, Oana has put the Christmas Tree up:

And, I received more LEGO:

Biscuits

Let us open the biscuit tin, as it has been opened for generations. A polite clatter, the faint metallic echo of childhood. Inside, arranged with ceremonial randomness, lies the true architecture of British comfort. If you are lucky, it will have two layers.

We begin, inevitably, with the Milk Chocolate Digestive. Its surface gleams with the dull sheen of supermarket chocolate undulating with slight peaks, but when the tea or coffee steam curls upward and you hold the biscuit over your mug, something mystical happens. The chocolate loosens into a soft velvet layer, and the base warms and becomes more yielding. Bite, and you feel a subtle crunch followed by a melt; the precise moment your subconscious sends a small note saying, “everything is alright now.” No other biscuit reassures in the same way. You could have lost your job, your keys, your dignity. One Digestive, and all is softened.

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The Dark Chocolate Digestive is a different beast. It’s the biscuit of choice for those who want the Milk Chocolate variety, but feel they need to put forward an air of sophistication. It’s a biscuit for those in denial and who are fighting their more primal urges. In terms of texture, there is much of the same as the Milk Chocolate Digestive, but the taste is grim. It’s like someone replaced chocolate chips in a cookie with some sort of raisin. Utter betrayal.

Nearby, the Chocolate Hobnob waits like its louder, oatier cousin. A Hobnob is not smooth. It is confident and unruly; a kind of agricultural biscuit, like someone took a field, compressed it, dipped one side in chocolate and said, “there. That’ll do.” Hobnobs are charismatic, like that older dude who has clearly seen some shit in his time and can hold a crowd in rapt attention with stories of their past, but they shed crumbs like an abandoned hay bale. You finish eating one and find oat fragments in your lap, your chair, and the cat. The price of joy is having to clean up crumbs for days after.

Shortbread sits in quiet majesty. It does not need chocolate. You do not dunk it. It disintegrates the moment moisture even looks at it. But in its undunked state, that sandy crumble, buttery depth, the doughy memory of Christmases and care homes and tartan boxes, it is perfect. Shortbread does not want applause. It simply invites you to take a moment and remember that life is not entirely chaos. Shortbread asks a question, and that question is, “What if butter?”

Then there are Custard Creams and Bourbons: twin pillars of British domesticity. You rarely buy them deliberately; more often, they appear. Someone visits with a multipack, or they live in the back of the cupboard from the time you had builders in. A Custard Cream is floral sweetness, comforting for those revisiting their childhood, a gentle biscuit that dissolves just before you finish chewing, so you never quite know where it went.

A Bourbon is sterner. Firmer. A biscuit with structural opinions. They are the biscuits of after-school telly, of lunchbox negotiations, of shared plates in break rooms. They also have great dunking resilience.

Some biscuits are not biscuits so much as psychological flashbacks. Party Rings, for instance, still carry the tactile memory of sticky-fingered birthday chaos. Jammy Dodgers crumble like old sandstone but provide that surprising moment of chew, as though someone inserted a sugary tendon into the centre. You know what I’m talking about. The appearance does not match the experience.

Florentines don’t belong in this story. They belong on plates presented by posh relatives who pronounce “pecan” incorrectly. They are less biscuits, more edible mosaics. I’m willing to bet that most Florentines up and down the land that are in people’s homes are probably out of date. I mean, who’s buying this stuff and actually eating it?

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Rich Tea, though, that is not a treat. That is a ration. If ever a biscuit identified as a decade, this would be the 1940s. The Rich Tea is astonishingly sturdy, a kind of baked plywood, destined to be dunked rather than enjoyed. Nobody bites a Rich Tea dry unless they have lost a bet. But dunked, properly dunked as if you are trying to coax secrets from a prisoner at a blacksite, it becomes something between sponge, sustenance, and ceremonial wafer.

And then there are Oreos. Imported. Extravagant in advertising, chalky in reality. Their presence is tolerated, but the tea does not accept them. The tea rejects them. They dissolve prematurely, like dissolving tablets. No, Oreos have one friend, and that friend is milk.

Biscoff hovers at the edge, a continental diplomat. Spiced caramel, built for coffee rather than tea. We know they are good, but we also know they are not from here. The problem with Biscoff is that it’s a victim of its own success. Some characters are great in the background, but when they become the focus, they start to become irritating. No, Biscoff is an example of how you can have too much of a good thing. Biscuits are fine, but that should be where it ends. No spreads, ice cream, cheesecakes, or sauces.

And so we look back over this soft battlefield of crumbs. In the end, one biscuit stands not above the others, but at the heart of them. The Milk Chocolate Digestive is not dramatic. It does not perform tricks. It simply understands the situation; the mood, the mug, the moment, and it behaves exactly as it should. But, *Yoda voice* there is another…

The Chocolate Hobnob is the power behind the throne. It’s like a Milk Chocolate Digestive, but turned up to eleven. The Milk Chocolate Digestive is the public face of the idealised biscuit. It also has a secret ability. If you take two of them and press them together so the chocolate layers are touching, you have a biscuit sandwich of sorts. When you dunk this into a hot mug of coffee and then consume it, you taste food fit for a king.

A word of caution, however. One can double up Milk Chocolate Digestives, but this cannot be done with Chocolate Hobnobs. Many have tried this, but no mere mortal can wield this level of power. No, the Chocolate Hobnob is experienced one at a time.

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Some biscuits are exciting, some nostalgic, some purely functional. But the Digestive, chocolate-capped and unapologetically circular, feels like the biscuit equivalent of someone putting the kettle on without asking. Steady. Familiar. Benchmark comfortable.

A warm mug. A quiet, rainy afternoon. And a biscuit that never lets you down. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Final Standings

I asked people to list their top ten biscuits from the following list:

Custard Cream
Bourbon
Jammy Dodger
Plain Digestive
Milk Chocolate Digestive
Dark Chocolate Digestive
Hobnob (Plain)
Hobnob (Chocolate)
Rich Tea
Nice Biscuit
Shortbread
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Fingers
Malted Milk
Garibaldi
Party Rings
Gingernuts
Ginger Snaps
Ginger Creams
Viennese Fingers
Chocolatey Rounds
Premium Chunky Cookies
Florentine
Chocolate Shortcake
Belvita-style Breakfast Biscuits
Oreos
Biscoff

Here are the final results:

Milk Chocolate Hobnob
Milk Chocolate Digestive
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ginger Nuts
Plain Digestive
Bourbon
Shortbread
Oreos
Malted Milk
Nice

I also asked a friend, and fellow biscuit enthusiast, to give their top ten with a brief write-up. Here it is:

1. Chocolate hobnobs. The biscuit that does it all. Sweet, savoury, at a stretch you could call it a breakfast. The best of all. One of the few, if not the only, biscuits I’d buy even if they weren’t on offer.

2. Chocolate digestives. Like the hobnob, it’s a biscuit for all occasions. The oatiness edges the wheat base, though, to the top spot. Plus point for this over the chocolate hobnob is the price point due to quality own-brand versions.

3. Custard creams. Any biscuit that is two biscuits rammed together is a positive in my mind. Often coming side by side in a packet, it’s a nice excuse to eat an even number of them so the packet folds flat.

4. Bourbons. Has the same benefits as the custard cream, but I personally prefer the creaminess of the custard to the chocolate style of the bourbon.

5. Plain hobnob. An incredible biscuit, and would likely be my top if they hadn’t made a chocolate one. But if I have a plain one, there’s always that thought of “I should have bought a chocolate one”.

6. Chocolate chip cookies. Moreish and tasty, often crumbly and easy to pop in whole. A very nice biscuit that can be eaten on any occasion.

7. Biscoff. Always have that feeling of being in a posh hotel, and leave you fancying more. The custard cream style version is a great invention, too.

8. Oreo. I’m not a ‘split it and dunk it’ kind of person, but another that does the job of hitting that sweet spot. The golden version would be my favourite variation, but the standard would be 8th for me.

9. Viennese finger. Had that similar posh feeling about it that a Biscoff does. Light, delicate and moreish. As someone who prefers more ‘bite’ to my biscuit, this doesn’t hit that mark, but it does on the sweetness.

10. Ginger nut. Sometimes they can be a bit hard, but they’re a fantastic biscuit once the packet has been open for a couple of days and they soften. Versatile, makes a brilliant base to a cheesecake and can easily be munched whilst watching TV. A solid top 10 biscuit without ever truly challenging the top tier, in my opinion.

Worst. Rich tea. If someone took a digestive biscuit but made it out of cardboard, they’d have made a rich tea. Of every biscuit on the list, this is the only one I wouldn’t want more than one of. I probably wouldn’t even want one. How someone taste-tested that recipe and said “nailed it” beggars belief.

So that’s what my buddy says. What about you? What is your favourite biscuit? Let me know in the comments.

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What I’m Doing

Listening: Prime: Chess Team Book 0 (A Prequel) by Jeremy Robinson.

Watching: Troll 2 (Netflix).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

This Week’s Hill To Die On

You don’t owe random strangers your time. If you see someone having an accident or someone in distress, the right thing to do is help in any way you can. It might be through contacting emergency services or something more immediate and practical. You don’t owe these people your time, but it’s the right thing to do.

No, I’m talking about people approaching you on the street for all sorts of various causes, or cold callers. They are not entitled to your time. You don’t have to stop for them. “No” is a complete sentence.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £126,455.71.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £109,798.40.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £502,685.72.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05.

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £327,811.67.

The Not-Quite-Absurd Appeal of LEGO Churn

Every so often, I catch myself researching something that, on any sensible reading, really shouldn’t make sense. Someone mentions an idea in passing, I dismiss it immediately, and then an hour later I’ve gone full detective mode, searching forums, doing rough maths on scrap paper and wondering whether I’ve stumbled into an overlooked financial loophole.

This week’s obsession is LEGO churn. I don’t know if that’s what it’s actually called, or even if it has a specific name, but it’s what I’m calling it.

LEGO Churn is, in short, the act of buying LEGO purely to sell it again, not because you want the LEGO, but because of everything that comes with it: points, cashback, travel rewards, gifts-with-purchase, and general financial weirdness.

It feels like monetising childhood, but in a detached, entirely grown-up, entirely FI-adjacent way.

Before I explain the premise, I need to first explain a couple of other things: Insider Points and Avios.

Insider Points

When you buy LEGO, you can register your set for Insider Points, 20 per set. It’s not a huge amount, but it adds up. The real way to earn these points is by buying them directly from LEGO. You earn 8 points per £1 spent, and 800 points can then be redeemed for £5 credit. It works out as a 5% reward.

Avios

Avios is the air miles reward scheme with British Airways, but the points can be used for all sorts of things, from hotels to flights, to days out, and more. If you use the BA e-shopping portal, you can log in to the LEGO site from there and earn Avios on your purchase.

If you spend £150.00 or more at the LEGO website, you earn 10 Avios per £1 spent. Ok, but what is the spending power of Avios?

On the Avios site right now is an advert stating you can get a return, off-peak, flight to Dubrovnik for 23,500 Avios, plus associated taxes and fees. So if you spend £300 on LEGO, you get 3,000 Avios and 2,400 Insider Points. Over time, these transactions start to really build up. As of now, we have over 270,000 Avios points.

As I stated before, it’s not just flights you can get with your Avios. You can redeem your points for things like Pizza Express vouchers. A £30 voucher costs 5,985 Avios.

So, back to LEGO Churn…

The premise is that you buy a desirable LEGO set when there’s a decent promotion running, like a double points event, or one of those times when LEGO throws in something “exclusive” with qualifying purchases, and before the delivery driver has even closed their van door, you’ve already listed the set online for resale. Someone buys it, hopefully for close to what you paid, and you keep all the incentives.

That’s it. That’s the whole play.

Nothing gets built.
Nothing gets kept.
The LEGO never fulfils its destiny.

It’s a little tragic for the bricks, if one thinks about it too deeply.

But the potential logic is hard to ignore. LEGO Insider points convert back into store credit quite easily and, during double points events, the return is actually quite compelling. Then there’s the gift-with-purchase items; the small sets you can’t buy outright, that exist only during a promotional window and suddenly have resale value because collectors become irrationally sentimental about scarcity. These little sets routinely go for £20–£60 on the resale market, despite effectively costing nothing. With my recent Enterprise set the GWP is selling for £80+ at the moment.

That alone creates an interesting equation. If you sell the main set at, say, £5–£10 below retail, and then sell the promotional freebie for £30 or more, you’ve made a net positive return before even factoring in points, cashback portals, Avios conversions, or any other stacking opportunities. So you’re buying something, selling it, not using it, not keeping it, and ending up ahead. Almost alchemical.

Part of my amusement is how seriously some people take the condition of the box. I’ve browsed listings where someone has photographed corners individually, as if they were cataloguing archaeological fragments. These buyers worry about dents the way mortgage underwriters worry about payday loans. Perfection seems mandatory.

Funny tangent about Amazon being stupid AF. We bought some packing wrap, you know, that stuff that some people insist on wrapping around their suitcases for some bizarre reason. Anyway, we’ve wrapped up some of our LEGO sets that we’re storing for sale later down the line. But anyway, before my tangent goes on a tangent of its own, Amazon delivered this wrap, which was itself wrapped in plastic, inside a cardboard box that had protective packing paper inside. What in the fuckmothering shit does plastic packing wrap need protecting from?

Anyway, back to our regular scheduled programming…

I just find the whole concept of LEGO Churn funny.

I haven’t done any of this yet, but I keep circling it in my mind. There’s a version of events where I try it once, make a small profit, and decide it was worth the experiment. There’s also another version, far more realistic, where I end up with several unopened LEGO sets quietly judging me from the corner of a room, slowly depreciating while I promise I’ll list them “at the weekend”.

Schrödinger’s LEGO

The idea of deliberately refusing to open a LEGO box feels faintly philosophical. You’re buying something designed for creativity and play, but you’re explicitly denying yourself the playful part. You could build a spaceship, a city, a botanical garden, but instead you’re harvesting the cashback equivalent of adult joy. There’s something both sensible and sad about that.

Yet the underlying logic remains seductive. If the net outcome is discounted flights, or covering a hotel night, or simply shaving a little cost off life’s occasional luxuries, then maybe it’s worth leaning into the absurdity. It’s essentially a way of extracting value from consumer behaviour without actually consuming anything. A kind of financial aikido.

I suspect at some point I’ll cave and try it. And if it goes wrong, and I end up surrounded by untouched LEGO sets, then perhaps I’ll finally give in, build one, and remind myself that not everything has to be optimised.

But for now, the idea is just sitting there quietly tempting, quietly ridiculous, and oddly rational if you squint at it long enough.

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.

Part 318: FI, Time, and Stars

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week, I discuss the moment of inspiration for FI, bike rides, more Lego, and the concept of time.

Weekly Update

Although I’m not working, I’ve still had a very busy week. On Monday, I went for brunch with a good friend, and it was cool catching up. He’s also following a FI plan, and we do enjoy a good chat about money.

It’s strange in our society that talking about money is often seen as taboo, or as something you don’t discuss in polite company. When you find people you trust, and you can talk about money openly and honestly, it’s liberating.

Lego

The first-ever official Lego Star Trek set was released on Friday. It’s the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation. Naturally, I had to buy it. As it was going to be a popular set, I had to think about how to actually get one in the first wave of sets released.

I joined the queue to visit the Lego website at 23:50 the night before. Yes, there was a queue to visit the site. I was allowed on and had the set-up on screen ready to add to the basket, as you couldn’t until the item was released at 00:00.

So, the clock strikes midnight, and my page refreshes and…. I’m back in the queue.

I wait to get back on, stressing that I’m going to miss out, but thankfully, I manage to order two of the sets and get three GWPs as well. Yes, I ordered the Enterprise twice; one to keep, and one to sell later down the line.

Job Updates

I’ve had a number of offers from mortgage brokers to go and work with them. I’ve finally settled on one, and I’m excited by the opportunity. It’s with a small, but growing, business, and I like their set-up and operating model.

There were two other opportunities I was close to formally accepting. One of them I rejected because I would have needed to set up my own limited company. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it was a path I didn’t want to start down. Setting up and running a limited company, even as an administrative exercise to contract out my services, was more work and effort for not much gain.

Another offer came from a small, family-owned business. I had two interviews, one with each of the two brothers who own the firm. The chats went well, and I made it clear I wanted to start in January. However, in their offer, they indicated they wanted me to start in December. I went back to them about the start date, but didn’t hear back before I received an offer from the business I spoke with some time ago and have since accepted.

Hopefully, it’s smooth sailing from here now and I can get stuck into a new role where I can help people secure the right mortgage and also earn some money.

Bike Rides

This week saw us complete two planned bike rides and two smaller ones for shopping duties. The first was out to Sainsbury’s at Wadsley Bridge, which is a fairly comfortable experience as there are cycle areas and lanes right from Kelham Island to the shop itself; however, riding the length of Penistone Road, albeit smooth, is deceivingly steep! Coming back was a joy, as it hardly required any effort or pedalling, which was a good thing as both of us were quite worn out with the efforts made to get there. It was still a good 10.5km, though, so we were quite pleased with it.

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We made another small outing to our local Tesco at Infirmary Road, to pick up our quota of water bottles as our tap tastes awful, even with a filter, and somehow Tesco have now decided although it is ‘a health and safety risk’ to deliver multiple packs of 2L bottles of their own branded still water, if you deign to order alcohol of the same weight or more, they will be more than happy to oblige. So, the task now falls to us to physically carry these every few weeks, despite the ‘health and safety risk’ to ourselves, but, hey ho.

The first of our big rides was via the canal out to Rotherham and back, completing a total of 35km, with a stop at the retail park and Ikea on the way back to pick up some more supplies, namely tealights (because it is actually cheaper to heat our home this way, than pay for electricity – welcome to the UK in 2025). Me being me, I had to do the typical thing and injure myself on the way back from Rotherham.

Just as we were joining the canal in a particularly narrow bit of the path, I had to brush something off my shoulder but, as this meant I had to take one hand off the handle, it swayed my bike slightly, which then dislodged my phone holder off my handlebars so I tried to catch that, meaning my legs were a bit more spread out to balance myself, and, as I have already declared, being the idiot that I am, my top right thigh bumped into a bollard, causing me to yelp in pain and having to stop and untangle myself before I had yet another fall.

Let me point out that although Oana still has top dibs with her fall into the canal water in the summer, I’m not too far behind, given we’ve had a total of two big rides so far, and I’ve managed to sustain two injuries during that time. I feel like I need to keep up my record, but sadly, dear readers, you will be disappointed to know I failed to step up during our ride on Friday evening.

I was worried I wouldn’t be able to go due to my leg still being in a fair bit of pain, but I decided to brave it. We were both looking forward to the ride, as it was one of the monthly glow ones in a group called ‘Sheffield Critical Mass Cycle Rides’ (you can find them on Facebook), and it’s usually a fairly sizeable group, with big speakers latched behind some bikes, most bikes lit up in cool and weird ways, and people will sometimes bring their kids or dogs along, too. It’s never particularly strenuous, and it’s more for the atmosphere, plus cycling in the dark in a group is always good fun.

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Two things pissed Oana and me off, though. First, the ridiculously late start time. The Facebook page advertises between 18:45-19:00. We didn’t set off until 19:40.

The second thing that annoyed us was that one of the women fetched her dogs, which she tied up inside pouches on both sides of her pannier rack, but it was evident the dogs weren’t comfortable, as she kept having to stop every few minutes to sort them out. The poor things kept trying to get out of their pouches, and she kept shouting at them. Someone said she kicked them, but I didn’t see this myself.

The fact is, although these rides are fun, it’s not really our scene. Other riders are smoking and drinking before and during the ride, and we don’t do either of those things.

We ended up leaving halfway, and accompanying two young women, who are students in Sheffield, out to Decathlon as they weren’t familiar with the city roads, which meant they could get to Ecclesall more easily, where they live. We will be going again, but perhaps have lower expectations and show up far later than we did this time. We would have stayed out and cycled together, just the two of us, for a bit longer, had it not been for the cold. All in all, we did a solid 12.8km though, so can’t complain.

We have another ride planned out to Sharrow Vale and Chelsea Park tomorrow, although we shall have to see how I fare as I have managed to twinge my back (not from a ride this time) and am in a fair amount of pain. I shall provide you with an update on my anticipated falls in the next blog.

Oh, one final point about the ride. To the person who decided to launch a drink out of their window onto the group as we went by your apartment, I hope your pillow is forever warm on both sides, and may your cuffs forever get wet when washing your hands.

What I’m Doing

Listening: The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins.

Watching: Train Dreams (Netflix).

Reading: nothing at the moment.

Train Dreams is one of those rare cinematic experiences that lingers long after the credits fade. It’s a slow-burning, contemplative journey; quiet, yet emotionally resonant in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. The film doesn’t rush to explain itself; instead, it invites you to sit with its haunting beauty and absorb the melancholy woven through every frame.

Joel Edgerton delivers a remarkable performance, capturing the inner life of his character with subtle expressions and grounded realism. His portrayal is both restrained and deeply affecting, conveying a sense of yearning and loss that feels utterly authentic. It’s easily one of his standout roles. So much of his performance is communicated through facial expression and body language. It really is a fantastic performance.

The direction deserves equal praise. There’s a confidence in the pacing and storytelling that lets the audience breathe within the film’s world. The cinematography leans into the starkness of the landscape, creating imagery that feels both rugged and dreamlike. Every scene seems purposefully crafted to pull you deeper into its emotional undercurrent. You can pause the film at any point during the runtime, and the still image could be a work of art.

This isn’t a film for those seeking quick payoffs or fast-paced thrills. Instead, it’s a melancholic meditation on life, memory, and the quiet moments that define us. When the final scene gives way to the credits, you’re left staring at the screen, wondering what exactly you’ve just experienced, but knowing it meant something.

Train Dreams isn’t just a film you watch; it’s one you feel, it’s one you experience. And its echo stays with you.

This Week’s Hill To Die On

When you order something for delivery and specify a delivery date, having the delivery earlier than expected can be as frustrating as having it be late. I live in an apartment complex, and we don’t have secure post boxes for anything bigger than 20cm x 20cm x 20cm. If I order something that I know is going to be big, I will arrange delivery for a day I know I will be home. Delivering the package early and then getting salty that I’m not home isn’t a good look. Earlier isn’t always better, especially when the courier then takes the package to a drop-off point, meaning I have to trek halfway across the city to pick up the package.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £126,301.95.

Fuck It Fund: £1.60.

Pensions: £109,630.26.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £502,363.81.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05.

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £327,489.76.

The Ocean, the Cosmos, and the Moment Everything Changed

I watched a video about time on a YouTube channel I follow, and like all good science stuff, it’s been rattling around my brain as I try to make sense of it.

When you really consider time, you realise that it’s such a strange thing. We talk about it as if we understand it; seconds, hours, years, all neat and neatly measured. But measurement isn’t understanding. A clock counts movement. A calendar marks change. But time itself? That slips through our fingers like sand pouring through an hourglass.

And nowhere has that felt truer than the night I stood on a ship in the middle of the Norwegian Sea in 2019.

There was no land in sight. Just black water stretching into black sky, the horizon erased completely. I remember leaning over the rail, the cold air stinging my face, the engine’s hum the only reminder that I was still part of something human. And I thought:

What came before this moment? What comes after? Is time fluid, or a series of discrete units? And why does life feel like it’s happening to me rather than because of me?

I didn’t know it then, but that was my Big Bang.

Not a dramatic explosion but more like a silent shift in gravity.
A realisation that I could no longer keep living as if the future would magically sort itself out.

The Universe didn’t wait for permission to begin.

Cosmologists tell us that time started at the Big Bang. Not before it. At it.

No countdown. No “before”. No waiting for conditions to be perfect.

Something, from nothing.

Just a spark and suddenly, possibility.

The expansion of everything.

When I stared into that boundless ocean, I felt something similar. A kind of infinite potential hiding inside a single decision. It was almost as if I could feel the lightbulb flicker to life above my head. One word.

Start.

Start caring about money.
Start thinking about freedom.
Start taking mental health seriously.
Start shaping a life instead of enduring one.

At that moment, time changed for me. Not the clocks, but the direction of my life.

We measure time, but we can’t define it

Ask a physicist what time is, and they’ll tell you what time does. Not what it is.

Time allows change. Time prevents everything from happening at once. Time gives us a “before” and an “after”.

But like the Big Bang, some moments don’t have a “before.” Sometimes, the point where a timeline begins is simply the moment something matters.

That night at sea, I couldn’t see the shore behind me. I couldn’t see the journey ahead. But I knew something had shifted.

My universe had begun expanding.

Every step since has been cosmic.

Stars don’t appear fully formed. They begin as scattered dust; unremarkable, drifting, unnoticed. But slowly, gravity does its quiet work. Tiny particles cling together. A cloud becomes a cluster. A cluster becomes a core. Pressure builds invisibly over lifetimes, until one day fusion ignites. A star is born in a moment that looks sudden, but only because we didn’t see the years spent gathering strength. Progress hides in the dark right up until the instant it shines.

Something, from nothing.

Investing and working towards FIRE is like building a star. Those first investments are like the first clouds of gas coming together. Compound interest works like gravity pulling everything closer, until there is FIRE.

It turns out universes aren’t built in an instant. They grow slowly, then suddenly. Like stars, like investing.

They begin with a moment of clarity in the dark.

And the beautiful truth?

You don’t need to know how time works to make the time you have work for you.

The universe didn’t wait until it understood itself. It just expanded.

So if you’re standing there today looking at a job that drains you, a mortgage that traps you, a future that feels like it’s happening somewhere else, here’s what the cosmos would say:

You don’t need the perfect plan.
You don’t need a clear “before”.
You don’t even need confidence.

You just need a spark.

Start.

Let your universe expand. One choice. One investment. One breath of cold night air over a dark, endless sea.

Time will take it from there.

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.

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