Part 336: David doesn’t share biscuits…

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

The big space news this week is the launch of the Artemis II mission, which was designed to take four astronauts around the moon before returning them safely to Earth. It’s frustrating that it’s taken this long for humanity to return to Luna, but hopefully it’s the start of a new space race that will see us lay the foundations for spreading throughout our system. I’m almost certainly being naively optimistic, but I’d love to see a colony on the moon or Mars in my lifetime.

On Thursday I met with a good friend for some food, and it was great catching up. Although we speak pretty much every day, in person meet ups are not that common with work and other adulting commitments.

I made a bit of a mistake on Friday by not closing my diary for appointments, which led to me seeing several clients that day. I have now made sure Monday is booked out as we will be heading to the cinema to see Project Hail Mary.

In other news, I saw in The Guardian that people are being advised to stockpile food. In the UK. In 2026. As a species, there are times when we seem to be hopeless.

There’s something faintly unsettling about being told, in calm, measured tones, that you should probably start stockpiling food. Not in a “build a bunker and start bartering in beans” kind of way, but in a softly reassuring, middle-class sort of way. A few tins here, some oats there, maybe a secret stash of crisps to keep morale up while the planet burns.

That’s the tone of the piece in The Guardian, which argues that in an increasingly turbulent world we should all be quietly building up a reserve of long-life food. Not panic buying, you understand, just preparing.

At a basic level, it’s not wrong. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that systems we assume are rock solid can, under pressure, start to creak. Shelves empty. Supply chains wobble. People do strange things with toilet roll and hand soap.

Having a few days’ worth of food and water at home isn’t paranoia, it’s just common sense. The kind of low-effort resilience that costs very little but buys you a bit of breathing room if things go sideways. But the article doesn’t just stop at “be a bit prepared.” It wraps that advice in a broader narrative of looming instability. Experts warn of fragile food systems, geopolitical tensions, and the risk, however loosely defined, of disruption severe enough to leave people without access to basic supplies.

This is where it starts to feel a bit slippery, and it moves from sound practical advice to scare mongering.

While the threats are real in an abstract sense, they’re presented without any meaningful sense of scale or likelihood. It’s all very “this could happen” without ever quite addressing how probable it actually is. The result is a kind of low-grade anxiety. Not enough to make you panic, but just enough to make you think: should I be doing more?

The voices in the article are given plenty of room to make fairly bold claims, about civil unrest, systemic fragility, even the risk of catastrophic failure in the coming years, but those claims largely go unchallenged. There’s no real attempt to balance them with alternative perspectives or to interrogate the assumptions behind them. It’s presented as a quiet consensus, when in reality it’s likely a more contested space. Many disasters that plague humanity, like pandemics, natural disasters, Donald Trump, are things that we know will happen at some point, we just can’t always predict when.

The real facepalm moment comes when we’re told to build up a personal stockpile,but also to be ready to share it. Morally, that’s hard to argue with. If things genuinely got bad, social cohesion would matter. Communities that look after each other tend to fare better than those that don’t, but it does raise an uncomfortable question: if the system is fragile enough that we’re being nudged to prepare for shortages, why is the burden quietly shifting onto individuals, and then further onto communities, to manage the fallout?

Actually, as I ask that question, I think back to our government’s response to Covid and it starts to make more sense that we should take on the burden.

To be fair, when the article sticks to practical advice, it’s on much firmer ground. Buy things you’ll actually eat. Favour long-life items that don’t require cooking. Build your stores gradually as part of your normal shop rather than panic buying. All entirely sensible. This isn’t about going full prepper, it’s about being slightly more prepared than you were yesterday.

However, even here, there are moments where the detail wobbles. One suggestion around water, 7 to 12 litres per person per day, feels wildly out of step with typical emergency guidance, and it’s presented without context or challenge. It’s a small thing, but it matters, because once advice starts to feel unrealistic, people either ignore it entirely or assume the situation must be far more serious than it is. If Oana and I had to have just three days worth of water in keeping with those amounts, we’d need a minimum of 42 litres of water stored for an emergency. If we needed to keep enough water for a week, we’re looking at 98 litres.

Our apartment is a decent size, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a large living room. We could not store 49 2 litre bottles of water indefinitely, just in case. The advice given here seems to be geared around living in some degree of comfort, but if shit got real, I’d be more concerned about survival than comfort, and it’s entirely reasonable for two adults and a cat to get by with much less than 7 litres per person per day.

The comparisons with countries like Switzerland and Sweden are also doing a bit of heavy lifting. Yes, some nations take civil preparedness more seriously and provide clearer guidance. But they also have different histories, different risks, and different approaches to state responsibility. Dropping them into the conversation without that context subtly nudges the reader towards a conclusion: that the UK is behind the curve and you, personally, might need to compensate.

Having a modest supply of food and water at home is sensible. It’s no different, really, to having an emergency fund. You hope you never need it, but you’ll be glad it’s there if you do. It’s about buying yourself time, not surviving the apocalypse. If there was a worldwide nuclear war, or an asteroid impact, or the return of Cthulhu, I’m not sure I’d want to live through something like the reality depicted in The Road.

It’s also worth being clear-eyed about what this kind of advice is and isn’t.

A cupboard full of oats and tuna isn’t a solution to systemic risk. It’s a sticking plaster. A small, individual buffer against problems that are, at their core, much bigger than any one household can solve. While there’s nothing wrong with being prepared, there’s something slightly uncomfortable about the idea that the answer to large-scale fragility is simply for everyone to quietly fend for themselves, but to also be prepared to share their hobnobs.

Don’t come knocking on my door if things ever did get that bad, because I don’t share hobnobs. Ever.

The Greatest Science Fiction Shows

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

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

So far, I’ve covered:

10 – The Outer Limits

9 – The X-Files

8 – Space: Above and Beyond

7 – Quantum Leap

Now for number six (pun not intended, but I’m going with it… IYKYK)

Battlestar Galactica (2004 – 2009)

Battlestar Galactica is often held up as one of the greatest science-fiction series ever made, and for good reason. It took the relatively simple premise from the original series and transformed it into something far more ambitious: a character-driven exploration of survival, identity, politics, and morality, all wrapped in the framework of a space opera.

Background

Humanity lives in the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Decades before the main story, humanity fought a war against a race of machines they created to serve them; the Cylons. The war raged for years and eventually an armistice was agreed.

The show begins with catastrophe. After decades with no sign of the Cylons, they reappear and launch a devastating attack on the colonies. Somehow they had hacked the Colonial military and disable almost every ship rendering them helpless. The Cylons are able to pick the human military apart with almost no resistance.

The Cylon fleet orbits the Colonies and nuke them from orbit. Within hours, the human race is almost completely wiped out. Only a few civilian ships escape and their only protection is the ageing Battlestar Galactica; a survivor of the first Cylon war. The fleet, led by Galactica, leave known space in an attempt to find the mythical thirteenth colony; Earth.

From the outset, Battlestar Galactica makes it clear that this is not a story about triumph. It is a story about survival. It’s grim, dark, and gritty. It feels very much like a show made in the shadow of 9/11.

The fleet is constantly on the run, pursued by an enemy that is relentless, adaptive, and often indistinguishable from the humans they hunt. Although the Cylons were machines, they’ve developed a way to create versions of themselves that look human.

Resources are scarce. Food, water, and fuel is all finite. Every decision carries consequences, and unlike shows such as Star Trek: Voyager, the reset button isn’t hit each week.

The comparison between Voyager and Galactica is relevant because without Voyager there may not have been a Galactica. Ronald D. Moore grew frustrated at how Voyager didn’t commit to its premise of being a ship alone in hostile space trying to find safety. He left Voyager and created the reboot of Galactica, where every decision has consequences further down the line.

Cylons and The Plan

At the heart of the series is the relationship between humans and Cylons. Initially presented as the enemy, the Cylons quickly become something more complicated. Many of them look human, think like humans, and feel like humans. Some even believe they are human. It is often stated that they have a plan, but it’s kept a mystery. All we know is that humanity is a source of fascination and disgust to the Cylons. We know there are twelve human designs of Cylon, but we only see seven of these designs for most of the run of the show. The mystery of “The Final Five” is central to the later episodes, because they could be anyone.

While the show is often remembered for its action and drama, one of its defining features is its focus on politics and the interplay between the characters.

The dynamic between Admiral William Adama and President Laura Roslin forms the backbone of the series. Military necessity and civilian governance frequently clash, particularly as the fleet faces existential threats. Decisions about leadership, justice, and survival are rarely straightforward, and the balance between security and freedom becomes a recurring theme. One of the most powerful, and relevant quotes from the series comes from a conversation between these two characters. Adama says to Roslin;

“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people”.

The show doesn’t shy away from reflecting real-world issues. Storylines involving occupation, insurgency, and terrorism mirror contemporary conflicts, particularly in the post-9/11 world in which the series was produced. It asks difficult questions about how far a society should go to protect itself and what it risks becoming in the process. In one harrowing arc of the show, we see our heroes engage in a campaign of suicide bombing. This is uncomfortable viewing when you place it in the context of the War on Terror.

Running alongside the political and military narrative is a more philosophical thread centred on religion and destiny. Both humans and Cylons grapple with questions of faith, often from opposing perspectives.

The Cylons, despite being machines, are deeply religious, believing in a single God and a greater plan. Many humans, by contrast, follow a polytheistic belief system rooted in ancient mythology.

The recurring phrase “All of this has happened before, and will happen again” captures the show’s fascination with cycles of history. Are the characters shaping their own future, or are they simply repeating patterns that have played out countless times before?

It’s a question the series never fully answers, but the exploration is interesting.

Battlestar Galactica helped redefine what science fiction can be. I mentioned previously, when talking about Space: Above and Beyond, that this show could not have been made without Above and Beyond leading the way. Well, Galactica helped open a path to more gritty, grounded in reality science fiction that has followed.

“Action Stations”

One of the biggest strengths of Galactica was the care and attention put towards action scenes. When the Galactica goes to “Action Stations” you know that you’re in for a visual treat.

A lot of science fiction thinks you can just throw lots of ships and lasers into a scene and it will be cool. It’s not. It’s often confusing as you have no clear idea of what is going on in the battle.

A well written space battle must have clear stakes. The factions must be identifiable. There has to be a compelling reason for the conflict, and the battlespace must be well defined. Galactica has, in my opinion, two of the best space battles put to screen; the attack on the Resurrection Ship and the escape from New Caprica.

In both of these battles all the above criteria are met. We see awesome effects that bring the battles to life. There are clear stakes, and there are some genius tactics employed. The “Adama Maneuver” is now the stuff of legend within sci-fi. In the show, the method of FTL travel is a form of instantaneous jump-tech, where you blink out of existence in one place and reappear in another; there’s no direct direction of travel unlike in Star Trek. Well, the Galactica is not designed to fly in an atmosphere, but to get by a blockade, Admiral Adama jumps Galactica in the atmosphere of a planet and the ship starts plummeting to the ground surrounded by fire as it’s armour burns in the atmosphere. As the ship falls, it launches its fighter wing before jumping back out seconds before it would hit the surface.

For all the greatness of Battlestar Galactica, it lost its way after the first couple of seasons. Studio interference led to a few clunker episodes, and although it tried to get back on course, it never quite managed it. The “Plan” never amounted to much, and it seemed as though the writers were making it up as they went along.

Overall, Galactica deserves its place on this list because of some fantastic ideas, characters, and the gritty, realistic world building. It would rank higher if it maintained its quality from the first two seasons throughout.

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What I’m Doing

Listening: Artifact by Jeremy Robinson

Watching: nothing

Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £127,192.48.

Fuck It Fund: £5,233.86.

Pensions: £112,672.76.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £491,529.10.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,145.84.

Total Debts: £174,145.84.

Total Wealth: £317,383.26.

The new financial year is upon us but I don’t have £20k to dump into my ISA right away. I’ll probably move £5k from my cash savings into it, and then drip feed into it as and when I get the cash through the year.

My investments have recovered a little from the madness engulfing the world but I think there’s going to be a few more dips before the situation resolves itself. I think the only real stability we will get is when Trump leaves office.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Thanks for reading.

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 335: Retirement is Inevitable

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week, retirement is inevitable, and you need to prepare for it. Also, some First World Problems, and the next entry on my best sci-fi list.

Weekly Update

Out of all the weeks of my life, this was one of them. Not to say that it’s been a bad week, it’s just there’s not a huge amount of excitement in the Scothern household right now. We’re having to pay closer attention to Poppy though.

A few weeks ago it was determined that she had an overactive thyroid and the vet prescribed some meds to help. These meds may have helped with her thyroid, but Poppy was not the same cat. She lost her personality and started repeatedly scratching her cheeks, which started bleeding. We stopped the treatment and some of her personality is returning, but because her cheeks are scabbed over, she is still scratching. As we need to let the wounds heal, we’ve had to put her a collar of shame on. She’s now a pretty sunflower:

She doesn’t like the collar but it’s better than her constantly reopening the cuts and making them bleed. We give her a few monitored breaks from the collar to let her groom and clean, but she can be a sneaky little goose and we’ve had to rush to stop her scratching when she thinks we’re not looking.

First World Problems – Adverts

I reserve a specific type of rage for mobile/online ads, especially the sort that don’t just appear, but ambush. You’re halfway through a video, or you’re on a roll on a game, and suddenly your screen is hijacked by something loud, garish, and utterly irrelevant.

Worse still, it’s never just one tap to escape. It’s a ritual. Tap the microscopic “x” in the corner, wait for the fake loading bar, tap another “x”, dodge the inevitable misclick that opens the app store, and only then, finally, you’re allowed back to what you were doing. The most clicks I’ve counted to exit an advert was six. Six screens to click through just to exit an ad for something that I’m never going to buy.

It’s not just intrusive, it’s adversarial. These ads aren’t designed to inform or persuade; they’re designed to trap. And that’s the fundamental issue. Good advertising should create a positive association with a brand. It should be memorable for the right reasons. But these formats do the opposite; they build irritation, resentment, and in many cases, outright hostility.

I’ve drawn a hard line. If I have to close an ad more than once, that brand has immediately disqualified itself from ever getting my money. And anecdotally, that sentiment seems widespread. Most people I speak to about this say the same thing; adverts are fucking annoying.

And this mindset doesn’t just apply to mobile games or websites. It carries straight over into streaming services. If I’m paying for a subscription, that should be the end of the transaction. The idea that I’m then expected to sit through ads, or worse, pay again for an “ad-free” tier, feels like double-dipping at best and outright contempt for the customer at worst. It reframes the entire relationship: I’m no longer the customer, I’m the product being monetised twice.

It’s the same underlying philosophy; extract maximum value with minimal regard for user experience. Whether it’s a mobile game forcing you through a maze of fake “x” buttons or a streaming platform inserting ads into something you’ve already paid for, the message is clear: your time is less important than their revenue model.

So why does it persist?

Because, depressingly, it does work, at least in the narrowest, most cynical sense. Mobile and digital advertising operate on scale and probability. If even a small percentage of users misclick, tolerate the ads, or upgrade to remove them, that’s enough to justify the model. It’s not about goodwill; it’s about conversion rates. It’s also similar to tins of baked beans in Tesco; they might only make 1p profit per tin, but they sell enough tins to make it worthwhile. It’s all about the numbers.

But there’s a long-term cost to this approach. Every forced interaction erodes trust. Every unnecessary ad nudges people closer to ad blockers, piracy, or simply disengaging altogether. And every time a paying customer is told, “pay more if you want a better experience,” it chips away at the perceived value of the service itself.

There’s a better way. Advertising doesn’t have to feel like a siege, and subscriptions shouldn’t feel like a negotiation. But until the incentives change, we’re stuck in this loop, furiously tapping tiny “x” buttons, skipping ads on services we already pay for, and quietly writing off brands that decided annoyance was an acceptable strategy.

It reminds me of a post I saw a while back from YouTube’s official account somewhere. They asked what people were going to watch first when they opened YouTube. Some legend replied, “probably an advert”.

The Greatest Science Fiction Shows

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

So far, I’ve covered:

10 – The Outer Limits

9 – The X-Files

8 – Space: Above and Beyond

Now for number seven…

Quantum Leap (1989–1993)

Created by Donald P. Bellisario, the series follows Dr Sam Beckett, a physicist who becomes trapped in his own time travel experiment, leaping from life to life within his own lifetime. Although there is a very loose overarching plot, it’s very much an episodic series.

Each episode drops Sam into the body of a different person. He retains his own consciousness, but to everyone else, he is that person. A pilot, a boxer, a doctor, a prisoner. Each leap comes with its own set of challenges, relationships, and consequences. His task is simple in theory but often complex in execution: put right what once went wrong before moving on to the next leap.

Guiding him is Al, a holographic observer from Sam’s own time, visible only to him. Armed with information from the supercomputer Ziggy, Al helps Sam piece together what needs to change. But the information is often incomplete, the stakes unclear, and the moral choices anything but straightforward.

What makes Quantum Leap stand out when compared to many of the shows on this list, is its scale. There are no galactic wars or existential threats to humanity. Instead, the show focuses on smaller, more personal moments.

Because Sam is living these lives rather than observing them, the show carries a level of empathy that feels earned. Each leap forces Sam (and by extension, the audience) to confront the realities faced by people in different circumstances and different eras.

At its core, Quantum Leap is about identity. Sam is constantly looking in mirrors and seeing someone else staring back. He exists in a kind of limbo, never fully himself, never fully the person he’s inhabiting.

Sam and Al

The emotional anchor of the show is the relationship between Sam and Al, which benefits from the amazing chemistry between Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell. Sam is driven by compassion and a desire to help, often to the point of self-sacrifice. Al is more pragmatic, occasionally irreverent, but deeply loyal.

Their dynamic gives the show its balance. Without Al, Sam’s journey would feel isolating. Without Sam, Al would have no purpose. Together, they create one of the most memorable partnerships in science-fiction television. On a side note, it was great seeing the actors perform together again in Star Trek: Enterprise.

Over time, their relationship deepens, revealing that while Sam is the one physically leaping through time, Al is also carrying the emotional weight of what that journey costs.

Standout Episodes

Because Quantum Leap is largely episodic, its legacy is built on individual stories that resonate long after they’ve finished.

“The Leap Home (Part 1 & 2)” stands as one of the show’s emotional high points. Sam leaps into his own past and reconnects with his family, including his brother Tom. Knowing what will happen to his brother, Sam is faced with a deeply personal dilemma; should he try to change his own history? It’s a powerful collision of the show’s premise with Sam’s own life.

“M.I.A.” shifts the spotlight to Al, exploring his past during the Vietnam War and his relationship with his first wife, Beth. It’s a reminder that Sam’s mission has consequences not just for those he helps, but for the people waiting for him back home. The episode adds emotional depth to Al and reframes his role in the series.

Then there’s the finale, “Mirror Image.” Rather than offering a neat resolution, the episode leans into ambiguity. Sam encounters a mysterious figure, possibly something more than human, who suggests that Sam may have more control over his leaps than he realises. Faced with the choice to return home, Sam instead chooses to continue helping others.

It’s a quiet, understated ending. Bittersweet, heroic, and tragic. And then comes the coda.

A simple title card explains that Sam never returned home, continuing to leap through time, putting right what once went wrong.

Except his name is spelled incorrectly. “Sam Becket.” One “t” missing. It’s a small detail, but it has become one of the most enduring quirks in television history, with much debate about whether it was always that way, or if the “t” was initially there and then dropped on repeat airing. Whether it was a genuine production error or something more symbolic, it feels oddly appropriate. A man lost in time, drifting between identities, and even history itself can’t quite fix who he is.

What Quantum Leap demonstrates better than most is that science fiction doesn’t need spectacle to be powerful. It needs ideas, characters, and emotional truth. While other shows explore the fate of galaxies or the future of humanity, Quantum Leap focuses on something smaller but no less important: the idea that one person, in one moment, can change a life.

It’s a different kind of sci-fi. It’s quieter, more reflective, and more human.

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What I’m Doing

Listening: 30Seven by Jeremy Robinson

Watching: I Swear (Netflix)

Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Earlier in the week I finished the Chess Team series, also known as the Jack Sigler series. I loved it. The series tells the story of a US special forces unit, the Chess Team, who are tasked with dealing with the threats conventional units can’t handle. It’s a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and military thriller. In total there are nine novels, and a number of other novellas and short stories. So, whilst it’s an investment in time to get stuck into it, I’d thoroughly recommend it.

You may be wondering why they are called Chess Team and the answer is simple; each operator’s callsign is the name of a piece in chess; King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight.

I Swear is a harrowing watch, but it’s also a very well made movie. The undoubted star of the movie is Robert Aramayo who delivers a career defining performance. I don’t want to say too much about the film as I think it’s best to watch it with no prior knowledge. If you have Netflix, check it out. I Swear will punch you in the gut one moment and reaffirm your belief in the goodness of people the next.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £124,558.89.

Fuck It Fund: £5,114.83.

Pensions: £110,484.91.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £486,588.63.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,145.84.

Total Debts: £174,145.84.

Total Wealth: £312,442.79.

The economy continues to take a hammering because of the Orange Tyrant and his incredibly smooth brain. It’s remarkable that someone can be so stupid and yet hold on to a position of power.

Anyway, his latest round of ideas have wiped tens of thousands of pounds worth of value from my investments over the past few weeks. I’m not losing sleep over it as the value will return. However, there will be people out there that will be losing sleep. There will be people on the brink of retirement who have seen vast sums of money wiped off their retirement accounts. And for what? Just so the rich can get richer, or just so Trump can feel more like a man than a joke?

When looking at a long-term FI plan, you need to remember that there will be bumps in the road, and the market will take the occasional hit. It’s easy to get drawn into the doom and gloom, and when this happens you need to take a step back and really think about your options without giving in to fear or knee-jerk actions.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember in all this economic insanity is that losses are only realised if you sell. Balances dropping in your investment accounts can be scary to see, but the numbers are only a guide, or a point of reference. It only becomes real when you hit the sell button.

More Thoughts on Retirement

You don’t need to “picture” retirement in some romantic, sun-drenched fantasy to take it seriously. You don’t need to visualise yourself walking along a beach at 65 with a cocktail in hand and not a care in the world. Retirement isn’t a dream. It’s a financial inevitability. At some point, you will either choose to stop working, or you won’t have the option to continue. Either way, the requirement is the same: you’ll need money to live on. That’s not a vision board exercise. That’s a liability sitting in your future, quietly accruing whether you acknowledge it or not. It’s going to happen, and not thinking about it will not change that fact.

The bigger issue isn’t imagination. It’s friction. We hear a lot about how people “can’t afford” to save, and there’s truth in that. Living costs are high, rent is punishing, and wages haven’t exactly been racing ahead to compensate. But there’s a subtle shift in language that often goes unnoticed. When people say they can’t afford to save, what they often mean is that they can’t afford to save comfortably, or meaningfully, or in a way that feels like it will make a dent. And so the conclusion becomes that it’s not worth starting at all.

That’s where things go wrong, because retirement planning doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards time. Small, consistent contributions made early will outperform large, heroic efforts made later far more often than people expect. The problem is that small amounts feel pointless in the moment. They don’t move the needle today. But retirement isn’t about today. It’s about giving your future self a fighting chance, even if the steps you take now feel insignificant.

Layered on top of that is the idea that pensions are too complex, too opaque, too difficult to understand. And to be fair, they’re not exactly marketed in a way that inspires confidence. They’re wrapped in jargon, buried in statements that most people don’t read, and presented as something you’ll deal with “later”. But the irony is that you don’t actually need to understand every moving part to benefit from them. You don’t need to become an investment expert. You don’t need to optimise every decision. You just need to engage enough to not miss out entirely. Being in the system, contributing, and nudging things in the right direction over time will do more for most people than endlessly researching the “perfect” approach and never acting.

Retirement planning doesn’t require clarity, or certainty, or even confidence. It doesn’t require you to have your life mapped out decades in advance. It just requires you to start, however imperfectly, and to keep going. Because in the end, the biggest risk isn’t getting it wrong. It’s waiting so long that you never really get started at all.

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 334: Above and Beyond

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. A bumper post this week as I discuss my plans for the new financial year, the chaos in the Middle East, and the next entry on the list of greatest sci-fi shows…

Weekly Update

My legs are like jelly after a week of intense biking. We’ve explored some new areas, like Waverley and Catcliffe, and pushed ourselves to do more climbs. It’s always great to see progress and we’re already seeing the benefit as we can now climb hills on our bikes that we couldn’t just a few weeks ago.

The only downside to biking is having to leave Poppy on her own. We always make sure we’re not gone for too long, but whenever we leave she just looks so sad. It’s heartbreaking. I don’t think Poppy is herself generally due to the medication she started and then stopped. She has an overactive thyroid and we were told to give her meds twice a day. Although some of her symptoms calmed, the biggest adverse effect was lots of scratching around her cheeks and ears. On both sides of her face she now has cuts from scratching, and after talking with the vets again we’ve decided to stop the treatment and see if the scratching stops. It may be that she is sensitive or allergic to something in the meds, and we have to think about the quality of her life as she’s an elderly lady.

It’s no coincidence that with the upturn in weather, I’m feeling better in myself, apart from the usual stresses of work and generally being an adult. I’m going to try and reduce my antidepressant dose but it will have to be done very gradually. I’m taking 100mg of sertraline, whereas I used to take 200mg back in 2023 when I had an awful mental health crisis. This was around the time when I had to take a little break from posting weekly as I just wasn’t well enough mentally.

In my life I can point to two times when I had a real dark time of it mentally; 2020, and then 2023. I thought 2020 was bad at the time, but 2023 was something I’d never wish on anyone.

If you are struggling with mental health, it’s important to remember that there’s always someone you can talk to, even if it’s just a stranger on a help line. I know some people have gained a lot of comfort from talking to ChatGPT as well. Don’t struggle alone.

Nicholas Brendon

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show that sits close to my heart. I was roughly the same age as the characters as they moved through high school, and looking back, I think their struggles helped me navigate that period of my life.

Buffy had a way of taking the vague, ever-present anxieties of being a teenager and turning them into something tangible; literal monsters. It was never just about vampires or demons; it was about growing up, about that messy transition from childhood to adulthood, and all the fear and confusion that comes with it.

Despite everything that has come out over the years about Joss Whedon, the show still stands as one of the greatest of all time, for its storytelling, its character work, and its willingness to confront difficult themes head-on.

One of the core characters was Xander, played by Nicholas Brendon. Within the fandom, he’s never been universally loved. Some of the criticism aimed at him is valid as he could be insecure, entitled, and at times outright misogynistic. But some of it also feels disproportionate, more aggressive than it needs to be.

Because here’s the thing: flawless characters are boring. Xander’s flaws are precisely what made him feel real. He wasn’t the chosen one, he didn’t have supernatural powers; he was just a guy, muddling through, getting things wrong, and occasionally getting them right.

Unfortunately, that messiness wasn’t confined to the character. Brendon himself has struggled publicly with addiction and legal issues over the years. I don’t know the man, and I won’t pretend to, but what is out there doesn’t paint a particularly positive picture.

Which brings us back to that uncomfortable question: can you separate the art from the artist?

Because without Xander, Buffy wouldn’t have been the same. He grounded the show. He was the human perspective in a world full of the extraordinary.

When you look at Brendon’s life, it’s hard not to feel a sense of waste; of potential that never quite found its footing.

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Now for someone who is just so incredibly stupid…

I mean, it wasn’t going to be anyone else was it?

Donald Trump has always mistaken volume for strength. He bellows, he pouts, he postures, and somewhere in that cacophony he seems to imagine the world will confuse theatrical aggression for leadership. It is the politics of a man who thinks swagger is a substitute for substance, as though sounding tough is the same thing as being competent. It never is.

Strip away the noise and what remains is not some grand strategist or iron-willed statesman, but an insecure, petulant blowhard with the emotional steadiness of a pub bore who has mistaken his own reflection for a war cabinet.

It matters, because when a man like that sits in a position of enormous power, his stupidity does not remain a private embarrassment. It becomes a public hazard. And Trump’s recent complaints about NATO allies and Iran are a perfect example. Reuters reported on 17 March that Trump called NATO’s refusal to join the U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran a “very foolish mistake”, while pressing allies to help police the Strait of Hormuz. Three days later, Reuters reported that he escalated the rhetoric further, calling NATO allies “cowards” over their refusal to back the war effort. The wider picture, reported by AP and other outlets, is that the conflict has already caused large-scale casualties, regional instability, and major pressure on global energy supplies. (Reuters)

All this comes after he has stated the war is won, and after blasting the UK for wanting to enter a war once it’s already won, conveniently forgetting the US entering the First World War late in the day, and only entering the Second World War after it was attacked by Japan and after Germany declared war on the US. Let’s not also forget that the US made an absolute fortune selling weapons and supplies to the Allies fighting the Nazis before deciding to actually join the fighting.

And this is where Trump reveals himself again, because the tone is less “commander-in-chief” and more “toxic man-child furious that nobody wants to join his stupid scheme”. He comes across like the angry, rejected wannabe alpha male who cannot believe the room has failed to applaud his performance. He launches or backs a catastrophic escalation, then starts snarling because other countries are not rushing to validate him, subsidise him, or share the consequences of his decisions. It is not serious. It is not disciplined. It is not even especially masculine, if we are being honest. It is just a brittle ego trying to hide behind fake tan and DARVO; Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

What makes it even more grotesque is the contrast between Trump’s chest-thumping rhetoric and his own history when actual personal risk was involved. The Associated Press has reported that Trump received a series of Vietnam-era draft deferments, including one based on bone spurs. National Archives records also confirm the existence of his Selective Service documents. So yes, the line lands because it gets to the heart of the man: the difference between Vietnam and Iran is that Trump had a plan to get out of Vietnam. That is not just a joke at his expense. It is a summary of his entire character. When danger was his problem, he found the exit. When danger is somebody else’s problem, he discovers the language of toughness. (AP News)

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That, in miniature, is Trumpism. It is borrowed courage. It is the political philosophy of a man forever demanding that other people do the bleeding while he does the boasting. He has spent years cultivating this cartoon image of himself as some kind of ultimate hard man, but the historical record is far less flattering. The man who dodged Vietnam now wants to wrap himself in the language of martial resolve. The man who avoided service wants to cosplay as a war leader. The man who never stops sneering at weakness seems permanently dependent on others to carry the real burden. He is seemingly so desperate to be respected as a leader of legend. He is so far from that, he’s not even in the same reality.

And that is why his rhetoric about NATO is so revealing. Alliances, in Trump’s mind, are not partnerships. They are stage props. He expects other countries to exist as backup dancers in the permanent musical of his own ego. If they say no, he does not ask whether his strategy is reckless, incoherent, illegal, counterproductive or deranged. He simply lashes out. The tantrum is the point. He cannot bear the thought that others might judge his ideas and conclude, quite reasonably, that they are idiotic. He’s like that guy, and we’ve all seen him, you know, the one who gets rejected by a woman and he then starts screaming “well, you’re ugly anyway!”

There is also a thick layer of hypocrisy smeared over the whole performance. Trump has long liked to market himself as the only adult in the room, the only one with “strength”, the only one who can impose order on chaos. But everywhere he goes, chaos seems to billow out behind him like smoke from an electrical fire. Even in the current Iran crisis, the reporting points to mixed signals, contradictory messaging, and uncertainty about what the actual endgame is supposed to be. Reuters described Trump pressing allies to support the maritime mission while simultaneously saying the U.S. did not need NATO’s help. AP reported that as of 21 March he was considering a possible military “wind down” even as Israeli officials signalled an escalation and Congress demanded a clearer strategy. That is not clarity. That is not resolve. That is a man wandering into a minefield while insisting everybody else is overreacting. (Reuters)

Which brings me to the tortoise on top of a lamppost. The old line fits Trump almost too perfectly. We do not know how he got up there, he clearly cannot get down on his own, and it is painfully obvious to everyone watching that he does not belong there. That has always been Trump. A grotesque accident of politics somehow elevated into a role for which he is visibly unsuited. The presidency demands patience, discipline, curiosity, judgement, and at least a passing ability to understand consequences. Trump offers the opposite: vanity, grievance, ignorance, spite, and the attention span of a labrador in a butcher’s shop.

His defenders often mistake shamelessness for authenticity, but being shameless does not make a man honest. It just means he is willing to say stupid things with confidence. And confidence, in politics, is one of the most dangerous disguises stupidity can wear. Plenty of fools are certain. Plenty of idiots are loud. Plenty of destructive men are utterly convinced of their own genius. Trump belongs squarely in that tradition: the kind of fool who mistakes impulse for instinct and who thinks gut feeling is superior to expertise because his gut has never once had the decency to tell him to shut up.

That is what makes him so dangerous. A competent authoritarian would be frightening in one way. Trump is frightening in another. He combines malice with incompetence, vanity with ignorance, and power with a level of childish emotional fragility that would be embarrassing in a pub manager, never mind a head of state. He is not some grand master moving pieces around the board with terrifying precision. He is the bloke flipping the board over because he was losing, then screaming that everyone else is unfair.

And that is the thing people still too often miss. Trump is not terrifying because he is brilliant. He is terrifying because he is a moron with reach. He is the sort of man who can drag countries towards disaster not through cunning, but through ignorance, ego, and the endless need to look strong in front of people he despises and fears in equal measure. There is no nobility in that. No strategy. No doctrine worthy of the name. Just a vulgar, combustible little man stamping around on the world stage, demanding applause while setting fire to the scenery.

If history is kind, it will remember him not as a titan, not as a visionary, and certainly not as the alpha male of his own fantasies, but as what he so often appears to be: an angry mediocrity inflated by money, television, and a political culture degraded enough to mistake performative cruelty for strength. A tortoise on a lamppost with the nuclear codes would be funny if it were fiction. In real life, it is merely obscene.

The Greatest Science Fiction Shows

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

So far, I’ve covered:

10 – The Outer Limits

9 – The X-Files

On to number eight…

8 – Space: Above and Beyond (1995–1996)

Space: Above and Beyond was ahead of its time but feels a little dated when watched back now. It was also frustratingly cut short. Airing for just a single season in the mid-1990s, it never had the chance to fully realise its long-term vision, but what it did deliver remains one of the most grounded and emotionally resonant depictions of war in science fiction television.

Set in the 2060s, the series imagines humanity’s first interstellar war against a mysterious alien species known as the Chigs. Rather than focusing on admirals, politicians, or grand strategy, the show places its lens firmly on the individuals fighting the war. At the centre of the story is a squadron of Marine Corps space aviators known as the Wildcards, operating from the US space carrier Saratoga.

From the outset, the tone is clear: this is not a glossy space opera about heroism and adventure. It is a story about survival, sacrifice, and the grinding reality of war.

What sets Space: Above and Beyond apart is how deliberately it avoids romanticising conflict. The Wildcards are not invincible heroes; they are young, flawed, inexperienced pilots thrown into an unforgiving war where losses are frequent and sometimes meaningless.

The show takes clear inspiration from World War II and Vietnam dramas, but transplants those ideas into a science fiction setting. Dogfights in space feel less like spectacle and more like aerial combat, with tension built around fuel, positioning, and the ever-present risk of not making it back.

Identity and the “In Vitros”

One of the most interesting threads running through the series is the presence of “In Vitros”; genetically engineered humans created artificially to serve as soldiers. They are bred to serve humanity, raised in controlled environments, and treated with suspicion or outright prejudice by “natural-born” humans.

This creates a powerful undercurrent throughout the show. Characters like Hawkes and McQueen represent the struggle for identity in a world that views them as tools rather than people. The discrimination faced by In Vitros mirrors real-world themes of racism, class division, and what it means to be considered fully human. This is something that good science fiction has always done, by using fictional examples to highlight the struggles of minority groups facing persecution.

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The Enemy You Don’t Understand

Unlike many science fiction series, the Chigs are not immediately humanised or explained. For much of the show, they remain an unknown and deeply unsettling enemy. You only see them in their full body armour, with their true appearance a secret until the last episode.

Their motivations are unclear, their culture largely hidden, and their methods often brutal. Their soldiers dig up the graves of fallen human soldiers to mutilate the corpses. The theory is that they misunderstood human religions that talk of an afterlife, with the Chigs afraid that killed humans will reanimate after death.

This ambiguity works in the show’s favour. Rather than presenting a simple good-versus-evil conflict, Space: Above and Beyond leans into the fear of fighting an opponent you do not understand. The war feels chaotic, uncertain, and driven as much by misunderstanding as by intent.

Over time, hints emerge that the conflict may be more complicated than it first appears, suggesting that humanity itself may not be entirely blameless in how events unfolded. There was a remarkable level of restraint shown by the writers to not immediately answer every mystery.

A Show That Ended Too Soon

Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Space: Above and Beyond is the sense of what might have been. The show was clearly building toward a larger narrative about the origins of the war, the nature of the Chigs, and the future of humanity’s expansion into space.

Unfortunately, it was cancelled after just one season, leaving many of those threads unresolved.

And yet, in some ways, that abrupt ending adds to its legacy. Like the soldiers it portrays, the story feels incomplete, cut short before its time. There is no neat resolution, no triumphant conclusion and just the lingering sense of a conflict still unfolding.

Why It Still Matters

Space: Above and Beyond stands out for its restraint. It treats war not as an adventure, but as an experience that shapes and scars the people who endure it. We see PTSD treated seriously as marines are tortured and have to deal with those memories once freed. It also tackles loyalty, and how and why some orders should be disobeyed.

Long before shows like Battlestar Galactica (2004) brought a darker, more grounded tone to science fiction television, Space: Above and Beyond was already exploring similar territory. It asked difficult questions about duty, identity, and the cost of survival.

It may only have lasted a single season, but it left behind something rare: a science fiction series that feels less like escapism and more like a reflection of very real human experiences just set among the stars.

The Show That Quietly Set the Tone

It’s hard to talk about Space: Above and Beyond without acknowledging the shadow it casts over later science fiction, particularly Battlestar Galactica which I mentioned before.

That might sound like a bold claim at first glance. After all, Battlestar Galactica (2004) is often credited as the show that redefined television sci-fi, dragging it away from idealism and into something darker, more grounded, and more reflective of real-world conflict. But if you look closely, many of the elements that made Battlestar Galactica so compelling were already present, at least in embryonic form, in Space: Above and Beyond nearly a decade earlier.

The tone is the most obvious parallel. Both shows treat war not as spectacle, but as something grinding, uncertain, and deeply personal. Victory is never clean. Loss is frequent. Characters carry the psychological weight of what they’ve experienced, and that weight doesn’t conveniently disappear at the end of an episode.

There’s also the focus on the people inside the war machine. Rather than centering the narrative on high-level strategy or political leadership, both shows spend most of their time with those actually doing the fighting. In Space: Above and Beyond, it’s the Wildcards, young pilots trying to survive one mission at a time. In Galactica, it’s the crew of the fleet, soldiers and civilians alike, all struggling to endure under impossible circumstances.

Even the themes of identity and what it means to be human echo across both series. The In Vitros and the Silicates in Space: Above and Beyond, engineered, distrusted, and treated as expendable, feel like a clear thematic precursor to the Cylons. Both raise uncomfortable questions about artificial life, prejudice, and whether humanity’s definition of “human” is more about biology or about something deeper.

That’s not to say Battlestar Galactica directly copied Space: Above and Beyond. Rather, it feels like Space helped lay the groundwork for a different kind of science fiction, one that moved away from clean heroism and towards moral ambiguity, emotional realism, and the idea that the future might not be as tidy as we’d like to imagine.

The key difference is that Battlestar Galactica arrived at a time when television was ready for that shift. It had the budget, the platform, and the cultural moment behind it. Space: Above and Beyond, by contrast, arrived just a little too early.

But without shows willing to push in that direction, without series like Space: Above and Beyond testing the waters, it’s entirely possible that Battlestar Galactica would not have taken the form it did, or perhaps would not have been made at all.

Sometimes the most important shows aren’t the ones that succeed, but the ones that show what’s possible before the world is ready for it.

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What I’m Doing

Listening: Empire: Chess Team Book 8 by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: –

Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £126,518.72.

Fuck It Fund: £5,114.83.

Pensions: £111,310.27.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £489,373.82.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,369.33.

Total Debts: £174,369.33.

Total Wealth: £315,004.49.

The market is taking a battering at the moment with, well, *gestures at the Middle East and The White House*

During Trump’s first term, I felt like we just had to survive those four years, and I feel the same about this term. Every so often there will be stupid people doing stupid things, just like the Truss fiasco a few years ago. The important point is to not react out of fear or panic. The seas will calm and the ship will steady itself.

The new financial year is almost upon us and I need to start thinking about how I’m going to handle my ISA. I suspect my decision will be forced by the funds I have available. I would love to be able to throw £20k in there as soon as possible, but I think it’s going to have to happen in stages.

What are your plans for the new financial year? Let me know in the comments.

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 333: Arrogance and Stupidity

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. Something a little different this week, with no weekly update (it got late and I was tired), but plenty of thoughts on other bits and pieces…

“Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you.”

There is a line from Babylon 5 that has always stuck with me. The character Londo Mollari, an ambassador to Earth from an alien civilization, is meeting with Earth military officers. They are asking him about a race they want to make contact with, and he’s telling them to be careful as this new race, the Minbari, are dangerous. In typical fashion the Earth officers are arrogant and stupid, hence Londo’s rebuke; “Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you.”

It’s difficult not to think of that line when looking at figures like Donald Trump. There is a strange political phenomenon where confidence and bluntness can be mistaken for strength, and recklessness can be mistaken for decisiveness. In a world where politics often feels paralysed by committees, diplomacy, and hesitation, a leader who simply does things, even destructive things, can appear efficient. Donald Trump, alongside his numerous other character flaws, embodies arrogance and stupidity. How efficient of him.

Efficiency without wisdom is not leadership. It’s just acceleration in the wrong direction, and that brings us to the tragedy of modern warfare. Bombing campaigns are often presented in sterile language. Military briefings talk about targets, operations, and strategic objectives. On television maps, explosions appear as small flashes of light accompanied by arrows and acronyms. It all feels abstract, almost mechanical. But every bomb that falls lands in the middle of a human network.

Every person killed is someone’s friend. Someone’s colleague. Someone’s brother, sister, parent, or child. They are part of a family, a neighbourhood, a community. When that person dies, the grief and anger do not disappear with them. They ripple outward.

For every person killed in a bombing campaign, there are often many more people whose lives are permanently altered by that death, like a grieving father or a traumatised child. A community that now sees the attacker not as a distant geopolitical actor but as the force that destroyed someone they loved.

This is the brutal arithmetic of insurgency and asymmetric warfare. Bombing rarely destroys an ideology. What it often does instead is manufacture martyrs.

History has shown repeatedly that military force alone struggles to defeat movements built on identity, belief, and grievance. When bombs kill civilians, even unintentionally, the narrative writes itself. The dead become symbols. Their stories circulate through families, social media, and communities. Each new death reinforces the belief that the attackers are enemies not just of combatants, but of the people themselves.

The result is a self-perpetuating cycle. Violence creates anger. Anger fuels recruitment. Recruitment prolongs the conflict. More violence follows.

Meanwhile the political leaders who authorised the bombing stand at podiums promising that this time the strategy will work.

The uncomfortable truth is that we have seen this pattern before. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan.

Each conflict was entered with confidence and the belief that overwhelming military power could impose a stable outcome. Each produced years, sometimes decades, of instability, resentment, and human suffering.

Which leads to a darkly amusing observation I came across recently. Wars are usually named after the country being attacked. The Vietnam War. The Iraq War. The Afghanistan War. The naming convention subtly frames the narrative around geography rather than responsibility.

If wars were named after the nation doing the attacking instead, the historical record might look very different. In fact, there might be so many “American wars” that we would have more of them than there are films in the Fast & Furious franchise. The joke lands because there is an uncomfortable truth hiding inside it.

Powerful countries possess enormous military capability, and the temptation to use it is always present. Airstrikes and missile campaigns offer the illusion of control. They appear decisive. They create dramatic footage. They allow leaders to claim action.

Destruction is easy. Stability is hard. Ordering airstrikes from your office is easy. Diplomacy is hard.

Bombs can flatten buildings in seconds. They cannot rebuild trust, legitimacy, or political order. Those things require patience, diplomacy, compromise, and sometimes the humility to recognise that force alone cannot solve every problem.

Arrogance, on the other hand, often pushes leaders toward the opposite conclusion.

It tells them that if a strategy hasn’t worked yet, the answer must simply be more of it. More bombing. More escalation. More demonstrations of strength.

Which brings us back to Londo Mollari’s observation about arrogance and stupidity being such a potent combination. Arrogance provides the momentum. Stupidity provides the direction. Unfortunately, history suggests that when those two forces combine in geopolitics, the people who pay the highest price are rarely the ones making the decisions.

The Greatest Science Fiction Shows

10 – The Outer Limits

Now, we have number nine on the list…

The X-Files (1993–2018)

Some shows follow a genre. Others create their own genre. Few television series captured the imagination of the 1990s quite like The X-Files. Created by Chris Carter, the show blended science fiction, horror, conspiracy thriller, and procedural drama into something that felt entirely unique at the time. At its centre were two FBI agents assigned to investigate cases that defied conventional explanation: Fox Mulder, a believer in the paranormal, and Dana Scully, a medical doctor and sceptic who approached every case with scientific rigour.

The show’s premise was simple. Across the United States, strange events were occurring like possible alien encounters, unexplained creatures, government cover-ups, and phenomena that did not fit within the normal rules of reality. Mulder believed that somewhere within these cases lay evidence of a vast hidden truth about extraterrestrial life and government secrecy. Scully’s role was initially to debunk Mulder’s theories, but over time she too encountered events that could not easily be dismissed.

What made The X-Files particularly compelling was the way it balanced two distinct storytelling modes: the overarching conspiracy mythology and the so-called “monster of the week” episodes.

The Conspiracy Mythology

Running throughout the series was a complex narrative involving alien colonisation and a shadowy government conspiracy. Mulder’s lifelong obsession with extraterrestrials stemmed from the disappearance of his sister during childhood, an event he believed was linked to alien abduction. His search for the truth leads him into conflict with powerful forces determined to keep that truth hidden.

Central to the mythology is the mysterious Smoking Man, a government operative who appears repeatedly throughout the series. Often seen silently observing events while smoking a cigarette, he embodies the idea of a hidden authority manipulating events behind the scenes. Alongside him are secret organisations working with alien forces in preparation for a future colonisation of Earth.

Over time, Mulder and Scully uncover fragments of a terrifying possibility: that elements within the government have struck a bargain with extraterrestrials. In exchange for technological advantages and survival privileges, they may be assisting in a long-term plan for alien control of the planet.

The mythology arc grew increasingly complex as the seasons progressed, weaving together alien viruses, hybrid experiments, secret projects, and hidden factions within government and industry. At its best, this storyline captured the paranoid mood of the post–Cold War era, when distrust of institutions and fascination with conspiracy theories were both on the rise.

However, for many viewers, myself included, the mythology eventually became too convoluted, particularly in later seasons when the show struggled to provide clear answers to the mysteries it had built over the years. In a way it set the scene for Lost, in that the mystery was more interesting than the answers.

Monster of the Week

If the overarching conspiracy gave The X-Files its grand narrative, the monster-of-the-week episodes gave it its creativity and variety. These standalone stories allowed the writers to experiment with different forms of horror, science fiction, and dark humour without being tied to the central plot.

Some of the most memorable episodes in the series fall into this category. I can’t recall many specific episodes that focused on the grand conspiracy, but I can vividly remember some of the MOTW episodes.

One of the most famous is “Squeeze.” The episode introduces Eugene Victor Tooms, a mutant capable of stretching his body through impossibly small spaces in order to kill his victims and harvest their livers. Tooms hibernates for years between killing sprees, making him one of the series’ most unsettling villains. The character proved so memorable that he returned in a later episode.

Another standout is “Ice,” an early episode clearly inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing. Set in an isolated Arctic research station, the story follows Mulder and Scully investigating a parasite that causes violent paranoia among those infected. The claustrophobic setting and growing mistrust between characters make it one of the show’s most tense episodes.

The show was also capable of moments of unexpected humour. “Bad Blood,” written by Vince Gilligan, retells the same vampire investigation from the conflicting perspectives of Mulder and Scully, highlighting how each sees the other in wildly exaggerated ways. The result is one of the funniest episodes in the series.

One of the episodes that has stuck in my mind was also written by Vince Gilligan, and stars Bryan Cranston. I’m talking about “Drive”, where Cranston’s character has to keep driving west or else his head will explode. It sounds absurd but was a very strong episode, and Cranston credits this episode as a major factor in Gilligan casting him as Walter White in Breaking Bad years later.

Then there is “Home,” perhaps the most infamous episode of the entire series. So disturbing that it was originally banned from repeat broadcast on network television, the episode tells the story of a grotesque family living in rural isolation whose secrets are far darker than the agents could have imagined. Even decades later, it remains one of the most unsettling hours of television ever aired on mainstream television.

These standalone stories gave the show enormous flexibility. One week the agents might be dealing with alien conspiracies, the next they could be investigating psychic killers, genetic experiments, or creatures hiding in the forests of the American Midwest.

The Legacy of the Show

Part of what made The X-Files so influential was its atmosphere. The show’s distinctive visual style, dim lighting, shadowy forests, rain-soaked streets, and flickering flashlights, created a sense that the world was full of hidden mysteries lurking just beyond the edge of normal perception.

It also helped establish the template for a type of television storytelling that would become increasingly common: a blend of episodic cases and long-running narrative arcs. Shows like Fringe, Supernatural, and many others owe a clear debt to the structure pioneered by The X-Files.

Above all, the show succeeded because of the chemistry between its two leads. Mulder’s relentless belief and Scully’s grounded scepticism created a dynamic that allowed the series to explore strange ideas while maintaining a sense of balance. Their partnership became one of the most iconic relationships in science fiction television.

Even after its original run ended in the early 2000s, The X-Files remains one of the defining science-fiction series of its era. It tapped into a cultural moment when the idea that “the truth is out there” felt both exciting and unsettling.

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What I’m Doing

Listening: Empire: Chess Team Book 8 by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: The Tourist (BBC iPlayer), Firebreak (Netflix).

Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

We finished the second season of The Tourist on iPlayer. It was decent enough, but not anywhere near the quality of the first season. We were thinking about another watch of Deep Space Nine, but it has been removed from Netflix. It’s a show we may end up buying on DVD as we’ll definitely watch it again several times. It’s my favourite Star Trek show, and I even converted Oana to it.

On Saturday evening we watched Firebreak, a Spanish movie, on Netflix. Very early on I’d already mentally checked out. One of my pet hates in any story is when a stupid child acting like a stupid child is the catalyst for the plot. It’s lazy and the sort of thing a stupid child would come up with. I wasn’t impressed.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £127,440.52.

Fuck It Fund: £5,114.83.

Pensions: £113,537.85.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £492,523.20.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,369.33.

Total Debts: £174,369.33.

Total Wealth: £318,153.87.

Perfection Is the Enemy of Progress

One of the phrases I hear most often when speaking with potential mortgage clients is some variation of “we’re just getting our ducks in a row first.” It’s usually delivered in a reassuring tone, as if the person is demonstrating responsibility and prudence. On the surface, it sounds entirely reasonable. Buying a home or arranging a mortgage is one of the largest financial decisions most people will ever make. Taking time to think things through, to prepare documents, and to ensure the numbers make sense is sensible behaviour.

But there is a point where preparation quietly turns into procrastination.

Many people become stuck in a state psychologists refer to as analysis paralysis. Instead of taking the next step, they remain suspended in a cycle of research, planning, forecasting, and waiting for conditions to align. They read articles about interest rates, check mortgage comparison sites, follow economic commentary, and run affordability calculators over and over again. All of this activity feels productive, but nothing actually moves forward. Months pass while they continue to wait for the moment when everything looks perfectly aligned.

The problem is that the perfect moment never arrives.

When it comes to mortgages, people often behave as though there must be an optimal point in time when the stars align. Interest rates will have dipped to exactly the right level. Their savings will have grown just a little bit more. The economy will look stable. The housing market will appear predictable. Their employment will feel completely secure. Once those conditions exist simultaneously, they tell themselves, that will be the moment to proceed.

But the real world doesn’t operate like that.

There will always be another reason to delay. Interest rates may fall slightly, but then inflation data appears that makes economists nervous. The housing market may look steady, but then geopolitical events rattle financial markets. Your savings might improve, but suddenly the car needs replacing or the boiler breaks. Life and economics have an annoying habit of constantly introducing new variables. Waiting for a moment of perfect clarity is a bit like waiting for the sea to become completely calm before leaving harbour. If that’s the standard you set, you may spend your entire life tied to the dock.

Interest rates are perhaps the biggest trigger for this kind of paralysis. Understandably, borrowers want the lowest possible rate. A difference of even half a percent can look significant when spread across a mortgage balance over many years. The temptation is therefore to treat mortgage timing like a strategic exercise in economic prediction. People begin trying to second-guess what central banks will do next, when lenders might cut their pricing, or whether another few months might reveal a better deal.

The uncomfortable truth is that nobody really knows.

Interest rates move in response to a vast web of global factors. Inflation figures, economic growth data, political decisions, international conflict, energy prices, financial crises, and unexpected shocks can all influence where rates go next. Even professional economists who dedicate their careers to forecasting these movements regularly get it wrong. If predicting rate movements were straightforward, global financial markets would be a much calmer and more predictable place.

History offers plenty of reminders of how unpredictable the world can be. Few people in late 2019 were planning their mortgage strategy around the possibility of a global pandemic. Yet within a matter of months COVID had upended economies across the planet, sent interest rates plunging, and rewritten financial assumptions overnight. More recently, geopolitical tensions and inflation shocks have pushed rates in the opposite direction far faster than many analysts expected.

Trying to perfectly time mortgage rates therefore resembles trying to perfectly time the stock market. In theory it sounds like a rational strategy. In practice it relies on predicting events that are fundamentally unknowable.

Ironically, the people who become most paralysed by these uncertainties are often the ones trying hardest to be financially responsible. They want to make the right decision, avoid unnecessary costs, and ensure they are acting at the best possible moment. But in chasing perfection, they sometimes create the very risk they are trying to avoid.

Doing nothing is still a decision.

When someone delays securing a mortgage rate because they believe something better might appear, they are effectively making a bet on the future. They are betting that the environment will become more favourable rather than less. Sometimes that bet pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it is still a gamble, even if it feels safer than taking action.

What many borrowers don’t realise is that taking action does not necessarily mean locking themselves into a rigid outcome. In many situations, securing a mortgage product early provides a degree of protection without eliminating flexibility. If rates improve before completion, there is often the ability to switch to a better product with the same lender. Taking a step forward therefore doesn’t always close the door on future improvements. What it does do is protect against the possibility that conditions deteriorate while someone is waiting.

Another variation of analysis paralysis appears when people insist on getting every aspect of their finances perfectly organised before even speaking to a broker. They want to tidy their credit report, rearrange their savings, pay off small balances, research lenders, and explore countless online tools before picking up the phone. The intention is understandable, but it can lead to months of unnecessary delay.

In reality, that initial conversation is often the most useful place to start. An experienced adviser can quickly identify what genuinely matters and what doesn’t. Some of the things people worry about turn out to be irrelevant. Other factors they have overlooked may be far more important. Without guidance, it is easy to spend weeks optimising details that have little impact while missing the changes that could genuinely improve their position.

All of this brings us back to an old idea that applies just as much to finance as it does to many areas of life: perfection is the enemy of progress.

When people aim for perfect timing, perfect conditions, and perfect certainty, they often end up stuck in place. Meanwhile, those who make sensible decisions with the information available to them tend to move forward. They secure the mortgage. They buy the property. They get on with building their lives.

And years later, the precise interest rate they secured on one particular mortgage deal often turns out to matter far less than they once believed. What mattered more was simply moving forward rather than remaining trapped in endless preparation.

Sometimes the most powerful step isn’t the perfect one.

It’s simply the first one.

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 332: Budgeting and Betting on War

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

Another busy week in my new job, with Friday in particular being a real test of endurance. I spent more or less the whole day with one case, which I think is now moving forward.

On Saturday we went for a bike ride, and although it wasn’t our longest ride it involved a lot of uphill cycling. We also spent some time walking around the Botanical Gardens (walking because cycling is not allowed there). It was a really nice day as we hit a few parks around the city, and grabbed an ice cream at Weston Park. It’s just a shame the weather wasn’t warmer.

On Saturday evening we went to Peddler market but it wasn’t fantastic. The quality of the street food vendors seems to be getting worse over time. Street food is such a big thing now, it feels like the quality across the board is being diluted by too many people trying to make it.

Budgeting Starts by Looking Backwards

Whenever people talk about budgeting, they tend to imagine something that feels a bit like financial surveillance involving a spreadsheet or an app. The idea is that every pound is carefully logged. Every purchase is categorised. Every trip to Starbucks is coffee judged by the cold glare of a budgeting dashboard.

It sounds disciplined and responsible. It’s adulting in action. It also tends to last about three weeks, if you’re lucky.

The problem with most budgeting advice is that it starts at the wrong end. It assumes that the first step is to begin tracking every single thing you spend going forward. In theory, that sounds sensible. In practice, it’s exhausting. Life is busy enough without having to record every £3.40 Pret sandwich like you’re doing forensic accounting.

Even if you do manage to keep it up for a while, something strange starts to happen. You begin to behave differently. The moment you know you are tracking your spending, your behaviour changes. You hesitate before buying something. You delay purchases. You avoid things you would normally buy. Suddenly you’re performing for the spreadsheet, trying to look like a model citizen of personal finance. Which means the data you’re collecting isn’t actually representative of your real life.

This is why the best place to start a household budget is not by looking forward, it’s by looking backwards. Before you download an app, or build a spreadsheet, before you promise yourself you’ll “be better with money”, open your bank statements and credit card statements for the last three to six months.

Don’t do it to judge yourself. Just observe. Look through the data and really absorb your spending habits. Maybe put a few columns together on a spreadsheet; household shopping, leisure and entertainment, bills, and so on. The exact names don’t matter too much as long as things are grouped logically. Then work out how much you spent in each category.

Those statements contain the most accurate financial data you will ever have: a record of how you actually spent money when nobody was watching. You’ll notice the obvious things immediately. The big fixed costs tend to be easy to spot. The mortgage or rent. Council tax. Energy bills. Insurance. Broadband. Maybe a car payment. These are the structural costs of your life. They show up every month whether you like it or not. Most people already have a rough idea of these.

Where things start to get interesting is in the background noise of everyday spending. Supermarket trips, takeaways, impulse Amazon purchases, or the trip to the Tesco Express for a bottle of milk that sees you spend £20 on milk, chocolate, crisps, and a bottle of wine.

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These £10 here, £20 there transactions that never feel significant at the time. Individually, none of them look particularly dramatic and that’s exactly why they slip under the radar.

However, when you look at them over three or four months, patterns start to appear. The supermarket shop you thought was £60 a week is actually £110 most weeks. The occasional takeaway turns out to be three or four a month. The streaming services you barely notice are quietly costing £50 or £60 when you add up the cost of Netflix, Disney+, Now TV, and so on.

This is where many people have their first real budgeting realisation. Most people are fairly accurate when estimating their large expenses. But they are usually wildly wrong about the smaller, variable spending that fills the gaps between those big bills. It’s not because they are irresponsible. Simply because small transactions are easy to forget.

Budgeting is not really about controlling spending in the first instance. It is about understanding it. You cannot meaningfully change your financial behaviour if you don’t first understand what your current behaviour actually looks like.

Looking back over several months allows you to build a baseline. Not a theoretical budget based on good intentions, but a realistic picture of the financial life you are already living.

Think of it like a financial diagnostic scan. Before a doctor prescribes treatment, they run tests to see what is actually going on. They don’t start by guessing.

Your bank statements perform the same function for your money. They show you what your life actually costs. Not what you think it costs. Not what you hope it costs. Not what you tell yourself it costs. Just the truth, and that truth is invaluable.

Once you understand where your money has been going, you can start to make deliberate decisions about where you want it to go next. You now have clarity.

Too much personal finance advice frames budgeting as a moral exercise. As if the goal is to shame yourself into spending less. It isn’t. The goal is awareness and mindful spending. This is at the very heart of FI; it’s not about restriction, but rather understanding the impact of your spending habits and making informed decisions.

Once you know the truth about your spending, you can decide, calmly and deliberately, what you want to change, what you want to keep, and what genuinely adds value to your life. The first step isn’t building a complicated system, it’s opening your bank statements and asking one simple question: Where has my money actually been going?

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The Greatest Science Fiction Shows

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

10 – The Outer Limits (1995–2002)

The 1990s revival of The Outer Limits brought the classic anthology concept into the modern television era. Running from 1995 to 2002, the series updated the original show’s formula of standalone science-fiction stories but leaned much more heavily into darker themes, advanced technology, and moral dilemmas.

Each episode tells a self-contained story, usually centred around a scientific breakthrough, alien encounter, or technological development that forces characters to confront difficult ethical questions. The tone is often unsettling or tragic, with many stories ending in ironic or disturbing twists.

One of the most memorable episodes is “Sandkings.” Based on a story by George R. R. Martin, it follows a man who acquires strange alien creatures as exotic pets. At first they seem like harmless curiosities, but the creatures rapidly evolve into intelligent, organised societies that begin to reshape their environment, and ultimately turn on their owner. The episode is widely regarded as one of the strongest premieres in science-fiction television.

The episode “The Sentence” explores the dangers of neural technology used to simulate prison sentences in minutes instead of years. A violent criminal experiences what feels like decades of imprisonment inside a virtual environment before being released back into the real world. The story raises disturbing questions about punishment, rehabilitation, and the psychological consequences of manipulating human perception. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a very similar story involving one of its main characters, who is convicted of a crime and completes a decades long sentence in just a few moments.

One episode that has always stuck with me is “Trial by Fire” in which the US President on the day of his inauguration is faced with a fleet of alien ships approaching Earth. This episode is very much a “bottle episode” with the vast majority of it taking place in an underground bunker. The story develops as the different officials and military officers debate whether the aliens are peaceful or not. It’s a tense episode with the usual tragic twist at the end.

Throughout its run, The Outer Limits excelled at presenting science fiction as moral thought experiments. Rather than focusing purely on spectacle, the series asked difficult questions about cloning, artificial intelligence, alien life, punishment, and human nature. Many episodes feel less like traditional television and more like short philosophical parables wrapped in science-fiction concepts.

For viewers who enjoy anthology storytelling in the tradition of The Twilight Zone or the darker technological speculation of Black Mirror, the 1990s Outer Limits remains one of the most underrated science-fiction series ever produced.

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

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What I’m Doing

Listening: Empire: Chess Team Book 8 by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: The Tourist (BBC iPlayer).

Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £130,446.98.

Fuck It Fund: £5,114.83.

Pensions: £116,259.52.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £498,251.33.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,369.33.

Total Debts: £174,369.33.

Total Wealth: £323,882.00.

Betting on War

I saw this post on Facebook the other day:

I wasn’t sure how genuine the claim was, so I turned to ChatGPT to fact check it. I’ve included the response at the bottom. For now I just want to comment on prediction markets as a general concept. I’ve just had a quick look on Polymarket, and as of now there are several armed conflicts you can gamble on. There’s the Russian invasion of Ukraine you can bet on, as well as potential conflicts with India and Pakistan, and the potential invasion of Taiwan by China, in addition to the current crisis in Iran. Gambling on war and human suffering… what the fuck is wrong with people?

You can also bet on the number of tweets high profile individuals will publish, or the number of views certain YouTube videos will get. Does this not all just seem a bit odd? It reminds me of that incident a few years back in English football where gambling companies offered odds on whether the substitute goalkeeper for Sutton United, Wayne Shaw, would be seen eating a pie during the match.

When something like this happens, the subject of the wager can’t be neutral in their response. Whether Shaw ate a pie or not, he was influencing the outcome of the bet. If you found out someone was offering odds on whether you would post fifteen or more tweets on a specific date, what would you do? Once you know of the bet, any decision to make is going to be questionable. The whole thing just seems odd and I don’t understand why anyone would gamble on this, unless they knew with certainty they were going to win.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Check out the ChatGPT output below, and please remember to complete the Check My File offer!

1️⃣ Did people make money betting on the Iran strike?

Yes — this part is real.

Multiple outlets report that users on the prediction market Polymarket made significant profits by betting that the U.S. (and Israel) would strike Iran by 28 February 2026.

Around six accounts reportedly made about $1.2 million combined betting on the strike date. (Responsible Statecraft)
One user reportedly turned ~$87,000 into over $500k. (New York Post)
Another account known as “Magamyman” made hundreds of thousands betting on related events. (The Daily Beast)

These bets were placed shortly before the attacks, which has raised suspicions of insider knowledge.

Important point:

👉 Suspicious ≠ proven insider trading.

Right now the reports say:

Analysts flagged the trades.
Politicians called for investigations.
No confirmed proof of insider involvement has been publicly shown.

2️⃣ Is Polymarket a real betting platform for events like this?

Yes.

Polymarket is a crypto-based prediction market where users buy contracts based on real-world events (elections, wars, etc.). (Responsible Statecraft)

Example:

“Will the U.S. strike Iran by Feb 28?”
If you buy shares at $0.10 and it happens, each share pays $1.

So if someone bought 870k shares at $0.10, they could make a huge profit if the event occurs.

This mechanism is basically futures trading mixed with gambling.

3️⃣ Is it legal?

This is where things get messy.

Polymarket operates in a legal grey area because:

It runs offshore.
U.S. regulators have limited jurisdiction.
It uses crypto wallets.

Experts describe the risk of insider trading as a known problem. (Wikipedia)

But:

Insider trading laws apply differently to prediction markets.
Proving someone used classified information is extremely difficult.

So:

✔ Betting itself may be legal.
❗ Using secret government information would likely be illegal — but that has not been proven.

4️⃣ Did Donald Trump Jr. have a connection to Polymarket?

Yes — but the post frames it in the worst possible way.

What’s accurate:

Donald Trump Jr. serves on Polymarket’s advisory board. (The Daily Beast)
His investment firm has invested in the platform. (News.com.au)

What is not proven:

That he knew about the strikes.
That he traded on the platform.
That the accounts involved had any connection to him or the administration.

The post implies corruption without evidence.

5️⃣ Did the Trump administration shut down investigations?

There were investigations into prediction markets under previous administrations.

But the claim that they were “shut down to protect Polymarket” is not clearly proven.

What reporting says:

Investigations existed.
Regulation of prediction markets is still evolving.
Some enforcement actions changed after political shifts.

That’s very different from the certainty implied in the social media post.

6️⃣ The “six accounts created hours before the attack”

This part appears to come from blockchain analysis:

Analysts found several accounts created shortly before the strikes.
They only bet on Iran-related markets.
They profited heavily.

But again:

⚠️ That raises suspicion — it does not prove insider knowledge.

Possible explanations include:

Insider information (worst case).
Lucky speculation.
Geopolitical analysts making educated bets.
Bots reacting to intelligence leaks or news signals.

7️⃣ Is this type of betting controversial?

Very much so.

Lawmakers from both parties have criticised these markets because they could:

Allow people with government knowledge to profit
Create incentives around war, disasters, or assassinations
Blur the line between financial markets and gambling

Some politicians are proposing bans on prediction markets tied to government actions. (New York Post)

8️⃣ Biggest exaggerations in the post

These are the misleading parts:

❌ “Someone made a fortune betting hours before the missiles hit.”
→ Some bets were made shortly before the strike, but exact timing and intent remain unclear.

❌ “Trump orbit built themselves a front-row seat.”
→ No evidence links the betting accounts to Trump or his associates.

❌ “The cops were sent home.”
→ Regulation changed and investigations evolved, but that claim oversimplifies a complex regulatory situation.

🧠 Overall Reality Check

A fair summary would be:

Prediction markets did allow people to bet on a U.S. strike on Iran.
Several traders made large profits when the strike occurred.
Some bets were placed suspiciously close to the event.
Analysts and politicians suspect insider information, but no proof has been presented publicly.
Donald Trump Jr. is connected to the platform, but there is no evidence he was involved in the bets.

✅ Truth level of the post:

Claim	Reality
People made money betting on the strike	True
Accounts were created shortly before	Likely true
Profits around $1M	True
Trump Jr linked to Polymarket	True
Insider trading proven	Not proven
Administration corruption	Speculative

💡 My overall assessment:

This post is a mixture of real reporting + political narrative.

The suspicious betting activity is real and worth scrutiny — but the post jumps from “suspicious trades” to “corrupt war profiteering conspiracy.”

Those are very different levels of evidence.

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 331: Respect is Given. Admiration is Earned.

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

Another week down, another week closer to FI. Work is ramping up even more, and I’m learning a lot about time management. It’s easy to manage time when you’re on a salary, and you know you’ll get paid anyway, but when you are putting the time in without that guarantee, it can lead to some frustrating situations.

It’s at times like these that I’m reminded of the 62nd Rule of Acquisition;

“The riskier the road, the greater the profit.”

I’m enjoying much of the new work situation, with being able to manage my time and work with much more autonomy. I just need the money to start coming in.

On Saturday, I went for my first solo bike ride in a long time. I covered over 40km, and it was mostly an enjoyable experience. What never ceases to infuriate me is how many people just walk four or five abreast on a dedicated cycle lane. At one point, I was cycling along such a lane, which also has a pedestrian lane alongside. A group of lads, maybe 18 years old, were walking towards me on the cycle lane. The rest of the path was empty. As I approached them, I refused to slow or veer off the cycle lane. They saw me coming but acted as though I’d insulted their ancestors.

On that same stretch, someone was walking in the same direction as me, but maybe fifty meters ahead. Suddenly, for no reason, with their head in their phone, they stepped into the cycle lane. Had I been a second further along, I would have flattened them.

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Moving on to a completely different subject, I’ve started becoming aware of some verbal tics that I need to stamp out in this new venture. As I’m working as a broker, I’m dealing with cases that are generally more complex than the vanilla cases I would get at Lloyds. I really need to stop saying things like;

“It’ll be straightforward.”

“I don’t see any problems.”

“We’ll get this done quickly.”

“Leave it with me.”

I need to stop promising outcomes and start promising actions, i.e. effort, attention, and transparency.

We all use these phrases, though, and I’ve noticed myself using them a little more than usual recently. It feels decisive. It feels reassuring. It feels like leadership. It’s something else, though; It’s borrowing from your future self with interest.

Overpromising is a short-term loan taken out against tomorrow’s performance. You get an immediate hit of approval. The other person relaxes. You look capable. The room feels lighter. You’ve bought goodwill instantly.

But like any loan, the repayment date is already scheduled, and the interest rate is rarely attractive. The moment you overpromise, you create a fixed expectation. Not a flexible one. Not a “we’ll see how this develops.” You’ve locked in an outcome in someone else’s mind. You’ve effectively said, “Future Me has this covered.”

Morgan Freeman voice: “Future him did not have this covered.”

Future You has to deal with reality. Future You has to deal with missing documents, slow third parties, regulatory friction, unexpected complications, human unpredictability, shifting criteria, delayed responses, and the thousand tiny variables that don’t care how confident you sounded last week.

When performance fails to perfectly match the promise, the interest starts compounding.

You don’t just have to deliver the work. You have to explain the gap, soften disappointment, and manage emotion. You have to try to defend your past self whilst protecting your future self. You’re paying twice; once in effort and once in credibility. That’s the hidden interest.

What makes overpromising so seductive is that the cost is delayed. The reward is immediate. Humans are wired to prefer immediate reward over future stability. It’s the same impulse that drives lifestyle inflation, bad debt, and “I’ll deal with it later” decision-making.

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You feel powerful today. And the more often you do it, the more leveraged your reputation becomes. Credibility works like capital, where each promise is a liability, and each delivery is a payment.

If your liabilities consistently exceed your capacity to perform, you become overleveraged. And once trust begins to wobble, it wobbles quickly.

The phrase “But you said…” is the professional equivalent of a bank calling in a loan.

Underpromising, by contrast, is the opposite strategy. It’s refusing to take on unnecessary debt.

It’s saying, “There may be hurdles”, “I’ll confirm once I’ve reviewed everything”, or “I can’t guarantee the outcome, but I’ll guarantee transparency and effort.”

What you’re doing is protecting future you. You’re creating a margin for delays and things that just… happen.

The bonus arrives when things go well, as they often do when managed properly, you end up delivering beyond expectation rather than scrambling to meet an inflated one.

Professionalism rather than pessimism…

There’s also a deeper link between this and respect. Professionalism isn’t about being friends. It isn’t about liking everyone you interact with. It isn’t about personality chemistry.

It’s about restraint. It’s about not letting ego push you into declarations you can’t control. It’s about not speaking beyond your evidence. It’s about not inflating certainty to impress.

And it’s about treating people with baseline respect, even when tensions rise.

You can disagree without belittling, and you can assert without patronising. You can also correct without humiliating.

When people overpromise and then react defensively to scrutiny, it’s usually ego protecting the loan it never should have taken out in the first place. Professional discipline means you don’t take that loan.

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You let your performance speak. You let your record build quietly. You don’t need theatre, because consistency compounds.

Overpromising is like living off a credit card and hoping next month’s income covers it. Sometimes it does. But the stress accumulates.

Underpromising and overdelivering is investing steadily and letting the returns do the talking. It doesn’t look flashy. It looks measured. Controlled. Slightly conservative.

But over time, the difference is enormous. One approach creates anxiety and reputational volatility. The other creates stability and long-term trust.

You don’t need to be the loudest voice in the room. You don’t need to be the hero in every interaction. You don’t need people to walk away dazzled.

You need alignment between what you say and what you produce. Every time you overpromise, you sign a contract with your future self, and your future self deserves better than unnecessary debt.

Respect should not be earned, but it can be lost…

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around like it’s carved into stone tablets: “Respect is earned.” It’s usually delivered with a stern nod, as if the speaker has just channelled ancient wisdom. But the more I hear it, the more I think it’s largely nonsense, or at least, dangerously misunderstood.

What people often mean when they say “respect is earned” is actually “status is earned.” Authority might be earned. Trust might be earned. Admiration, certainly. But basic human respect? That should be the default setting.

If you walk into a room, whether it’s a workplace, a client meeting, a GP surgery, or a queue at the Co-op, you should not have to perform a qualifying routine to be treated with basic courtesy. You shouldn’t need a certain job title, salary, accent, or level of confidence to avoid being spoken down to. Respect isn’t a prize for achievement. It’s the baseline of civilised interaction.

The idea that respect must be earned often becomes a thinly disguised excuse for treating people poorly until they prove themselves “worthy.” It’s hierarchical. It’s ego-driven. And more often than not, it says far more about the person withholding respect than the person supposedly failing to earn it. It’s Donald Trump energy.

Because here’s the thing: it costs you nothing to be respectful. You can speak calmly, listen with attention, avoid sarcasm designed to belittle, and disagree without it becoming a personal attack. None of this requires the other person to have demonstrated brilliance, wealth, or authority. It simply requires you to choose not to act like a bellend.

In professional life, especially, this matters. You don’t have to like everyone you deal with. You don’t have to be mates with colleagues, clients, suppliers, or managers. But professionalism is simply respect with a suit on. It is the minimum viable standard of adult behaviour. It’s great when you build long-lasting friendships with people you meet through work. What I’ve found is that those friendships tend to endure when you have shared interests that exist outside of work, but I digress.

When someone says “respect is earned,” what they’re often doing is positioning themselves as the gatekeeper. They’re setting up a system where they start from zero and decide who deserves decency. That’s backwards. The starting point should be 100%. Respect is freely given on first contact. It’s there to be lost, not awarded.

If someone lies, manipulates, bullies, cheats, or repeatedly behaves like a tool, then yes, they can absolutely forfeit that respect. You don’t have to tolerate nonsense. But that’s a response to behaviour. It’s not a pre-emptive withholding. And it’s vital to remember that in a work setting, you can lose respect for someone, but you still have to behave professionally.

And there’s a deeper practical truth here. When you begin from a place of automatic respect, you create stability. Conversations become clearer. Boundaries become easier to hold. Conflict becomes more manageable. You’re not constantly jockeying for dominance or validation. You’re simply interacting as two adults.

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Ironically, the people most obsessed with demanding that respect be earned are often the ones quickest to feel disrespected. Because if respect is transactional, then each disagreement feels like theft. Every challenge feels like rebellion, and being corrected feels like humiliation.

There’s strength in being the person who offers respect freely. It shows confidence. It shows self-control. It shows you don’t need to belittle someone to feel taller.

Respect isn’t earned.

Trust, authority, and reputation are earned.

Respect is given. And if someone acts like a bellend, they can lose it just as freely as they received it.

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Obliteration Is Not a Peace Plan

Modern warfare is a different beast. The deaths of thousands can be executed with the push of a button from an operator controlling a drone on the other side of the planet. There is also a particular kind of theatre that accompanies modern warfare. It comes with dramatic verbs. Obliterate. Annihilate. Erase. It is designed to sound decisive, final, and even biblical.

And right now, we are watching that theatre play out again as the Orange Dipshit strikes again.

The United States and Israel have launched direct attacks against Iran, escalating an already volatile region into something far more combustible. Donny Trump has spoken openly about obliterating Iranian military capacity and annihilating its naval forces. The language is not cautious. It is not restrained. It is not the language of someone attempting to lower the temperature. It is the language of domination. It’s the language of someone desperately compensating for something. The important point is that domination is not peace.

Bombs Don’t Build Stability

There is a persistent myth in geopolitics that overwhelming force produces long-term security. That if you hit hard enough, fast enough, decisively enough, your opponent simply collapses into compliance. To a degree, maybe they do. Maybe the people just bide their time until the occupying force decides to leave. History has demonstrated that uncomfortable truth in recent years.

Military strikes may degrade infrastructure. They may destroy hardware. They may eliminate commanders. What they do not destroy is grievance. In fact, they often fertilise it. National humiliation does not produce reconciliation; it produces radicalisation. Every missile that lands does not just destroy a target; it creates a narrative, and narratives outlast rubble.

If the stated goal is peace, then the method of escalating violence is intellectually incoherent. In the same way you can’t gamble your way out of debt, you cannot bomb your way to trust. You cannot threaten annihilation and expect de-escalation in return. You cannot shout someone into submission and call it diplomacy.

The Rhetoric of Strongmen

The language matters, and words have power. When a president speaks of obliteration and annihilation, he is not merely describing a tactical objective. He is projecting an identity. It is the lexicon of strongmen; leaders who frame conflict as spectacle, who present destruction as proof of strength, who equate maximal aggression with credibility.

But strength and stability are not the same thing, in the same way that respect and admiration can be separate, as I discussed earlier.

Strong rhetoric can win applause at rallies. It can dominate headlines. It can make a leader appear decisive. What it does not do is create durable peace in one of the most historically fragile regions on earth.

And let’s be honest: this is not a video game. There is no reset button. No clean ending screen. There are civilians in Tehran. Sailors in the Gulf. Families who will absorb the shockwaves of decisions made thousands of miles away. When leaders speak casually about annihilation, it reveals something deeper: a willingness to reduce entire populations to abstractions.

It’s like Trump is playing Civilization, one of my favourite games of all time. Is he actually worried about nuclear proliferation, or is there another agenda at play?

Escalation Is a Ladder With No Top

The most dangerous illusion in moments like this is the belief that escalation can be tightly controlled. That strikes can be “limited.” That retaliation can be “managed.” That regional actors will remain neatly contained. Conflict rarely respects those assumptions.

Iran retaliates. Allies become involved. Proxy forces activate. Shipping lanes destabilise. Energy markets spike. The entire region shifts into a more brittle posture. Each step feels reactive, justified, and necessary. And yet each step climbs further up a ladder that becomes increasingly difficult to climb down. Peace requires off-ramps. War rhetoric removes them.

Peace Is Not Won Through Obliteration

There is a harsh clarity here: destroying military assets does not erase political reality. Nations do not disappear because a president declares they should. And threats of total annihilation do not create legitimacy; they create fear.

Fear is not the foundation of peace. Peace is built on containment, diplomacy, incentives, and pressure balanced with restraint. It is built on preventing the next war, not fighting the current one.

When leaders default to the language of obliteration, they are not demonstrating strategic depth. They are revealing strategic impatience, which can be expensive in geopolitics.

If this escalation continues, it will not be remembered as the moment peace was secured. It will be remembered as the moment another long chapter of instability was opened loudly, theatrically, and with words that sounded strong but solved very little.

There are a few times when military conflict is justified. I can’t say I think this is one of those times.

What I’m Doing

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

Watching: The Tourist (BBC iPlayer).

Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £133,633.86.

Fuck It Fund: £5,001.62.

Pensions: £118,915.57.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £503,981.05.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,369.33.

Total Debts: £174,369.33.

Total Wealth: £329,611.72.

I have finally gotten around to moving my pension from my IMH employment, and with that, the last thread connecting me to them is cut. The funds were transferred as cash, but I’ve not invested it yet. The transfer only completed on Friday, and I went to look at placing a deal on Saturday, which would complete Monday, but all this stuff kicking off in Iran gave me pause. I’ll wait and see what happens to unit prices next week, as I may get more for my money. It’s not that I’m trying to profit from war, as I was going to invest anyway; it just seemed like the sensible thing to do.

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It will be interesting to see what impact this war has on the global economy. A prolonged conflict could push oil prices up, which in turn would have an impact on global shipping. This would then convert to higher prices for goods that have to be shipped long distance. If the Strait of Hormuz is closed, or otherwise rendered unsafe, it will add uncertainty to the markets. Approximately a quarter of oil transported by sea passes through this region.

Airline travel is also going to be affected by these “combat operations”. Flights will need to divert around the areas of conflict, which will lead to more fuel consumption and higher fares. A lot of questions in life can be answered when you follow the money. I’d be very interested to look at some trading accounts over the coming days and weeks. I’m not saying that this new conflict is a way of transferring wealth, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

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 330: More FI Nonsense

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

Weekly Update

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

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

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

Dinner Disaster

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

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

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

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Sometimes you are just prioritising the wrong things…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FI Nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m Doing

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £131,883.60.

Fuck It Fund: £5,001.62.

Pensions: £117,783.53.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £501,098.75.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,531.44.

Total Debts: £174,531.44.

Total Wealth: £326,567.31.

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

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

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

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

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.

If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional. If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:

StepChange

MoneyHelper

Biolink

You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:

bio.link/davidscothern.

Part 329: Plan 2 Bro

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

It would be nice if it stopped raining, but the only dry day we had was Saturday. We took full advantage and completed a 41km bike ride. It was, in some ways, a frustrating ride. Oana had a problem with her gears, and my rear mudguard was being awkward, and on our way home, my chain came off. Apart from that, it was all good.

My rear mudguard has been a pain for a while now. It sits between my pannier rack and the rear wheel, but when we have had heavy panniers, it must have caused the rack to sink and press the mudguard into the wheel. I ended up just removing the mudguard and binning it.

I’m going to head to our local bike shop and ask them to source and fit a new mudguard and a new rack that sits higher to avoid this in future.

We got home from the ride absolutely shattered, and both felt a little overtired.

Star Trek used to teach you how to think. New Star Trek tells you what to think.

There is something enduring about the TNG-era of Star Trek. From the latter seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, the shows possess a tone that feels oddly timeless. Not because the sets were cutting-edge, or because the special effects were flawless (they weren’t). It’s because the writing aimed upward.

The language was deliberate. Measured and elevated without being theatrical. Characters spoke as though humanity had matured. Even when they disagreed, they did so with structure, composure, and appropriate respect. They sounded less like 1990s television characters and more like citizens of a future that had grown out of our present anxieties.

That tonal decision matters more than it first appears.

Contrast that with much of modern Trek, particularly Star Trek: Discovery and its successors. The dialogue is contemporary. Characters use present-day slang. Emotional beats are heightened and frequently explicit. Moments that would once have unfolded gradually are often declared in real time. This isn’t inherently wrong. But it signals a philosophical shift.

Old Trek aspired to transcend its moment. New Trek often reflects it. The distinction becomes clearer when examining character development. Take Benjamin Sisko in Deep Space Nine. No episode ever stopped to inform the audience that Sisko was a good father. There was no overt framing, no narrative applause sign. Instead, we watched him cook with Jake, support his son’s writing ambitions, and prioritise him even when Starfleet responsibilities pressed heavily. We saw him navigate grief and anger without allowing them to consume his role as a parent.

Over seven seasons, Sisko’s fatherhood was not announced; it was demonstrated. It accumulated through small, consistent acts. That accumulation created credibility.

Deep Space Nine excelled at this kind of long-form investment. Garak was never reduced to a simple archetype. He was a tailor, a spy, a patriot, a liar, a man negotiating exile and loyalty simultaneously. His layers unfolded in fragments, often through subtext rather than exposition.

Rom began as comic relief and evolved into a capable engineer and eventually a reformer of Ferengi society. His growth was gradual and surprising because it was earned.

And then there is Nog. Introduced as an illiterate, anti-Federation Ferengi youth shaped by the worst instincts of his culture, Nog’s arc across seven seasons remains one of the most carefully constructed in television. He learned to read. He chose Starfleet not as rebellion, but as conviction. He endured war, suffered trauma, and rebuilt himself into a disciplined officer.

At no point did the series declare Nog heroic. It allowed us to watch him become so.

This kind of storytelling requires patience. It assumes the audience will remember earlier episodes. It assumes viewers are capable of connecting long-term narrative dots. It assumes attention.

That assumption, that trust and respect to the viewer, is part of what made the TNG-era shows feel intellectually respectful.

By contrast, one of the more common criticisms of Discovery is the relative thinness of its ensemble development. After multiple seasons, many viewers struggle to name or describe the bridge crew. Emotional intensity is abundant, but long-term layering is less consistent. Characters are often defined through immediate emotional framing rather than gradual behavioural evolution.

Again, this is not an argument about morality or representation. Star Trek has always been progressive. From its original multicultural bridge crew to its sustained critiques of militarism, xenophobia, and capitalism, its ethical foundations have been clear for decades.

The difference lies not in values, but in delivery.

Deep Space Nine addressed religion, terrorism, occupation, war, and moral compromise without flattening those issues into declarations. “In the Pale Moonlight” does not tell the audience how to judge Sisko’s actions. It presents the consequences and leaves space for discomfort. The viewer is invited into moral reasoning. Even the way it is filmed shows maturity and restraint. It’s essentially a one-man play, with Sisko speaking directly to the camera. There are no jump cuts or erratic camera action. All substance, where the story has a chance to breathe.

Similarly, The Next Generation frequently structured episodes around ethical dilemmas, such as the rights of artificial life, the limits of cultural interference, and the boundaries of autonomy, and allowed debate to unfold between intelligent characters. You watched argumentation. You observed logic under pressure.

That process models thinking. A line often attributed to critics of modern Trek captures this tension: old Star Trek taught you how to think; new Star Trek tells you what to think. While reductive, the sentiment reflects a broader perception. Earlier series constructed scenarios that required audience interpretation. Contemporary iterations sometimes frame their conclusions more directly, narrowing interpretive space. It’s Trek for the Netflix era, where people are doomscrolling whilst watching, whilst those of us who favour more nuanced storytelling end up feeling shortchanged.

Language plays a subtle role here. The elevated, restrained dialogue of TNG and DS9 created a sense of aspirational humanity. When characters in a distant century speak with contemporary slang, it grounds the story in the present rather than projecting it forward. Relatability increases, but transcendence diminishes. Science fiction can mirror society. But at its most powerful, it challenges society by imagining what maturity could look like.

The TNG-era of Star Trek imagined a humanity that had learned to argue without shouting, to disagree without dehumanising, and to pursue truth collaboratively. It presented diversity not as a slogan but as a functioning reality. It depicted moral growth not through announcements but through patient development.

That is why those series feel timeless. They were not chasing cultural relevance; they were modelling aspiration.

Aspiration requires trust. Trust that viewers can follow complexity and trust that moral ambiguity will not confuse them. It requires trust that character depth can unfold slowly and trust that audiences want to think and not be spoonfed the answers.

When storytelling shifts from exploration to declaration, something subtle changes. The viewer’s role narrows from participant in reasoning to recipient of messaging. The show may be louder, faster, and more emotionally immediate, but it risks losing the quiet intellectual partnership that defined earlier Trek.

Old Star Trek believed its audience could handle complexity. It believed we could wrestle with ideas without being handed conclusions. It believed that growth, personal, societal, and ethical, all take time. That belief is what made it powerful, and perhaps that is what feels different now.

Poppy

We’ve now started Poppy on her thyroid meds, and she’s been eating it all up without any apparent side effects. The meds are in liquid form, and we just add a few drops to her food. I’m relieved we picked up her thyroid issue now because it can lead to a lot of internal issues.

Anyway, here are a few pics of the prettiest cat in the land. She’s also a silly goose.

The Student Loan Lie

The repayment threshold for Plan 2 has been frozen at £27,295. Frozen, in an inflationary environment where everything else moves. Wages inch upward. Rent explodes. Food inflates. Energy bills behave like they’re powered by spite. But that line? The magic line where 9% of your income starts quietly evaporating? That stays put.

Now, I don’t have any skin in this game, as I’m a “Plan 1 Bro” (no idea where that came from, but let’s roll with it).

And we’re supposed to nod along like this is fiscally neutral, but it isn’t neutral. It’s just another tax flying under the radar.

Every year, inflation pushes your pay up a little, more of it slides over that £27k line, and 9% gets skimmed off. You don’t feel it as a bill. There’s no monthly direct debit. It’s just a slightly smaller payslip. A background hum. A low-grade extraction that lasts thirty years.

We have normalised the idea that a teenager can sign up to a 30-year financial drag mechanism at seventeen years old. You can’t rent a car. You can’t meaningfully assess compound interest. But you can commit to RPI plus up to 3% on £50–70k because someone told you it was “good debt”.

And that’s the lie. The framing. “It’s not really a debt.” “You only pay if you earn enough.” “It gets written off.”

What they don’t say is that for a huge chunk of middle earners, like the teachers, the nurses, the public sector managers, the solidly average-but-doing-their-best crowd, this becomes a 9% marginal tax add-on for three decades. Not enough to clear quickly. Not low enough to ignore. Just persistent.

This threshold freeze turns the screw quietly. This is not an accident. It is design. But the loans are only half the story. The bigger delusion is the conveyor belt we built to feed them.

For twenty years, we told kids that if they didn’t go to university, they had failed. We turned higher education from an elite academic path into a mass participation rite of passage. Over half of young people now go. Half. That’s not “higher” education anymore. That’s default education with better marketing.

When everyone has a degree, a degree stops differentiating you. It becomes the new GCSE. The new baseline. The thing employers ask for, not because the job requires three years of academic theory, but because it’s a convenient filtering tool. We have inflated credentials the way we inflated house prices. More supply, lower signal.

The uncomfortable truth, the one people pretend is offensive, is that not everyone is suited to academia. That isn’t cruel. It’s reality. Different brains excel in different arenas. Some people are wired for theory and research. Some are wired for building, fixing, selling, and creating. Some thrive in practical problem-solving environments where the feedback loop is immediate and tangible. What’s the phrase, “a fish will struggle to climb a tree, and then believe itself to be stupid”? Something like that, anyway, but the point remains, we are all suited to different things.

Instead of celebrating that diversity, we herded half a generation into lecture theatres because we decided university was synonymous with success. Meanwhile, the country is crying out for electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, and mechanics. Trades that are skilled, valuable, and economically resilient. Trades where you earn while you learn. Trades without a £60k anchor tied to your ankle for three decades.

Culturally, we have made trades feel second-class. We wrapped academic pathways in prestige and left vocational routes to fight for scraps of respect.

So we created a pipeline: academically average teenagers encouraged to take on life-altering debt for degrees with questionable economic return, in a labour market saturated with identical credentials. And then we froze the repayment threshold.

The final layer of absurdity is who ultimately benefits.

Universities receive their fees upfront. Full whack. Every September, the money flows. The government underwrites the risk. The balance grows at eye-watering interest rates on paper. And graduates repay through payroll for up to 30 years.

High earners clear quickly. They pay more in absolute terms, yes, but they escape the system fast. Lower earners often never repay much. But the vast middle? The quietly competent majority? They sit in the repayment zone year after year after year, chipped away at by 9% above a frozen line.

If you wanted to design a long-term income siphon from the striving middle into institutional structures, you’d struggle to draw it more neatly.

We pretend this is empowerment. We tell kids this is the price of aspiration.

We tell them debt doesn’t matter because it’s “not like other debt”. Then those same deductions reduce mortgage affordability. Reduce savings rates. Reduce flexibility. They function exactly like a tax when you’re trying to build wealth or financial independence.

From a FIRE perspective, Plan 2 is a 9% drag on momentum. It slows the snowball. It lengthens the runway. It quietly compounds against you instead of for you.

But the real frustration isn’t even the mechanics. It’s the cultural dishonesty.

We refuse to say that the system might be structurally flawed. We refuse to say that some degrees have poor economic outcomes. We refuse to admit that pushing 50%+ of teenagers into university was a political target, not an economic inevitability. And we absolutely refuse to frame a frozen repayment threshold as what it is: a stealth increase in lifetime graduate repayments.

Education isn’t the enemy. Intellectual pursuit is one of the noblest human activities. The university industry, in my experience of two undergrad degrees and three post-grad courses, is that it’s all about money. It’s about filling every course so that the money keeps rolling in.

But mass-producing degrees, attaching long-tail repayment mechanisms to them, eroding the real-world signal of those qualifications, and then quietly tightening repayment screws during inflation? That’s not enlightenment. It’s a transfer of wealth.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Savage: Chess Team Book 6 by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: The Madness (Netflix).

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

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £3,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £131,639.15.

Fuck It Fund: £5,001.62.

Pensions: £117,067.54.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £500,138.31.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,531.44.

Total Debts: £174,531.44.

Total Wealth: £325,606.87.

I have cashed in £20k of Premium Bonds to pay for a few household bits, and to subsidise my income until I build a pipeline of business.

One thing I noticed about my ISA balance is that it’s had incredible growth since last year. The last time I put my own money into my ISA was early May 2025. After that investment, it was valued at £109k. It’s now over £131k, and that £22k difference is pure growth over that time. It’s insane levels of growth.

One downside to having to cash in the Premium Bonds is that I was going to use them to max out my ISA as soon as the new allowance came into effect. It is what it is, though, and once I’ve got my pipeline of mortgage business going, I should be able to start putting money aside again.

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 328: Lifetime Earnings

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Weekly Update

I had a face-to-face meeting with my new colleagues on Friday. Although I’m self-employed, it is through a firm which has a few advisors working under it. We met in Rugby, which is a little over 100km from Sheffield, but still involves three trains because our rail network is still catching up with the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

It was a good day meeting my new teammates. We had a good laugh and some nice food. It was a long day, though, as I had to wake at 6am to get ready to catch a train from Sheffield just after 730am, to make it to Rugby for the 10am start time. Seriously, the rail network in the UK sucks.

The journey back threatened to get off to a bad start. I had 12 minutes to change from train 1 to train 2 as it stood, but my first train was delayed by 20 minutes, meaning I would miss the connection. Fortunately, there was a helpful guy in the ticket office who sorted me out with a new ticket free of charge, where I only had to get one train to Birmingham and then another to Sheffield.

Apart from working this week and getting used to new systems and processes, the week has flown by yet again with nothing much of note.

Cheese Wheel Maths a.k.a. How Dairy

Ah, Reddit, the place you can always depend on to provide ~~fake~~ totally legit stories of the lives of everyday people. One of the most recent ones I’ve stumbled across is this beauty below:

So, this guy is confused that his girlfriend left him because he bought a whole wheel of 21-year-aged cheddar. Now, he states in the post that it’s a 140lb wheel, for which he paid $18,500. He then states he can cut it into 200g wedges and sell each for $60. According to his maths, he could make $38,000.

Ok, this is one of those things where I need a deep breath and a good amount of coffee.

Mistake #1: confusing imperial and metric. 140lb is 63,502.9g. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say 63,500g.

Mistake #2: 63,500/200 = 317.5 wedges of cheddar. Let’s be generous and call it 318.

Mistake #3: 318 wedges at $60 = $19,080

All that for $580 “profit”.

Mistake #4: Assuming that anyone would pay $60 for a wedge of cheddar from someone who carried it home in the back of his truck, and who you can’t be sure stored it correctly.

Some people buy property, some buy index funds, this lad bought a wheel and a dream.

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Will it ever stop raining?

So I recently rewatched Spartacus, and I do enjoy running ideas through ChatGPT so it can put something together in the style of a Batiatus rant. In light of the incessant rain, here is the latest offering…

Gods above, are you drunk?!

Have I not suffered enough beneath your endless downpour? Day after day you empty the heavens as though the clouds themselves have burst a bladder and cannot find relief!

Streets flood. Clothes cling. Spirits rot. Even the earth squelches in protest, yet still you rain — unrelenting, merciless, spiteful.

What more do you demand?! Blood? Coin? A formal apology for some forgotten insult delivered in a previous life?! Speak plainly, you thunderous cowards!

I ask not for drought nor miracle — only that you cease. Close the skies. Swallow your tears.

Give us one dry hour so a man might walk without feeling personally targeted by the heavens.

End this madness! Or know this — I shake my fist at you with full conviction, soaked to the bone and furious beyond reason.

Seriously, though, this rain needs to stop.

Being an asshole is hard work…

The older I get, the more I notice how much effort some people put into being unpleasant to those they’re interacting with. Not to friends. Not to equals. But to people in roles. The waiter. The call-centre worker. The receptionist. The doctor. The adviser. The person who happens to be standing between them and the thing they want.

There’s a strange belief that being difficult in these interactions somehow produces better outcomes. That irritation sharpens service. That impatience speeds things up. That dominance gets results. In reality, it does the opposite.

Being an arsehole to someone whose job it is to help you requires constant work. You have to adopt a tone. Maintain a posture. Decide when to interrupt. Decide when to escalate. You’re actively managing the interaction as a contest rather than a collaboration.

And the thing people don’t seem to realise is that the other person is doing the same calculation in real time.

They’re deciding how much discretion they have. How far can they reasonably go. How much effort this interaction is worth. Whether you’re someone they want to help or someone they simply need to process.

Most roles, whether it’s customer service, healthcare, advice, or trades, contain far more human judgment than people like to admit. There are rules, yes. There are procedures. But there are also grey areas. Workarounds. Favourable interpretations. Extra explanations. A bit more patience. None of that is unlocked by hostility.

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Being rude to a worker doesn’t make them more competent. It doesn’t make the system bend in your favour. It just moves you from the mental category of “person I want to help” to “person I need to get through without incident.” At that point, you’re no longer getting the best version of the service. You’re getting the safest one.

The same dynamic shows up in healthcare. Being aggressive with a GP, a nurse, or a consultant doesn’t make them care more. It makes them careful. It narrows the conversation. It reduces trust. You still get treatment, but you lose the softer, human edges, the reassurance, the extra explanation, the sense that you’re being seen rather than processed. And again, it takes effort. Sustained effort.

You have to stay angry. Stay sharp. Stay ready to challenge. You can’t relax, because relaxation would undermine the performance. You leave the interaction feeling tense, unsatisfied, and usually convinced that you were somehow wronged, which conveniently justifies doing it again next time.

Decency, by contrast, is remarkably efficient. It doesn’t mean being a doormat. You can still be firm. You can still ask questions. You can still escalate when necessary. But you do it from a position of shared reality rather than imagined combat. You frame the problem as something to solve together, not something to win.

When you do that, people open up. They explain things properly. They flag options you didn’t know existed. They make an effort, not because they have to, but because you’ve made it easier for them to do so.

I’ve spent enough time on both sides of these interactions to be confident about this: the nicest clients, patients, and customers consistently get better outcomes. Not preferential treatment; just fuller treatment. They get more information. More care. More thought.

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The irony is that people who pride themselves on being “no-nonsense” often end up creating far more nonsense for themselves. Longer interactions. More friction. More stress. More stories about how useless everyone else is. Being decent isn’t naive. It’s easier, and generally more rewarding.

It recognises that most systems are run by tired humans doing their best within constraints. If you make their day harder, they’ll make your outcome smaller. If you make their day easier, they’ll often stretch a little further for you.

Being an arsehole in these situations isn’t powerful. It’s inefficient.

What I’m Doing

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

Watching: Quiz (Netflix), The Rip (Netflix), The Anniversary (Netflix).

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

We finished Spartacus, and although I’ve seen it a few times before, I appreciated it even more on this viewing. If you strip away the over-the-top fight scenes and questionable acting from some of the background cast, it’s a surprisingly emotional story. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment is the relationship between Spartacus and fellow gladiator turned rebel, Crixus. At first, these two hate each other, but that slowly changes over time from hate to grudging respect to true brotherhood. What makes this impressive is that neither character really changes from who they are. Yes, they evolve as all well-written characters should, but they are still the same character at heart.

After finishing up Spartacus, we watched Quiz on Netflix, which is a dramatised interpretation of the Charles Ingram scandal on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

For those who don’t know, former Army officer Major Ingram was convicted of fraud when it was decided he cheated to win £1,000,000 on WWTBAM.

The alleged scheme was, in a way, genius. They had an accomplice in the studio, as well as Ingram’s wife, and they would cough when the correct answer to a question was said aloud.

Once you go in with this knowledge, it becomes obvious upon watching the real footage. However, is it a case of confirmation bias? There were over a hundred coughs in the studio during Ingram’s time in the hot seat, so there is an argument about cherry-picking the coughs that coincided with the correct answers being spoken. Now, there’s a lot more context I’ve not gone into, but I’m probably coming down 75/25 on the side that they probably did cheat. However, I don’t think it’s quite the slamdunk some claim it to be.

I think their biggest mistake was not quitting while they were ahead. Had they quit at £250k, no one would probably have batted an eye at them.

If you want to know more, I’d definitely check out the show on Netflix, as it’s only a three-episode show and is entertaining enough.

We also watched a couple of good movies this week: The Rip and The Anniversary. I knew almost nothing about these films and only watched them on the strength of their casts: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Sasha Calle, and Kyle Chandler, in The Rip, and Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler (again), Madeline Brewer, and Phoebe Dynevor, in The Anniversary.

The latest Damon/Affleck project was a tense thriller about a team of cops who stumble across a huge sum of criminal money. I won’t say much more, but it was good fun throughout, and competently written and directed.

The Anniversary was a complete surprise to me as I had absolutely no idea what it was about. From the title, I expected some sort of romcom or something. I did not expect a political, dystopian thriller, which left me reeling. A very well-made film.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £129,613.27.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,880.79.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.

Total Assets: £510,925.67.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,531.44.

Total Debts: £174,531.44.

Total Wealth: £336,394.23.

Lifetime Earnings

This idea has been rattling around in my head for a while. It was sparked by a conversation with a good friend. We were talking about work, money, and time, as we often do, and at some point, the question came up: how much have you actually earned in your life? Well, he’d worked it out, and I hadn’t.

Not net worth. Not what you earn now. But the total value of all the work you’ve ever done. As I said, I didn’t know the answer. So I decided to find out. That turned out to be more involved than I expected.

For my years at Lloyds, things were mercifully straightforward. The pension portal gives annual salary figures going back year by year, which cover the bulk of my career. There were a couple of moments where pay changed mid-year, but in most cases, rises kicked in from April, so the numbers were close enough to reality to be useful.

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Everything outside of Lloyds was messier. Old jobs, student work, part-time roles, early years where income was low enough that you barely noticed it at the time. For those, I went back through my National Insurance record and worked backwards from the contributions, with ChatGPT helping to sanity-check the estimates.

It’s not exact. It can’t be. National Insurance is calculated per pay period, thresholds shift, and some work, especially while studying, barely leaves a trace. But when I lined the numbers up year by year, they broadly matched what I remember earning. Nothing jumped out as wildly wrong. Which was good enough for me.

There are also some important gaps to acknowledge. I’ve had just under nineteen years where I’ve been eligible to work full-time, once you strip out the five years spent across two stints at university. I’ve also had just under six months of unemployment, split between leaving Lloyds and joining IMH, and then leaving IMH to start my current venture.

In reality, that probably leaves me with something closer to eighteen years of actual employment. All the figures here are gross. They don’t account for tax, take-home pay, or how expensive life felt at the time. There will also be years, particularly as a student, when I did some work that never breached National Insurance thresholds and therefore never really shows up. This is an approximation, not a forensic audit.

Still, once everything was added together, a number emerged: £498,146.37.

That’s my best estimate of how much I’ve earned from employment in my life so far.

Spread across roughly eighteen years of work, that comes out at an average salary of £27,674.80 a year. Which feels fine, I guess. No huge spikes. No dramatic leaps. Just slow, steady progression, and a lot of time. Some of my first full-time jobs I remember paying as little as £11k. My most recent paid position at IMH paid more than four times that amount.

What really stopped me in my tracks wasn’t the earnings figure itself, though. It was what came next. At the time of writing, the total value of my assets sits at around £510,925.67. In other words, I now own more than I have ever earned from work. That’s a strange thing to sit with.

Dig a little deeper, and it becomes even more interesting. The combined value of my ISA, pensions, cash savings, and Premium Bonds is £267,495.67. More than half of everything I’ve ever earned has, in one form or another, been converted into assets that still exist.

There was no windfall here. No inheritance. No crypto bullshit or lottery win. Just years of saving, investing, avoiding the worst of lifestyle inflation, and letting time do its quiet, unglamorous work. This is also despite a gambling addiction that persisted from 2008 to 2018 in one way or another.

Compounding isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t feel like much is happening while you’re in it. But zoom out far enough, and the effect becomes undeniable. Of course, these numbers don’t tell the whole story.

They don’t show what it felt like earning very little in the early years, or the anxiety that comes with redundancy, or the temptation to play it safe when change feels risky. They don’t capture inflation, either. £20,000 in the early 2000s did not feel like £20,000 does today. But even with all those caveats, I find this perspective grounding.

We spend so much time focusing on annual salaries, monthly budgets, and net worth snapshots that we rarely stop to look underneath it all. Lifetime earnings are different. It’s a baseline that can’t be argued with.

It turns out that just under half a million pounds of lifetime earnings, handled reasonably well and with a bit of patience, can quietly build a life that feels far more secure than the numbers alone would suggest. It meant that those months in between jobs with no income coming in were not spent in total panic.

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 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.