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

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.  So far, I’ve covered:

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.

#AD – Do you want to help me earn a little cash for free? Of course you do!

Now that I’m self-employed I’ve signed up with a few businesses that offer services that assist with getting a mortgage.  One such service comes from Check My File which brings together your credit report from multiple sources into a detailed breakdown of your credit history.

Normally there is a £14.99 monthly charge but with my link you can get a FREE 7-day trial.  My affiliate link allows you to create an account, get your report, and if you want to cancel within the 7 day trial period you will not be charged.  If you want to keep the service beyond the trial period, the £14.99 monthly charge applies.  

By signing up to the trial period, you’ll help me out with a small commission even if you cancel inside that trial period. 

Important points:

1. This code is for a free 7-day trial for those who have not had an account with Check My File before.

2. You can cancel anytime with no penalty.

3. If you do not cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will be charged £14.99 until you cancel.

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).

5. I will earn a small commission from Check My File for each person who signs up for the free trial, whether they continue to a paid membership or not. 

6. I do not get to see your credit report.  It is private to you, unless you choose to share it. 

7. To make sure the code tracks, please complete your sign-up in one sitting i.e. don’t close the tab and start again later.

8. Make sure you download your report before cancelling.

9. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but my last wage was paid in October.

https://www.checkmyfile.partners/GZMJPSJ/2CTPL

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.

Advertisements

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?

Advertisements

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.

Do you want to help me earn a little cash for free? Of course you do!

Now that I’m self-employed I’ve signed up with a few businesses that offer services that assist with getting a mortgage.  One such service comes from Check My File which brings together your credit report from multiple sources into a detailed breakdown of your credit history.

Normally there is a £14.99 monthly charge but with my link you can get a FREE 7-day trial.  My affiliate link allows you to create an account, get your report, and if you want to cancel within the 7 day trial period you will not be charged.  If you want to keep the service beyond the trial period, the £14.99 monthly charge applies.  

By signing up to the trial period, you’ll help me out with a small commission even if you cancel inside that trial period. 

Important points:

1. This code is for a free 7-day trial for those who have not had an account with Check My File before.

2. You can cancel anytime with no penalty.

3. If you do not cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will be charged £14.99 until you cancel.

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).

5. I will earn a small commission from Check My File for each person who signs up for the free trial, whether they continue to a paid membership or not. 

6. I do not get to see your credit report.  It is private to you, unless you choose to share it. 

7. To make sure the code tracks, please complete your sign-up in one sitting i.e. don’t close the tab and start again later.

8. Make sure you download your report before cancelling.

9. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but my last wage was paid in October.

https://www.checkmyfile.partners/GZMJPSJ/2CTPL

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:

  1. Insider information (worst case).
  2. Lucky speculation.
  3. Geopolitical analysts making educated bets.
  4. 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:

ClaimReality
People made money betting on the strikeTrue
Accounts were created shortly beforeLikely true
Profits around $1MTrue
Trump Jr linked to PolymarketTrue
Insider trading provenNot proven
Administration corruptionSpeculative

💡 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.  

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Do you want to help me earn a little cash for free? Of course you do!

Now that I’m self-employed, I’ve signed up with a few businesses that offer services that assist with getting a mortgage.  One such service comes from Check My File, which brings together your credit report from multiple sources into a detailed breakdown of your credit history.

Normally, there is a £14.99 monthly charge, but with my link, you can get a FREE 7-day trial.  My affiliate link allows you to create an account, get your report, and if you want to cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will not be charged.  If you want to keep the service beyond the trial period, the £14.99 monthly charge applies.  

By signing up for the trial period, you’ll help me out with a small commission even if you cancel within that trial period. 

Important points:

1. This code is for a free 7-day trial for those who have not had an account with Check My File before.

2. You can cancel anytime with no penalty.

3. If you do not cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will be charged £14.99 until you cancel.

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).

5. I will earn a small commission from Check My File for each person who signs up for the free trial, whether they continue to a paid membership or not. 

6. I do not get to see your credit report.  It is private to you, unless you choose to share it. 

7. To make sure the code tracks, please complete your sign-up in one sitting i.e. don’t close the tab and start again later.

8. Make sure you download your report before cancelling.

9. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but my last wage was paid in October.

https://www.checkmyfile.partners/GZMJPSJ/2CTPL

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.

Advertisements

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.

Do you want to help me earn a little cash for free? Of course you do!

Now that I’m self-employed, I’ve signed up with a few businesses that offer services that assist with getting a mortgage.  One such service comes from Check My File, which brings together your credit report from multiple sources into a detailed breakdown of your credit history.

Normally, there is a £14.99 monthly charge, but with my link, you can get a FREE 7-day trial.  My affiliate link allows you to create an account, get your report, and if you want to cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will not be charged.  If you want to keep the service beyond the trial period, the £14.99 monthly charge applies.  

By signing up for the trial period, you’ll help me out with a small commission even if you cancel within that trial period. 

Important points:

1. This code is for a free 7-day trial for those who have not had an account with Check My File before.

2. You can cancel anytime with no penalty.

3. If you do not cancel within the 7-day trial period, you will be charged £14.99 until you cancel.

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).

5. I will earn a small commission from Check My File for each person who signs up for the free trial, whether they continue to a paid membership or not. 

6. I do not get to see your credit report.  It is private to you, unless you choose to share it. 

7. To make sure the code tracks, please complete your sign-up in one sitting i.e. don’t close the tab and start again later. Make sure you download your report or else the commission doesn’t register.

8. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but my last wage was paid in October.

Here is the link….

https://www.checkmyfile.partners/GZMJPSJ/2CTPL

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.  

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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. 

Advertisements

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:

Screenshot

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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:

  1. Your annual spending
  2. Your chosen withdrawal rate
  3. 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 RateAnnual SpendPot NeededSuccess Rate over 30 years according to FIRECalc
4.00%£30,000.00£750,000.0095.20%
4.00%£29,400.00£735,000.0095.20%
4.00%£28,800.00£720,000.0095.20%
5.00%£30,000.00£600,000.0074.40%
5.00%£29,400.00£588,000.0074.40%
5.00%£28,800.00£576,000.0074.40%
6.00%£30,000.00£500,000.0054.40%
6.00%£29,400.00£490,000.0054.40%
6.00%£28,800.00£480,000.0054.40%
4.00%£30,000.00£750,000.0095.20%
4.00%£29,400.00£735,000.0095.20%
4.00%£28,800.00£720,000.0095.20%
4.00%£28,200.00£705,000.0095.20%
4.00%£27,600.00£690,000.0095.20%
4.50%£30,000.00£666,666.6784.00%
4.50%£29,400.00£653,333.3384.00%
4.50%£28,800.00£640,000.0084.00%
4.50%£28,200.00£626,666.6784.00%
4.50%£27,600.00£613,333.3384.00%

Lever One: Annual Spending (The Quiet Giant)

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

But the size of the pot absolutely does change.

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

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

Lever Two: Withdrawal Rate (The Blunt Instrument)

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

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

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

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

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

This is where nuance matters.

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

And crucially…

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

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

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

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

Why This Matters More Than Market Returns

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

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

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

DISCLAIMER

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

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

StepChange

MoneyHelper

Biolink 

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

bio.link/davidscothern.

Part 326: TACO

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

Weekly Update

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

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

Advertisements

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

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

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

Eating Out

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

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

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

Cabbagegate

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

Advertisements

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

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

What I’m Doing

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

Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I endure. I always endure.

And…

I am convinced this is no accident, but war.

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

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

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

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

But by the gods, she laughs at me.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £128,579.93.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,629.39.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £509,640.93.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83. 

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £334,948.10.

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

TACO Investing

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

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

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

Trump Always Chickens Out.

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

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

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

Advertisements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about Greenland?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISCLAIMER

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

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

StepChange

MoneyHelper

Biolink 

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

bio.link/davidscothern.

Part 325: Pasta Disaster

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

Weekly Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strava Upload

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

Advertisements

Pasta Disaster

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

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

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

Which is precisely why this evening was so disappointing.

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

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

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

“Salmon-tuna-whatever.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t just bad. It was embarrassing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertisements

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

Screenshot

We won’t be returning.

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

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

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

What I’m Doing

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

Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).

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

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

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £129,062.01.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,880.70.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £510,374.32.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83. 

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £335,681.49.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertisements

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

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

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

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

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

DISCLAIMER

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

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

StepChange

MoneyHelper

Biolink 

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

bio.link/davidscothern.

Part 324: It Is A Gift

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

Weekly Update

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

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

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

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

2026 Goals Update

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

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

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

Advertisements

Civilization and FI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

That’s exactly how early investing works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later is always more expensive.

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

Advertisements

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m Doing

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

Watching: His and Hers (Netflix).

Reading: nothing at the moment. 

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £127,808.69.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £113,110.84.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £507,351.14.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83. 

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £332,658.31.

“It is a gift…”

Lord of the Rings, anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertisements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I saw the story about the ICE agent.

And something in my brain just… snapped back open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISCLAIMER

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

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

StepChange

MoneyHelper

Biolink 

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

bio.link/davidscothern.