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:
Biolink
You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:
bio.link/davidscothern.
