PF101

Personal Finance is a major hobby of mine.  I’ve now been absorbing everything I can about saving, investing and financial independence since late 2007.  In November this year I will have also been blogging about it for 10 years!  When I go on holidays I’m also the one reading Wall Street Revalued  and not that latest John Grisham novel

In my last post I mentioned the Ikigai model and if I apply that to personal finance I get the following...

Click to enlarge, Source

What you LOVE:

• Sad I know, but I never have to force myself to read a personal finance book, read the latest post from great blogs like Monevator or fire up Excel on my steam driven laptop.  In fact it’s the opposite for me.  I gravitate to this stuff so yes I’d say I love it.
• If I think about my previous (and even current to some extent) work/job I also used to love enabling others with training, coaching, process improvement and then with light touch sitting back watching them succeed.  I always took little satisfaction out of my own success but I took a huge amount of satisfaction out of watching my team succeed over and over.  I think this is why I’ve also stayed blogging for so long.

What you are GOOD AT:

• I am reasonably good at maths and now have more than 10 years of personal finance knowledge under my belt.  Sure, I’ve made mistakes and I’m sure will continue to do so but on the whole I think I’ve managed to get more things right than wrong.  I don’t think I would have achieved financial independence in 8.7 years if that wasn’t the case.  So yes, I’d say I’m good at it.
• In my previous day job I was also pretty good at teaching and developing others to succeed.  In some of my later roles it would have been impossible for me to do my job well if that wasn’t the case.
• While not being a fantastic motivational speaker I am pretty confident in smaller training / workshop environments where on many occasions I’ve been successful in getting the message across.

Back to powerful FI

6 months after taking the FIRE (financially independent retired early) leap I can confirm that (for now) I’ve reverted back to FI (financially independent) mode.  That’s right, we’ve left Cyprus, are back in the UK and I’m working and/or have a job.  More on that in a minute.

It’s been a long time between posts and a lot has happened so to try and get the story out in a succinct manner I’ll post some questions to myself.  I’ll then likely follow up with more detail in subsequent posts if people are interested.  So here goes...

Did Cyprus not agree with you and Mrs RIT?

We didn’t leave Cyprus because of Cyprus.  In fact quite the opposite.  Cyprus was absolutely brilliant and we saw it at its worst as we were there during one of the wettest / coldest winters on record.

There was so much relatively unspoilt nature with the picture above hopefully being a nice example of linking human occupation with nature.  Just around the corner from there is where turtles actually nest.  It was a walkers / hikers / cyclists paradise.  So much so that I managed to lose 10kg in relatively quick time.

The people and the way of doing things were also incredible.  On various forums I’d heard the term for Cyprus being siga siga which means slowly slowly.  I didn’t find that at all.  What I found was that things were done differently but in a good way.  For example to buy car insurance I went to the insurance company and sat across from the person who was going to sell it to me.  Over a good coffee and with no pressure the forms were duly completed and a quote was generated.  Hands were shaken, the forms were signed and I was done.  All over in about 30 minutes.  Give me that over automated menus that can’t understand me and a call centre if I press the right buttons correctly any day.