Friday 29 December 2017

Lasts

Ibiza
FIRE to a Spanish Island?
Just where has 2017 gone?  It seems like only yesterday I was eating One More Year (OMY) humble pie and I now find myself nearly half way through the most difficult part of my FIRE journey to date.  The closeness to FIRE is now really starting to hit home making me wonder whether we previously weren’t quite ready and used events like Brexit as an excuse.

In recent weeks it’s become particularly real as I’ve started to tick off things that I’m doing for the last time.  On the work front it’s been about setting 2018 plans and objectives.  It’s been quite a surreal feeling knowing that I’m signing up for something that somebody else will ultimately be responsible for delivering.  What I’ve found interesting is that I’ve actually found myself fighting harder for reasonableness than ever before.  I think this is for two reasons.  Firstly, I have nothing to lose given my current FU Money position.  Secondly, I don’t to be remembered as “the b*stard that sold us out before riding off into the sunset”.

Sunday 10 December 2017

Post Brexit phase 1 - a move to the Med is go!

Paphos Forest, Cyprus
Paphos Forest, Cyprus
In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum result my immediate thoughts were has the door to our dream been slammed shut.  An initial review suggested that it was still ok, albeit with some potential speed humps, but even though the data said we were still golden some trepidation was still there.  In particular I had three main concerns.

The first concern was being able to register and live legally in our new chosen country.  Both the EU and the UK government were always verbally saying current residents would be ok but they never spoke about new entrants since the referendum or since the trigger of Article 50.  Even as recently as September 2017 the UK would only commit to the negotiations being applicable from a date between the date of Article 50 trigger and date of exit.  The joint report published on Friday finally clears that up with the paragraph:
“The overall objective of the Withdrawal Agreement with respect to citizens' rights is to provide reciprocal protection for Union and UK citizens, to enable the effective exercise of rights derived from Union law and based on past life choices, where those citizens have exercised free movement rights by the specified date.”

A subsequent paragraph then defines the specified date as:
“The specified date should be the time of the UK's withdrawal.”

So provided we’re residing in an EU27 Member State by 29 March 2019 we’re within scope of the agreement.  Tick.

Saturday 14 October 2017

Quarter 3 2017 – Celebrating a 10 year anniversary

10 years ago I took a step back and looked at where my life was going.  Family life was great for which I was and remain incredibly fortunate.  However when I looked at my career I saw an industry that was being hollowed out, was being outsourced to the lowest cost country and where all the stuff that was fun was slowly being weighed down by stuff I disliked.  I was also 34 years of age and by that time had been working for 12 years across the globe yet when I looked at how that work had helped build our financial future I saw limited progress with the vast majority of the money I had earned having ‘disappeared’.

I was at a turning point, some might call it an early mid-life crisis, and clearly had to do something different.  Stay the course and I was looking at having to work until the nice government would let me retire but the risk I ran was finding myself without a career before that period.  So I started to think about retraining to do something different.  I’d also heard of people retiring a little earlier (this was before the millions of personal finance blogs appeared on the scene) and so I spoke to some financial planners about how they might be able to help me bring retirement forward a little. One of my strengths is quantitative analytics which meant I was able to work my way through their sales pitch which led me to the conclusion that while that route would help me bring retirement forward I would also be helping to bring their retirement forward as well.

In tinkering with those spreadsheets I also discovered something quite amazing.  If I could modestly increase my earnings, modestly decrease my spending, invest averagely and just not give my wealth accrued away to the financial services industry or tax man I could possibly bring my retirement forward  a long way.  I also thought I could do that myself and so in October 2007 I built a spreadsheet and a plan that would see me retire by age 50, a period of only 16 years.  I thought it also meant I didn’t need to retrain and instead just had to get my head down and run the plan I had built.