theFIREstarter

Well my last day at work was Friday, so that’s it. I’m “free”!

On the other hand I have that Alanis Morissette song on loop in my head, isn’t it just sooooo ironic? (And sorry Alanis but far more so than rain on your wedding day)

• The obvious one as per the title of this post. I am now “free” from work, but I can only leave my house once per day 😀
• My plans for side income are scuppered (until sports and specifically racing starts up again)
• My plans to continue to develop sports betting bots are also scuppered for the same reason
• I want to plough our spare cash into the stock market after the big drops we’ve seen, but on the other hand feel we need to keep our cash buffer as large as possible due to the uncertainty of the whole situation… talk about a catch 22!

And the kicker:

• I was looking forward to plenty of extra free time to spend on hobbies and working on projects, but now it seems like millions of other people who were previously in work (mainly those without children) now have plenty of extra free time, while the cancellation of schools/nurseries has actually meant that even with no job, I basically don’t have any extra free time at all. There was a work slack channel last week dedicated to the “passion projects” people have already started with all their “extra free time” and suggestions flying about on how we can all be spending our “extra free time that we all now have”. This didn’t make me angry at all…. no….

But anyway I’m over all of that now (sort of) as when I heard that work would not be extending my working period any further on Friday, I sent a firm but fair message to the person who made that decision telling them that it was the incorrect decision, then virtual mic dropped by setting my slack status to “Has left the building” 🙂 then shut the laptop down to spend the afternoon with the family. The sun was out and we went for a walk while maintaining social distance from the few people we encountered, and I could already feel the weight lifting off my shoulders.

After a few weeks of uncertainty about whether I’d completely f**ked up made the right decision by handing my notice in when I did, I knew almost instantly from that feeling that it was in fact the correct decision to make, even with all of this going on (not that I knew at the time anyway).

Even if the worst of this situation lasts for 3 months ¹, it would have been far more stressful if I had to try and pin down a full time job at the same time, and in the grand scheme of things, getting an extra 2-3 weeks worth of money from my now ex-employer will not have moved the dial much on our financial situation.

I spent the last week pretty stressed out (partially due to covid-19, but definitely mainly because of work) so that extra stress is just not worth the money, so in fact, they’ve inadvertently done me a favour by not extending my working period.

Thanks guys! 🙂

Anyway with that all done, here is a mixed up bag of other random thoughts on my situation / the situation we all find ourselves in:

That free time paradox thing

There has been much said, not just with my ex-work colleagues but in the media and even on many blogs I’ve read, about having the extra free time to do that thing you always wanted to do, and now have no excuses not to go and do it. But as I commented on one of indeedably‘s posts that mentioned this… People are VERY good at making up excuses and putting this sort of thing off:

• Children are at home and need entertaining, feeding, etc..
• People still need to WFH if they can do
• People are worried about friends and family so will spend far more time than usual on their phones to check in and do video calling and so on.
• People will be be stressed to the eyeballs in general and will want mindless crap to take their mind off of it.
• On the other hand people will also want to follow every update as this is living through something that has never happened in living memory for many people, and time will be “wasted” on that, expect that we will feel it’s our duty to stay informed (which is it, within limits of course)
• Sleep!!!! If you are used to getting up early for 1+ hour mega slog of a commute to work, the chances are you will be using this extra time in the morning to catch up on sleep, not knock out 10 pages per day of your new sci-fi novel before starting WFH.
• The extra stress of the situation doesn’t exactly put you in the super-motivated mood to do this sort of thing. If you are the kind of person that can block all of this out and start smashing through a passion project, you were probably the person who was already doing it before all of this started in the first place!

I also really liked Joe Lycett‘s advice I heard on the radio to just sack all of that “you should write a novel” crap off and just try to do nothing. I think doing nothing is really underrated in terms of mental health and having a balanced outlook on life. We rarely get the chance to indulge in doing it (or more accurately, not doing it) without feeling guilty we are wasting time that could be better spent doing something else, so why not just take this time to do, as Mickey Flanagan would say “Faaaack all”.

Family time

Obviously my gripe about no extra free time if you have children, although very real and I know some parents will be going up the wall already, is actually pretty pathetic. We chose to have kids so we should be loving the extra free time we can spend with them. There are loads of online activities and ideas of things you can do at home flying about so it’s down to us to use our imaginations and get creative with this hand we’ve all been dealt. And we are still allowed out once a day so have been going for a short walk most days as well which passes the time, and more importantly knackers the kids out so they actually go to bed at a reasonable time 🙂

Admittedly for those who are FI or can’t work / aren’t working such as myself, this is going to be a lot easier. But for me personally now I am seeing this as a massive positive, even more time with both the wife and TFS Jr before she (hopefully!) starts school in September? Brilliant!

The market / investments

I’ve filled up my ISA allowance for the year, which believe it or not is the first time I’ve ever done that (useless investor alert!).

I took about £10k of VWRL at £57ish and then another £10k at £59ish as it started to pop up and I pooped my pants thinking the bottom had been hit. Anyway not the most optimal but from what I’ve seen so far – the lowest price on the monthly graph says £55.56 – not that far off.

Not that my opinion is worth the daily cost of this website hosting of course, but I still think it will drop again. Cases and deaths are no where near at peak level in the western world yet. USA cases are surging and in about a weeks time the deaths will unfortunately follow with well over 1k/day passing away, if the trends follow and Spain and Italy anywhere near closely. I think this will cause another panic sell off, but maybe this has all been priced in weeks ago and I am well behind the curve here, and people have already predicted that the peak won’t be *that* bad and hence we are already seeing the start of a recovery.

And this is to say nothing of the months ahead of economic turmoil when companies run out of money and even more people start getting laid off.

Government plans to keep people “employed” can surely only last so long…?

I know of a fair few people who’ve either taken voluntary redundancy or it’s on the table already, or have had to take pay cuts and/or take unpaid leave.

Which suggests the furlough thing is not even an option for these companies, it’s that bad.

Anyway if the recovery keeps on going nicely up, and the economy isn’t as f**ked as it looks like at the moment, then that’s great and at least I can say I filled up my 2019-20 tax year ISA allowance at near rock bottom prices!

It’s very easy to dish the old “Be greedy when others are fearful” advice out, but acting on it when the world is seemingly falling apart around you is much harder, especially when you’ve just severed your main source of income 🙂

Lockdown Budgeting

I will probably do a short post on this soon so won’t go into detail, but has anyone else thought about re-doing their 2020 yearly budget?

It’s going to look a lot different to how I originally thought it would that’s for sure! There is a serious lack of things to spend your money on at the moment, and holidays are being cancelled left right and center, with no chance of rescheduling any time soon.

Apologies for sounding like a broken record but it obviously depends on how long this situation lasts for, but even if it’s only for 3 months then there may be a rebounding spend effect where everyone goes mental when they finally have things to spend money on again.

Alternatively maybe the masses are just diverting all their money to online purchases and consumerism and credit card pummelling continues unabated? I have to admit we’ve made a few lockdown impulse buys so far. Have you? 🙂

Isn’t this just business as usual for the FI crowd?

For most this is a huge upheaval compared to their normal daily lives. Especially for younger Londonites (and other big cities dwellers) who just use their flats / bedsits as a crash pad most of the time.

But for those that have opted for the “simple life” route to FI, by keeping things local, by not going out too much, and reducing expenses, I would posit they will have not really felt all that much difference to their normal lives, outside of working from home.

I’m no where near the extreme end of the spectrum but honestly I am just not bothered at all about not being able to go bowling, cinema, restaurants, or any of the other modern consumer traps for spending shedloads of money.

I can’t even say I’m missing a few pints in the pub (so far) but then I did go on a pretty decent “last night(s) out in London” binge in Jan/Feb as I knew I wouldn’t be able to now I’m no longer a London commuter.

At the time it felt unnecessarily extravagant, but looking back, I am pretty glad I did it!

Other random thoughts I’ve had

Disclaimer: Some of the below are serious, some not so, I hope it’s obvious which are which.

• Why are people panic buying Anti-Bac handwash? Anti-BACTERIAL? I thought this thing was a virus and as we are told many times by doctors etc… anti-biotics do not work on viral infections!
• I am very much looking forward to renewing my car and home insurance in a couple of months. With hardly anyone on the roads and everyone staying at home, claims must have dropped through the floor and the insurance companies will surely be kind enough to pass on those savings to their loyal customers
• We’ve all been ill over the last week or so. I am 99% sure it’s not Corona, as the symptoms were nothing like what they’ve said. But on the other hand they have also said you might have it and have no symptoms!? So who knows really, but either way it’s best to be safe than sorry and we’ve kept our distance from all friends and family like we should be doing regardless of whether we feel ill or not. We are all pretty much better now so that’s good.
• Why have we not tried video chats before!? They are really good. We have friends who have lived abroad for 6 years and this is the first time we’ve ever VC’d with them. Quite ridiculous when you think about it.
• This is the first post in about 3 years I’ve “properly” proof read ². So I guess I do have some extra free time after all 😉

On a final note, we already know of someone who has died of the virus, a friend’s mother. A big slap in the face from the reality of the situation, how serious we should all be taking it, and how silly all of our worries about being cooped up for a few weeks of our otherwise long and healthy lives really are (and all my silly worries about ex-work stuff).

Stay safe, and take care.