Why FIRE is no mental health panacea

It’s widely appreciated that financial woes negatively impact the mind, not just the bank balance. “It is difficult to disentangle the inter-relationship between debt and mental health, but the links are clear” (Mind) Causality may be murky, but the association is not. Financial turmoil is stressful, detrimental to one’s mental health and indeed even fatal.

Doughnuts and dollars

Doughnuts are hardly allegorical, though perhaps at a push you could conjure up some vague symbolism. The ring-shaped doughnut could represent the circular nature of life and death, the inexorable march of time in the universe, the futility but majesty of it all. The jam-filled doughnut is perhaps a lesson in not judging books by

Message in a bottle

If you could write a message in a bottle, one that would float down the river of life and be found by your future self, what would you write? In wonderland As I wrangled with this latest cerebral provocation from SQ HQ, my initial thought was of how futuristic a self should I speak to.

Twelve percent

The past year has given me, and I’m sure many others too, pause for thought about the way we live our lives. In more recent months I’ve engaged in some hefty type two thinking, reflecting on my financial past (its evolutionary nascency) and future (plans for the endgame, or lack thereof). I’ve dwelled on the

Learning

Our lives are too short to be able to learn everything through our own experiences. A degree of how we behave comes from lessons learned through the experiences of others. Assimilating these lessons into our own schema is a process; listening, reading, empathising, weighing, reflecting, adopting or rejecting. Second-hand experiential learning is an invaluable skill.

The MVP

When I first decided to start investing there was an information overload. Which platform? Which funds? What asset allocation? How much to contribute? Pound cost average or lump sum? The desire to make things ‘perfect’ from the off was overwhelming. Guaranteed decision fatigue. You may well have felt the same. Eventually I decided that I

The Con Is On

Readers of a certain vintage may remember the BBC’s TV series ‘Hustle’. A team of con artists, led by affable frontman Mickey Bricks, channel their inner Robin Hood to steal from wealthy, immoral or otherwise unsavoury ‘marks’ …and keep the money for personal gain. I previously lamented my lack of income diversity. How best to

Evolution

Financial origin stories are the flavour of the month and I’ve enjoyed reading about the geneses of my blogging peers. Yet when it came to writing my own I’ll confess to a fair dose of self-doubt. There are over seven billion individuals on this planet, we are but cosmic ants. Our stories may be unique

Am I Diversified Enough?

This question emerged from the milieu of my cognitive stew whilst in the shower. The knee-jerk part of my brain, the fast-thinking portion that doesn’t like to dwell spat out a “yes” and moved on. The more ponderous parts of my cerebrum latched onto the question, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. Diverse

The First 100,000

Milestones are an important part of making progress. They break up a task into more manageable psychological and material chunks. They’re motivating; you can celebrate when they’re reached even if the bigger victory isn’t yet won. Yes, milestones are generally a good thing, a marker on the road to where you’re going. There are conversely