Simple Living In Somerset

A visit to a non-bank branch of Barclays and Ryanair blues

update 17 Feb – I initially charged Ryanair with taking a CC booking as a cash charge. It wasn’t them, they are/were innocent. My bad. They haven’t done anything to pull my tail.

Been a while since visited a real bank branch. As you get older your affairs simplify, and I was able to do most stuff with the Internet. That’s the whole rationale for banks retreating from the High Street ¹. All the young ‘uns diddle with their smartphones, and the slightly older gits use their computers, though banks would rather force them onto smartphones to minimise their IT operation, leaving just the really old fossils who probably don’t make enough money so we’d rather have them stuff cash in their mattress and generally sod off. If they really want to go to a branch then they can damn well use their bus pass to find one of the dwindling number that is open.

It was a surprise to find that if I wanted to go to a branch I would have to travel to Bristol or Bath. The reason I wanted to go there was to switch my Barclaycard to a travel card, Moneysaving Expert lists several. I already have a perfectly good travel debit card in the form of Starling but I want a travel credit card, where I don’t get rushed for spending abroad, and Barclaycard Reward seems the way to go here. There are some things like car hire that you can only do with a credit card it seems, and 1+1 resilience is always a good thing in case some ne’er do-well pickpockets your card. That is, of course, if you split up your cards first 😉

I’ve had that card for over 10 years, but they don’t get fat on it. Two reasons, one is that I pay my cards in full as they fall due, but secondly I don’t use it that much. In theory you can switch cards using the app, but that didn’t work for me. There is some weirdness with that account in that I opened it more than twenty years ago with my staff pass card from The Firm when Barclays opened a branch on site, so it’s never gone through all the know your customer bollocks. Perhaps computer says no because they’ve decided I am a deadbeat. Since I couldn’t open that card as an existing customer I decided I’d close that Barclaycard and try as a new customer, though I retain my Barclays account for resilience against a bank deciding I am Nigel Farage and freezing an account for reasons they refuse to declare until they are good and ready. It’s never happened to me or anyone I personally know but MSE banking forums are full of people spitting bricks about frozen accounts, though in some cases I can see why their accounts were frozen.

I travelled to Wells to use a Barclays Local, which is a curious pop-up shop inside the Town Hall. Seemed a rum deal all round. There was a dispiriting waiting room full of posters of how to claim various benefits, recognise coercive behaviour and get help for mental health problems – it is a time-shared facility with other council biz. It was all a reminder of the endemic dysfunction across a wide swathe of British society, as working gets enshittified.

This is what secular decline looks like. Thirty years ago The Firm still employed their cleaners directly and they had a DB pension, fifty years ago my Dad worked as a maintenance fitter and he got a DB pension that also served my Mum until her death 10 years after he died. Nowadays all that sort of thing is outsourced to faceless service companies that hire such workers on zero-hours contracts, and the results show up in the need for these depressing services, themselves run on a shoestring so they can patch up but not fix. Continue reading “A visit to a non-bank branch of Barclays and Ryanair blues”

Dalio strikes again on AI and US tech

I’m starting to feel that Ray Dalio, he of Bridgewater Associates, is onto a good thing. We heard his prognostications of tech valuations, now Bridgewater’s pushing back on the tale of woe that is presaged by DeepSeek gaining an edge over Yankee ingenuity, saying the big picture just got better, well, if you think more AI is better. Let’s deconstruct the AI news with a summary of what’s happened:

World + Dog thinks AI is great. Mo ‘betta
Americans start building data centers powered by nukes
Chinese come up with a cheaper AI thingy, DeepSeek
Americans throw their hands up in the air and have a fit of the vapours?

Surely if some AI is good then faster better cheaper is even better? Okay the Americans have taken a hit to their egos but all that nuclear powere big iron they are building to do X AI instances can not do 2X or 10X if they run this.We might presume that the Chinese gov possibly has a faster and better or totally different secret version 😉

Bon mots from Liang Wenfeng (DS head)

China’s AI can’t be in the position of following forever. We often say that there is a gap of one or two years between China’s AI and the United States, but the real gap is the difference between originality and imitation

[…]

What attracts the best talent is obviously the solving of the world’s hardest problems. Our goal is still to go for AGI

lifted shamelessly from here

People that believe consciousness is downloadable to an SD card/emergent property of complexity will be cock-a-hoop about AGI because it’s that much nearer, well, in the event that it’s possible at all.

This is capitalism in action, it’s hardly as if much of this AI capacity has been built, surely a jump start on the code is what AI bosters want? Even the unlucky at the moment Nvidia ought to benefit. If mo’ betta is the watchword, where 1000 of the latest chips could run one AI thing, now it will run >> 1. WTF is not to like here, if you are an AI fan?

More widely, if AI is being used to get more out of business processes for less, what’s not to like? Perhaps some of those high SPX valuations might get a fillip from the greater productivity.

Okay, so Yankee pride has taken a ding, but the history of America has been of people spitting on their hands grabbing a hold of things and getting back to work. I was tickled by the head honcho Ross Burley of the Centre for Information Resilience warning that it could be used for

“surveillance, control, and coercion, both domestically and abroad.”

He said, if unchecked, it could “feed disinformation campaigns, erode public trust and entrench authoritarian narratives within our democracies.”

Ross, have you seen who is in the White House lately? All the young ‘uns on TikTok? That fight’s been lost, the bad guys won and the good guys ate their dust. China already pwns them. Until they build a Great Firewall of America to match the other wall, and, er, trump its lack of continuity a fightback ain’t happening.

In the meantime, Americans, get over yourselves and get back to work with the new tools you’ve just got. Faster, Better Cheaper 😉

Us Brits can take succour in the fall of the GBP against the greenback, so yer SPX trackers don’t look particularly sick puppies at this moment.

FIRE-side chat: Better late than never

That Monevator fellow was always a better headline writer than me. Anyway, a ghostly white mustelid form appeared on Monevator. If you don’t follow him, why not? More measured and balanced than I 😉

I was surprised to learn from the comments that a significant number of readers’ careers seem to run into choppy waters in their late 40s and 50s. Perhaps this is sample bias, folk who had the experience put their hands up and say that was me too, while 99.9% of other workers carry on until retirement age, collect their gold watch and sail off into the sunset with no trouble. Worked for my Dad

My Dad’s retirement watch, engraved with thanks for 20 years’ service on the back

who retired at 65 (which was the normal retirement age back in the day).

One of the arguments for retiring early, is of course, that each year that passes at work is a year you’ll never live again. On one morning in the middle of the period I was saving to get out I was

a wage slave that once resented the song of a charm of goldfinches on a June morning because they were free and I wasn’t.

Seriously, you are a long way down the wrong track if you can’t take joy in some King Harrys going about their business. We have feeding flocks of goldfinches on the Somerset Levels, and I try and stop to listen and watch these charms of goldfinches, and acknowledge how far I have come.

It’s not a great recording, too much traffic in the distance and too much handling noise, but the essence of goldfinch gets through. Choose life. Better late than never. Thanks TI and commenters.

US valuations are not in a bubble – perma-bear Dalio

I’ve grizzled about US valuations for some time now, though hypocritically VWRL/HMWO are my largest holding. What do these nominally world trackers contain? Two thirds the US, of which the Mag 7 is the largest part. They’re WINOs – World In Name Only.

It’s not a God-given thing that the US eats the world, there have been long periods historically when the US lagged. But that was then, this is now. As Monevator opined

The US is the only really strong big engine in the world at the moment.

Let’s hope the new captain takes care of the ship, rather than ending in a va a bordo, cazzo situation.

There are reasons to consider that Trump 2.0 will be good for tech. Big Tech has paid handsomely for influence, let’s hope people show up bigly at his inauguration ceremony compared to last time for a warm fuzzy feeling.

The wingnut fightback

There’s an interesting interview with Marc Andreessen (sorry, a podcast). Take it away, Marc Continue reading “US valuations are not in a bubble – perma-bear Dalio”

A look back at 2024

‘Tis the time to reflect, the Winter Solstice has passed, and the Light returns. As usual, it is the evenings drawing out later that beats the sunrise falling later, it only gets lighter in the morning earlier today Jan 4th at my latitude which is roughly that of Stonehenge.

2025 doesn’t look like a barrel of laughs on the macro front. Donald Trump? Again? This time he’s the monkey, the organ grinder is the sociopathic git Elon Musk. He’s the one with the money. Continue reading “A look back at 2024”

Against Workism – a defence of Early Retirement

In the years following the Global Financial Crash, the FI/RE space was more diverse than it is now, you had a fair few ordinary rubes. Nowadays it’s more high flyers, earning six figures. It’s probably fair to say that you have to be good at something to earn six figures, even if it’s playing the game or bullshitting on all cylinders.

I never earned that much, and was more of a company man than the go-getters who are making the running now. But I do wonder if there’s a narrowing of focus on work as the be all and end-all of life. Just how much has changed struck me when I read Monevator’s ‘A better alternative to the myth of early retirement‘. It’s by an author pimping their book for Christmas. It’s obviously going to pull the black tip of my tail (see header pic), telling me the last 12 years of my life is a myth, but it appears I wasn’t the only one.

Save your pennies for something else, what I read was narrow and IMO fatuous – opening with riffing off the characterisation of lottery winners which is not a common route to early retirement. Why’s that? There aren’t many Lottery winners – you have to burn the dreams of millions to make the business model work. Good causes are walk-on part – about the same goes to charity as goes to the company, it appears¹.

To paraphrase the extract, saving enough for early retirement is such a tough gig, you should make peace with working – it’s the do what you love, love what you do gaslighting of yesteryear. All very rah-rah get a head, a manifesto for become King Rat. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to be him there’s much good stuff in Rob Dix’s piece, particularly if you know you want to be King Rat in your 20s. My 20s and 30s had much less focus, and more beer and stupid shit and chasing the mating game in them, to the extent that I felt myself the object of the barbed

the skills you’ll learn from trying will make you more valuable in your career and so you’ll position yourself for a boost in pay compared to your less enterprising colleagues anyway.

I worked to live, not lived to work, I was that less enterprising pedestrian plodder Dix despised. Who has the last laugh², y’know, life’s not all about effing work! It reminded me of that bit in Trainspotting about choosing washing machines and compact disc players (remember them?). Dix’s exhortations to be the best work unit you could be and work your way up the value chain all the way to passive income from your works made me gag, because I am not so old that I can’t remember my childhood self dreaming of following my interests where they would take me, rather than being the best work unit I could be. Also: his Level 3 when time does not equal money sort of passive income is a chimera that doesn’t stick, of which more later.

Now that I’ve paid my dues through 30 years of working I don’t feel the need to be a productive work unit. I want to have fun, FFS. I also seem to have a deficit in the meaning/make contribution department, learning new shit is rewarding in itself, it doesn’t need to do anything. Maybe that’s the non-team player thing, others perhaps need to fit into the machine, and that’s great. Obviously with such an execrable lack of drive I will not rise to the heady heights, but there’s a flipside. I don’t need to work to be happy, and this seems to be a minority position.

Fifteen years ago there was a much higher focus on frugality as a way of getting your way ahead, inspired by Jacob early retirement extreme, who was really quite extreme. He had the purity of purpose that comes with being young³, but was also a sharp wit and an iconoclast. It was his deconstruction of the MBTI types observed in the personal finance community that warmed me up to the fact that I was a serious oddball, as were a lot of them.

They had a more catholic view of what living well was about. Often it was the nuts and bolts of self-sufficiency and doing more with less, not quite Dolly Freed’s Possum Living because it was the late 2000s not the 1970s. As you get older some of the attraction of self-sufficiency palls, it’s bloody hard work. I don’t chop my own kindling anymore, I pay a farmer’s young lad to do it. Though I will look down my mustelid snout at the lack of ambition of my younger self on the log store, I constructed a man’s version of that rather than the boy’s version in that post, but I have more realestate.

The post-GFCers could dream of FI/RE through frugality because the stock market had had the shit kicked out of it in the GFC, but work was less enshittified then, although the direction of travel was clear. Although globalisation was rapidly hollowing out the middle class in the developed world it was a lot less advanced than now. A lot of Donald Trump (and let’s admit it, our next Dear Leader Farage’s) appeal to people is because the wishes of the working and lower middle classes have been roundly ignored in the interests of economic efficiency. Precisely why they choose populist aristocrats escapes me, but there’s n’owt as queer as folk. ‘Anything but this’ is a dangerous request to make of the genie in the bottle.

I don’t doubt the economic efficiency, but that did eliminate an awful lot of middling jobs that paid well enough to have a decent life. Things are more polarised now, there’s an awful lot of casualised minimum wage work, then a chasm, and a modest amount of very well paid work, the sort of thing Dix was exhorting all you layabouts to dedicate yourselves to getting into. The dirty little secret, however, is that grit will only take you so far. Despite the so-called Flynn effect, I see no evidence of a secular upswing in smarts. This doesn’t have to be academic or intellectual. As I opened with, you have to be good at something. Football will do just fine. That’s a bastard if the smarts requirement of well paying work is gradually lifting⁴. I was bright enough to work in industrial research, I am nowhere near bright enough⁵ to dirty Google’s London foyer.

Half the kids from my grammar school in the 1970s left school at 16. They started work in small firms – fixing cars, building work, the light engineering that still existed in London at the time. They earned a damn sight more than I was going to do for the next five years (sixth form and university) and had the last laugh when I exited Imperial College in Thatcher’s first deep recession and spent six months on the dole. Well done me, eh?

I don’t think you’re even allowed to leave school at 16 these days. The kids of these kids will have been Millennials, and that career track just won’t have been open to them. I don’t think the Great Wen has grunts making anything on a production line inside of Zone 3 which is where that school was.

the Dix factor

Rob Dix is pimping his book round the PF circuit, and fair enough, he placed his thesis out there. I tried to keep it tidy and play the ball not the man in my riposte. Always disturbs me when I come across an effective work unit that retires early and finds that he’s been working so long that the hinterland has dried up into a parched desert for a lack of rainfall.

don’t let your hinterland get like this, with or without perambulating skull

The bottom line is that if after twenty-five or thirty years of work you get to the point where the only thing you can think of doing with your rapidly dwindling time on Earth is work, shouldn’t you perhaps consider oiling the stuck hatch, hit it with a hammer, and you know, pop your head up over the parapet, take the blinkers off and ask ‘Is there more to life than what I’ve been doing these last three decades’? Continue reading “Against Workism – a defence of Early Retirement”

VWRL salutes the new King

The Donald’s owned the libs properly this time, no need for legal chicanery or guys with pointy horns on their hats. Looks like the SPX has bought into the rally, America will be made Great Again. Or is it that the GBP and the Yurpeans have been Made Less again. It’s hard to tell.

VWRL.L touches the peak of its MAGA cap and offers President-elect Trump a sharp Yes, Sir salute of two and a bit percent. I did check GBPUSD and it wasn’t a horrific change to explain this, perhaps half, maybe off .6 of a cent start to finish of this chart, which is less than the VWRL change. So it implies VWRL saluted its future King.

I switched some of my HMWO in the GIA for VWRL in the ISA, using money liberated in the ISA by selling LGEN and ORIT. Because dividend taxation is lower now (for basic rate taxpayers) than capital gains, it makes sense to shunt higher dividend payers out into the GIA, higher dividends are usually at the cost of capital gain. This is contrary to the received wisdom up to now, which was to keep income in the ISA.

The Gold conundrum

I also bought a little gold in the ISA, to try to shift towards the Permanent Portfolio allocation, gold is my weakest part despite its recent rally. Greedy bastard that I am I also added to VUSA, though I don’t believe in that. Experience has show that you should always buy something you hate as well as something you want, because sometimes you are just plain wrong 😉

I haven’t yet concluded where to go with gold. I could buy sovereigns and take this with storage, which adds some cost of carry to a non-productive asset. Something weird is happening with the gold price, it could be more players wanting a dedollarised currency independent of Western sanctions, or it just could be weirdness and the madness of crowds.The advantage of sovereigns is they are CGT free, since CGT adds a serious cost of carry to the gold price offsetting inflation, I could pay that cost of carry to storage instead.

The trouble with capital gains in general, and gold in my specific case¹, is that crystallising a capital gain also pushes your income closer to higher tax thresholds. So although it’s commonly said that CGT is an elective tax, you choose the time of paying, if you accumulate a load of capital gain you are also accumulating a load of hazard relative to higher rate tax. In practice it makes sense to keep an eye on this and to pay the CGT every so often, to stay within this secondary constraint. This constraint will narrow for me at the time I draw the state pension, so it is worth lining things up so I realise capital gains using as much of the BR tax space as I find I have left after dividends and savings income.

Trump’s America First will probably be good for the SPX, and perhaps tech in particular, they paid good money to get him onside. I’ve only sold half my HMWO in the GIA, I need to make more space in the ISA. Perhaps time to let go of my old HYP shares and move them to the GIA, and perhaps time to actually use the income from the HYP that I have saved all these years.

In terms of spending more, I am ahead of dearieme’s enlightened response to the budget although I would suggest eating out in the week rather than the weekend 😉

realised GIA dividends. Header pic is the fine sea view from the Pea Green Boat in Sidmouth

I can’t say I’m thrilled about increasing exposure to the overvalued US, I do hope for a Trump/Santa rally in the ISA. At some time this will all come crashing down, preferably after I have worked out how to get more of the the gold away from CGT ;). Although I’ve made several bad calls, all of them in connection with gold directly or indirectly, they will only cost me about 3k in extra CGT. They disappear into the noise compared to the good call in respect of gold, which was buying it, first as a hedge to what I miscalled as the unlikely risk of Brexit, and then adding to it. Difficult to say whether ejecting the gold from the ISA was a bad move, the sheltered capital gain I passed up in gold was not entirely made up in the sheltered gain of VWRL but it reduced the differential a lot. Continue reading “VWRL salutes the new King”

ermine takes direct hit, worth it to see long standing iniquities hit too ;)

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail

Gore Vidal

I made a bad call in deciding to ignore the Budget chatter. All sorts of folk were getting worked up about it. Rather than listen to it go out today I spent the time looking at the stones in the header pic -Stanton Drew.

I did wonder if I should have listened to the budget at one time. Those black and white cows decided to get up and charge round the field so I had my back to a stone and needed to stand my ground with a couple of tons of beef heading my way. I observed a couple of pizzles in the herd. But they left me be, though I fancy I felt the ground shake 😉

Ah yes, Budget. Bad call. I get to pay £6k on 30k worth of capital gains on gold rather than 3k. Ho hum.

I do hope the personal allowance gets lifted later on as promised, though I suspect that’ll fall by the wayside. On the upside, some long-standing inquities are finally addressed.

agricultural relief

Many years ago, before I was a nipper, the reforming post-war Labour governments taxed the aristocracy trying to pass on their dynastic wealth given ’em by William the Conk. This was called estate duty (inheritance tax to you and me) . It’s why the National Trust has all those grand buildings. It was all part of the deal after the carnage of the First World war when the proles were slaughtered in the trenches, in fairness the aristocracy lost men too, but all of a sudden when Adam delved and Eve span took on an existential poignance with a land fit for heroes, we get to think about that on November the 11th. Then we did it all again twenty years later and Britain was boracic lint, and many of those stately piles had been requisitioned for the military.

The aristocracy wittered, and bleated thusly: estate tax our stately homes to rebuild after the war OK, but we are yeoman farmers, so don’t tax agricultural land, lest it stop being passed from yeoman farmer to son. Labour presumably knew nothing about farming, so they fell for it. There aren’t any yeoman farmers in Britain, there weren’t then and there aren’t now, because much rural land ownership is in aristocratic dynasties ever since 1066, it’s not like the north forty in the USA¹. Agricultural relief has led to massive consolidation in land ownership, as have other adverse changes in farming practice.

It’s all bollocks. What happens is the aristocracy holds title to the land, claims ag relief to evade inheritance tax and pass the capital on to their scions free of estate duty, cuz agricultural, innit. These scions have zero interest in farming, agricultural land is merely a tax wheeze. They put it out to contract farmers. They only need preserve the capital, so these toffs squeeze the bejesus out of these contract farmers to rape the land, drench it in chemicals and spray noxious shit that drifts on the wind, and no, I’m not talking about good honest muck. This gets the aristocracy some return on capital, to the detriment of the environment, flooding of towns and cities as as much land is in production as possible.

One result is that the mineral content of food grown in the UK has dropped since 1940² along with the general issues of ruoff, pollution and algal blooms, but hey, Tarquin’s inheritance is safe. Now only up to £1M, which is about the same amount that Shanice in sarf London can inherit from her diligent cleaner parents in Lewisham, who bought their council house³. Don’t see why farming pays IHT at 20% rather than 40% but it’s a step in the right direction.

In upland areas you get shooting estates, which I would eliminate for their bad attitude to mustelids, but they are also an environmental disgrace. Not content with persecuting mustelids, they illegally shoot some of our majestic birds of prey. So yeah, good start on aristocratic dynastic wealth, much work to be done.Expensive finance professionals will be drawing up trusts, shell companies, blind trusts to end-run this, so if we can have a law that no non-human entity can hold land in Britain without traceability to a responsible human as a matter of public record that might be a good start 😉 Go into any mayor’s office in France and you can inspect the cadastral records to know who owns what. Here in the UK we have the abomination of unregistered land.

Pensions as IHT scam stopped

On the subject of IHT apparently unused pensions will become part of the estate for IHT, removing a popular IHT-dodging scam which was an unintended consequence of Osborne’s pension reforms in 2016. I’m getting decent value for my £3k extra tax in seeing these guys taken out. Your pension, like your farm, was never designed to be an IHT evasion scheme.

I don’t personally give a toss about VAT on private/public schools – well, I’d raze the latter to the ground⁴ for being a major source of entitled pollution of the body politic, see last government for a worked example and the entitled incompetent git formerly known as Bozza for PM for a specific case. Neither sort should be charities, they are businesses providing a service in terms of Veblen goods, just like LVMH.

Curiously that blasted triple lock on pensions is retained, a link to inflation and to earnings is fair enough, but it’s time to switch off the escalator. Yes in principle I do benefit from it in future, but IMO it’s unsustainable and it’s also unfair. It’s done its job in lifting the state pension from a pittance and it’s time for the 2.5% part of the triple lock to retire.

Shifting things about – tax mitigation

I had expected dividend payments to be taxed like income, what with all this horny handed workers set against capitalist running dogs, but it was not to be, this time, leastways. While we’re at it it was a relief that the ISA allowance is retained. There is a cogent argument that only rich bastards can fill their ISAs – for perspective it’s nearly two thirds of the average UK net household income.

So it’s time to move things around between the ISA and the GIA. I have some things in the ISA for income, like some L&G shares and some renewables ITs. These do pay income, but capital gain, not so much. It would be rational to sell them to rebuy them into the GIA and sell my GIA world trackers, and perhaps some of the gold and rebuy in the ISA with the proceeds of the stuff I kicked out of it. Moving the gold out of the ISA was in hindsight a bad call too, but I’d rather have the gain and pay the tax than not have the gain. I have rolled forward CGT losses of 10k, they have just become twice as valuable today 😉

Okay. I get to pay more tax. Some people who expected to avoid IHT through various wheezes get to pay tax too, which is a good thing IMO. A million sods IHT-free should be good enough for anybody. If your kids need more than that to establish themselves in life then they’re not doing something right IMO. BTW given the human life cycle they probably need it before you are dead, so that’s a top fully legit way of giving any amount to your spawn IHT-free. Be no King Tut and give it away while you’re still alive, at least seven years before you kick the bucket.

If we’re really lucky some of that tax will make some things in Britain work less badly. I’ve seen rather a lot of the NHS this year, as a visitor, not a patient. In my non-expert opinion it’s on life support itself. In this expert’s opinion it’s in a critical condition, go figure.

You walk down the aisles in Tesco and you see all the fizzy drinks and energy drinks, and you can see that this fire is being stoked by capitalism. Nobody who is over a normal BMI need go within 100 yards of energy drinks. The NHS can’t beat that, that sort of shit needs to be regulated out of existence. It’s not the only cause of endemic sickness, but it would be a start.

Schools seem to be in a piss-poor shape too. State of the nation, SNAFU, that’s what 14 years of Tory rule do for you. I don’t see the prognosis as a resurgence, more managed decline. Britain is a poor society with a few rich people in it as this FT wag once said.

This is what decline looks like. If we must fall, let the fall be slow…

The USA doesn’t have yeoman farmers any more, the greater capital intensity of farming, debt and ag subsidies have seen to that, but yeoman farmers are just about in living memory in some parts of the States, in a way they just aren’t here. ↩
The mineral depletion of foods available to us as a nation (1940-2002)–a review of the 6th Edition of McCance and Widdowson, D. Thomas ↩
Which is a different sort of iniquity, but I’ll let that go for now. ↩
I have only recently discovered the difference between public schools and private schools. Both charge fees, but the former are the top tier, buying your child privilege, influence and rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers who will rule the rest of us in future. Private schools are also-rans, mainly aimed at people who think their rugrats too special to be educated with the 93% of prole oiks like former mustelids. ↩

financial independence in a world of hustle

Everybody’s talking about the forthcoming budget, but meh. Let’s talk about something else – the noise.

I am so old that I remember the beginning of the public internet, in particular the early Web. It was a shockingly amateur festival of the joy people found in being able to publish anything reachable anywhere ¹. Because it was technically a bit difficult, there was an explosion of geekery. It is difficult to believe it now, but the early internet and by extension the early Web had a decidedly anti-commercial bias. Even after Eternal September, the amateurish nature of Geocities and the fugly design was part of its handcrafted charm. It took a while for people to adapt to any new medium. Nowadays there are fewer websites offensive to good taste/visual design, though there are many more of them. But the price was high – the blandness of the ‘burbs, affecting the written word. Listicles, headlines posed as a question (the answer is always No, to save you the trouble). Humans are suckers for novelty and the slightly unexpected, and this plays to that itch. There’s an explosion of prettified noise drowning out the signal. This is not library of human knowledge, it is ‘content’ clamouring for attention, hoping to serve drive-by ads or know something useful about you that can be sold.

endless content clamouring for attention

In a previous life I worked for the BBC as a studio engineer at Television Centre in the mid 1980s. I heard lots of people talk about programmes and often mithering about the ‘talent‘ which was capricious and highly strung, requiring suitable horse whisperers to talk ’em down off a hissy fit. But nowhere in my three year career there did I hear a soul talk about the content they were making. Not all of it was art, there was plenty of pablum, for my sins I am responsible for some of the sounds on 1980s era Blankety Blank, created by a youthful mustelid mucking around on a BBC micro².

Somewhere along the line, what used to be known as music, or art, or movies, or even plain old TV programs, all became ‘content’ – to the extent that content producer is a catch-all role. I guess I fall under that broad brush, though there is one specific difference with most content producers. I write this to learn in public, rather than to earn anything. I am of independent means.

Financial independence is a state of mind – arriving with a whisper, not a bang

It takes a surprisingly long time in the FI journey to come to the realisation. Some of it is good old tempus fugit – I am 12 years older than when I left work. That’s 12 years of living my capital doesn’t have to carry.

Talking of capital, I never saw compound interest until very late in the day – I am now at risk of ending up in the higher rate tax bracket unless a good old stock market crash bends my GIA. It’s strange to stick a mustelid snout up in a world where everybody seems to be on a side hustle and just look and say No, not doing that. I don’t hustle, I don’t like hustle. I didn’t mind doing a straight day’s work for a straight day’s pay but hustle felt plastic and nasty. Many years ago after leaving work I was at some dreadful networking event. I still remember seeing people’s dead eyes looking at me thinking what could I do for them, an alienating experience for an introvert.

Stoats. Proudly independent of hustle since, oh probably 2022

Passive income is not to be had online

Passive income was a big trope in the post GFC FI/RE space. There were all sorts of dreams of doing something once that would bring in a trickle, add enough of those up and you can escape the Man for ever. Towards the end of my career, I did try content production – I wrote some cruft for a content mill that got its ass busted by the Google Panda algorithm update. It was an early lesson in the limitations of so-called passive income³. I got about a grand and a half out of the enterprise.

How d’ya get passive income out of content on t’internet? You take the £1500 that you ‘earned’ as ‘passive income’ and invest it in stocks, particularly after a humdinger of a crash a.k.a. the GFC. Little people just don’t get passive income from the internet on a useful scale, it changes too fast and the platforms have it away from you. Each and every sure fire passive income source either turned out to be disguised Work requiring endless addition, or it was ephemeral – passive for a while until overtaken by something. I’m not saying you can’t earn very well off t’internet, just that the dream of passive income was a chimera. Continue reading “financial independence in a world of hustle”

wait but what – welcome to our new Vanguard app – FAIL

Vanguard has gotten down wiv da yoof¹ and is touting the benefits of its new app. A mustelid scratches hits head and thinks WTF? Why on earth would I have any truck with that?

I am a recalcitrant git and don’t tote a fondleslab when going about my daily life. This saves me from many problems, though it does introduce others. I can just about see the point of having your credit card on your phone, particularly is this is your main window to the world, though I use plastic cards like it’s still the Eighties. There was an O2 outage many years ago and I was listening on the car radio to many tales of woe of people not being able to pay for their stuff in shops etc. It was news to me that you could put a card on a phone and pay with it, but it struck me as an example of newer does not equal better. Single points of failure may be convenient, but when they fail, well, who you gonna call, eh? At least have a dual SIM phone on different operators ² if you are going to do that.

Moronically I added the app for banking to my phone, because I was cheap enough to take the minor bung if I used it every month. And they made the desktop method of logging in so goddamned tiresome that the app was preferable. I also have the Starling app, because if you use Starling you use the app. I have never actually needed it on the phone, like, outside the house, however, the plastic card is just fine.

Then I read the tale of this Guardianista and thought to myself

Self, that was an epic fail. Anything financial and worth more than £5k to a thieving scrote has no business on your phone

You don’t need your Vanguard account on your phone. You shouldn’t be diddling with it every day FFS, it would be better if it was only by post 😉

So, er, no, Vanguard:

Our app offers easy access to our clients who value low-cost, long-term investing made simple.

low cost and long term doesn’t belong in the same sentence as easy-access. Somewhere a long time ago I recall Monevator opining that a boring platform will make you richer.

Investing apps. Bad for your wealth. You are just a retail schmoe, you don’t need to have your finger on the pulse. Just Keep Calm and Buy VWRL. Then if some scumbag half-inches your phone that’s one less thing to worry about, huh?

My ancient phone is so old the battery holds less and less power, so I probably have to change it. I will use this as an opportunity to not add any financial apps to any replacement and retire the old one. You just don’t need to diddle with your investments at a whim. FAIL, Vanguard.

OK, anybody under 55 but nobody gets down with the gramps do they;) ↩
I still haven’t put a card on a phone so I don’t know if the card is tied to one of the numbers. Validating anything dearer than a Mars bar using a phone number is the height of moronic insecurity because of the desperate ease with which scumbags can get your phone number, common enough to have its own WP page. How do banks and HMRC commonly validate people’s identity? You guessed… ↩