Despite generally being a grumpy and sceptical so-and-so, I couldn’t help having my heart slightly warmed by a story I read this week. If you have a moral objection to the Daily Mail, don’t click this link and I’ll summarise instead. In short, a young couple from the UK had a baby. They’d saved up, so during the mother’s maternity leave they could go backpacking – with the baby – around Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Good for them, right? Nope, apparently not! Here’s a selection of some of the…

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If we take “financial independence” to mean “being able to do whatever you want without money being a concern”, then the equation is very simple: You’re financially independent as soon as your monthly passive income from assets exceeds the monthly cost of doing whatever you want. This is the essential logic of the early retirement movement: save like crazy to buy assets, then quit once the expected return of those assets gives you enough to live on. It means the money you need to live keeps automatically rolling in, whether…

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Over the last year, I’ve started reading a lot of “early retirement” blogs: a category that has an oversupply issue in common with digital nomad blogs, but also a common desire to look at the normal way of doing things and say “sod that for a lark”. The gist of the standard early retirement method is this: instead of saving 10% of what you earn, aim for 50% or more. Invest it in the stock market, and in 10–15 years you’ll have accumulated enough that you can live off the…

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For some reason, I have an unhealthy fixation with the passing of time. If I had to put a coin in a jar every time I said “I can’t believe it’s September already” or “How can it be three o’clock?”… well, we’d be carrying around a really heavy jar which would pay havoc with our baggage allowance. I don’t know where this fixation comes from – perhaps because I’m so busy seizing every moment by learning new keyboard shortcuts that I never want it to end. But in any case,…

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