Of all the FIRE variants, the one most likely to actually work for ordinary UK earners is also the least talked about. Full FIRE (saving aggressively until you can stop working entirely) requires very high savings rates that most people genuinely can’t sustain over a decade or more. The maths
When someone is considering ethical investing for the first time, the question they ask first (or worry about silently) is almost always the same: do ethical funds underperform? It’s a fair question, and one the ethical investing industry has historically been bad at answering directly. The marketing tends toward “you
There’s an investing concept that gets discussed often but explained badly. The financial industry treats it as a sophisticated technique requiring careful judgment and ideally professional help. The honest truth is that rebalancing your portfolio is one of the simpler maintenance jobs in long-term investing, and most ordinary investors either
If you’ve been investing for a while and you’ve started bumping up against the limits of your annual ISA allowance, the question of where to put the next pound of investment money becomes genuinely interesting. The default UK answer is the Stocks and Shares ISA, with its tax-free growth and
If you’re earning enough to pay higher-rate or additional-rate tax in the UK, the rules around pension contributions get more interesting and more rewarding than they are for basic-rate taxpayers. The tax relief is generous, the allowances are substantial, and used properly the system is one of the best deals
Most of what goes wrong in private investing isn’t dramatic. It’s not a market crash, a fund collapse, or a once-in-a-generation event. It’s a handful of avoidable habits, repeated over decades, that quietly cost ordinary investors a substantial amount of money compared to what they could have had. The reassuring
If you’ve spent any time looking into FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), you’ll have come across a deceptively simple equation. Multiply your annual spending by 25, the formula says, and that’s the size of investment portfolio you need to retire. £30,000 a year of spending becomes a target of £750,000.
There’s a financial movement that began on the internet in the late 2000s, gathered serious momentum in the 2010s, and now has a sizeable UK following. It goes by the acronym FIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early. The basic idea is that by saving and investing aggressively during your working years,
If you’ve decided you want to invest in line with your values, the next question is the one that most articles on ethical investing skip: where do you actually put the money? Ethical investing in a UK ISA is more practical than it was even five years ago, but the
If you’ve ever tried to invest in line with your values, you’ll have noticed something frustrating. The financial industry uses about a dozen different labels for what looks, on the face of it, like the same thing. Ethical funds. ESG funds. SRI funds. Sustainable funds. Impact funds. Responsible investing. Green
If you’ve ever tried to work out how much money you need to retire, you’ve probably bumped into a strangely tidy number: 25 times your annual expenses. Save up that much, the argument goes, and you can spend roughly 4% of it each year for the rest of your life
There’s a strange psychological barrier between knowing your investment platform is too expensive and actually doing something about it. People will read article after article comparing fees, work out that they’re paying hundreds or thousands of pounds a year more than they need to, and then quietly do nothing about
Free chapter
Sign up and get the first chapter of Simple Investing for Absolute Beginners — free. No
spam, no sales pressure. Just a chapter of the book.
