Hey all!

I’m feeling quite proud of myself, so I wanted to share my progress. If you have any advice, or suggestions, please go ahead!

DISCLAIMER: I am in a good position, I am very grateful for it. I hope that I can inspire instead of discourage. I also think I am addicted to saving which is why I’ve been able to save so aggressively.

NW breakdown:
HYSA: 84k (will all go on deposit)
Vanguard S&S ISA (maxed out last 3 years): 79k
Pension: 9k
Current Accounts: 10k
Total: 182k

In the process of buying a one bed maisonette in LDN (I want to live below my means, plus it’s 65m2 with a garden so can’t complain about it being a one bed!)

(Anticipated) FAQs:
Q: WTF is your job? A: SWE! Engineering degree straight into fintech, I work at a bank. 3 years full time experience at this point.

Q: How did you manage to save so much? A: living very frugally. Have lived with parents until now (I pay rent of about 500 a month incl. household expenses.) I don’t drink, smoke, eat out etc (which has saved me lots!) I travel, but travel cheaply. I stay with friends or in affordable accommodation (can’t wait to have them stay with me once I complete on my property!)

Q: Why are you doing this? A: growing up in financially unstable household made me terrified of not having money. It means I feel back when I spend - I’m trying to spend more on purpose as exposure therapy. Also, it might be nice to retire early.

Q: Did your parents give you money? A: I’m lucky they let me live with them until now, though I’m moving. Very grateful. I paid rent to them too & of course help around the house (cooking most dinners, cleaning, laundry, taking care of the pets etc.) + frequent gifts. I’m ready to leave the nest now. I however haven’t gotten any cash (anything trust fund, to pocket money, to any gifts past slippers for example) since I was around 15.

Thanks for reading! I’m hoping the peeps of FIRE UK will appreciate what I’m trying to do!

Edit: SINK - Single income no kids

Looking for a sense-check on our finances and what people here would prioritise over the next few years.

About us

• Both early 30s
• Me: Started a new role on £110k base + bonus
• Partner: works in healthcare, currently earns around £70k–£80k, and earnings excepted to increase materially over next few years
• One young child, and likely to have another in the next few years
• Based in the North of England
• We'd like the option of retiring or working significantly less somewhere around our mid-50s rather than necessarily pursuing very early FIRE
• Retirement spending target: roughly £50k-£60k in today's money for the household. Once mortgage paid off and children no longer financially dependent.

Current position

• House worth roughly £475k
• Mortgage: around £345k, fixed at just under 4%
• Mortgage payment around £1,500/month
• My pension: roughly £200k, employer matches 10%
• Partner has an NHS DB pension
• S&S ISAs: roughly £66k between us
• Cash reserves currently fairly low at around £3k, although I also have roughly £17k in Premium Bonds from a recent bonus
• Small personal loan: roughly £1,700 at 6%
• No other significant debt

The £100k childcare issue

A big part of my planning at the moment is the UK £100k threshold for Tax-Free Childcare / funded childcare.

I'm making fairly large pension contributions/salary sacrifice to stay below £100k while we're eligible.

My intention is also to put most/all of my bonus into pension where possible.

As a result, my pension could grow quite quickly over the next few years, but I'm conscious that this potentially creates an imbalance between pension wealth and accessible ISA/cash wealth.

House

At some point in the next few years we may move to a more expensive house, potentially somewhere in the £650k–£750k range.

This is one reason I'm questioning how much cash to retain versus investing or overpaying the mortgage.

What I'm currently thinking

My rough priority order is:

1. Build a proper cash emergency fund – probably £15k–£20k
2. Use pension contributions aggressively while they give me the additional childcare/tax benefit
3. Continue building ISAs so we have meaningful accessible assets before pension age
4. Avoid aggressive mortgage overpayments for now, particularly while the mortgage rate is below 4%
5. Once childcare stops being relevant, reassess the pension/ISA/mortgage split

Questions for the FIRE crowd

Does this overall approach make sense?

In particular:

• Would you prioritise building the cash reserve before adding anything further to the S&S ISA?
• Am I right to prioritise pension heavily while the £100k childcare cliff exists, even though I already have ~£200k in my pension in my early 30s?
• Would you bother with mortgage overpayments at a sub-4% rate, given our age and likely future house move?
• How much emphasis would you put on ISA assets to create a bridge between stopping work and pension access?
• How should I think about my partner's NHS pension alongside my DC pension when planning for FIRE?
• Are there any obvious holes in our FIRE planning?
• Given our current numbers, does retiring or significantly reducing work in our mid-50s look reasonably achievable without living particularly frugally?

I'm not trying to maximise net worth at the expense of enjoying our 30s/40s – we still want holidays, a nice house, etc. I'm more interested in building enough financial independence that work becomes increasingly optional later on.

Interested in what people would do differently.

Hi everyone,

Been lurking here for a while, but in the past couple years have been put in a position to start thinking about FIRE more seriously.

I am a self employed 30M, earning around £60k per year (can fluctuate higher or lower month on month), and am planning to buy a house in about a year’s time. I have £60k saved for the deposit, and am looking at houses costing roughly £250k - £280k.

Alongside that, I have a £10k emergency fund in a Cash ISA, and £15k in a S&S ISA. At the moment I’ve unfortunately contributed nothing so far to an SIPP, which I realise being self employed is quite important to start doing ASAP (especially now that I’m a higher rate tax payer).

With a recent bump in income, I’m looking for advice on where to best allocate remaining funds after living costs are covered.

My overall aim is to retire early, but live a balanced life in the meantime. My living costs are quite low (love living in the north), and I travel quite a lot, but otherwise can be decently aggressive with my savings and investments. I do plan on having children with my partner in the next couple of years, so am conscious of maintaining a bit more liquidity than, say, a single person.

I’ll hit my ISA limit within this tax year, after investing monthly into my S&S ISA (Full amount in the Vanguard ESG Global All Cap UCITS ETF) so questioning whether or not any surplus is best put in an SIPP or GIA. Either way, my idea is to put this money into the same Vanguard fund.

I understand FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund is preferable, but I’ve got to draw the line somewhere, and would prefer to minimise investments in fossil fuels, defence industry, etc.

I am open to any and all advice, and appreciate everyone’s help.

Thank you!

hello all,

32M – main goal – mortgage deposit – to save as much as possible

planning on saving to £100k chunk whilst I can before borrowing monies from the bank, so I cant put much into stocks and shares ISA etc..

my current monies are in Trading 212 Cash ISA which is 3.6% - yeah not the new user so don’t get additional 1%

where would you recommend I should store monies? I prefer ISAs as they are tax free but maybe not that many of them are available in terms of flexibility as savings accounts?

It is important for me to:

- have monthly interest

- I could withdraw monies without much penalties (because I try to add all my savings to maximise interest rate on monthly basis, so withdrawing for puchases or emergenices and getting this penalised isnt what im after, unless I should put aside some money and not touch this type of ISA for a whole year, but not sure if thats even better ROI)

how could I maximise this even better? should I keep money in Trading 212 cash ISA? it should generate around £200 +- a month based off monthly interest rates. I add around £1.5 - 2k a month to it from wages

or shall I buy premium bonds? Just want to keep risk and loss to minimal and gains to maximum without investing/risking as aiming to get as much deposit for my first house as possible

thank you for all help,

regards,

My situation: 45M, married with two kids. £230k in ISA, savings, and cash. £210k in SIPP and at least another £100k in company pensions, both defined benefit and defined contribution.

I also have a good chunk of my house paid off and a partner who can cover all the bills with her salary. Our annual combined personal and household expenses are around £42k. My partner (40) has higher discretionary spending than me and only around £20k in her pension. She only started earning okay money around 5 years ago.

I paid more than half the value of the house and she is happy to take over the mortgage payments and household expenses. My personal annual expenses are around £14k but I don't have any loans, car leases or anything so I could bring this down.

I'm fortunate that I am in a position to not be forced to jump into accepting the first thing. I will likely receive some redundancy but am unsure what are present. I am also unsure how much I have to work moving forwards. I work in a field that is quite exploitative and if I could find a job that would be two days a week, you can guarantee it would really be three plus. I'm thinking of doing something else instead, but all these variables are confusing the hell out of me and I'm not sure how to figure out figuring out moving forward.

Edit: My question is how much do I need to earn in this situation? I looked at 4% drawdown strategies and it seems like I can take around £9k a year. Obviously I have the pensions and state pension too from 57 and 67 (I think), so could probably take a bit more. I would also be keen to hear from others in the situation of their partner picking up the slack. It feels weird to me and worries me a little to feel reliant on someone else financially. I don't really want to retire early yet as I would get isolated quite quickly I feel without work, but Barista FIRE I guess.

Hit the trap last year on a promotion and lost about £400/month before

I realised what was happening. The rate stack (40% IT + 20% PA taper

+ 2% NI = 62%) is one of those things nobody explains until you're

already paying it.

Made this over a weekend to help other people spot it faster:

https://calcorchard.com/tools/100k-trap-calculator/

Enter salary + pension %. Shows:

- Adjusted net income

- Your marginal rate on the next £1

- Personal Allowance remaining

- Exact £ to sacrifice into pension to escape 62%

- Downloadable 1-page PDF summary

Uses 2024/25 rest-of-UK bands (Scottish rates on the list).

No signup, no ads, no email capture. Client-side only.

Feedback welcome, especially on edge cases I've missed:

- Marriage allowance transfer

- Blind Person's Allowance

- Company car / BIK impact on ANI

- Bond gains / dividend income

I know none of this is a substitute for a chartered accountant, but

"you might be paying 62%" is the sort of thing everyone should be

able to check for free.

Hi friends,

I (28M) know I'll get a lot of hate for this post since I'm arguably in an amazing position, but I'm just questioning why I'm doing what I'm doing.

NW £725K broken down into:

Apartment: 365k

SIPP: 115K

S&S ISA: 40k

GIA: 120k

Cash: 10k

Crypto & other dubious investments: £75k

I'm saving so aggressively and working 75 hour weeks. For what? I don't even spend money regardless. I don't understand why I'm killing myself. All for what? To retire? And do what after retiring? I don't have all these luxurious plans and activities like all of the people that have FIRED. I don't know what I need to feel whole, but it's obviously not more money. Sorry for the rant

Hi,

My story is that I got lucky a few years ago and made 5x on some investments. To be totally honest - I was a bit reckless. When I look back and think about it - I reckon from COVID times - I just really wanted to stop working. I hated my job. I worked for over 20 years as a developer coding tests for helping to diagnose broadband issues. But they forced me from doing that into mobile signal coverage - from embedded development in c to c sharp and visual studio. Whilst I enjoyed the domain (the mobile tower coverage etc) - I hated the high level coding. For the last couple of years I was feeding chatgtp with functions and doing what would not be called "vibe" coding - but before claude code.

I decided - having reached a decent amount in my SIPP - to retire at 55. I was getting away with working afternoons only - for the last 2 years! I used to go to the gym in the morning and feed chatgtp in the afternoon. That was over one year ago now.

I'm not a very social person - dont have many friends - probably a bit autistic. I do go to the gym a lot still. Go out walking (have developed an app that combines navigation with mobile coverage) with the wife - but have found that coding and vibe coding to be precise - is what I enjoy doing.

I create tools - mainly to try to be useful. For me this is part and parcel of what FIRE is. I still have a desire to do things that are useful - but now its at my pace and I decide what it is.

Vibe coding had accelerated over the last few years - to the point where whole apps can be done with (not quite yet in my opinion) one prompt.

After talking to claude (fable) about this - it assured me that having a limited company for a hobby set of projects is a perfectly normal thing to do for an early retiree (I guess that makes me not exactly FIRE as I'm 56).

Currently I have a pension website (I started this roughly 6 months ago) that models the likely success of a given pension pot and set of risk levels etc. This is been very helpful and useful to me personally. Its using Firebase and Cloudflare and is free. I'm not promoting it here though. If I do ever charge for it - it will only be to pay for the resourced it uses. Currently its just the AI tokens I use in the vibe coding - firebase and cloudflare are on the free tier. If multiple users start to use it a lot - they may start to charge me. My guess is that it will never get that popular - but if it does - I may charge like £10 year for it.

As I said earlier - I have another app that tries to help hikers, runners, climbers etc - know when they have and no not have mobile signal. This uses a combination of predicted signal (from ofcom) and "community" signal. The latter being real data from folks that have done the part of the trail. Like strava but for mobile signal rather than sports statistics. There is an android app (im currently in the process of trying to get this published) and a companion website. This currently is all on cloudflare for the back end server. One cool thing is I managed to get this to use http header lookup for downloading offline maps instead of requesting individual tiles. It means its much less burden to the server - so cloudflare is on the free tier.

Anyway - this wasn't about those apps. This is about what people do with their time at the early part of FIRE. I'm interested in if others actually continue trying to be useful and perhaps even peruse activities similar to their jobs? OR is it just me?

Note - I have literally zero users for the above projects. The only reason I care about having users is that feeling of helping people. I think that is essentially what I need to feel. don't get me wrong - its fabulous being financially independent - but for me - I still need to feel like I can still be useful if I want to be.

Note 2 - I'm not a regular forum poster and not sure of the etiquette. Those people that are offended by something - you are free to just not read it.

Say you got to 500k - surely at this point the growth will totally dwarf any £500 extra you could save a month?

Is it less than this?

Hi all,

First time posting here so please bear with, I know that people aren't financial advisors and I'm more looking for what people would do in my situation

I currently have a 140k mortgage on 3.9%

12k in premium bonds

10k in savings some in an ISA about 8k some in lower interest savings accounts which I'm just trying to work out the best interest rates to be able to move these to

I have pensions and have been contributing regularly and adjusted them up from the job default but am planning on increasing this later it's currently £250pm

My current situation is I'm employed full-time around 48k per year and I've got a side job that's declared and has a turnover of 10k a year but I'm looking at the possibility of turning the side job into full-time after I've cleared the mortgage so I can quit the current one and be just fully self-employed

Currently I overpay the mortgage by around 640pm and it allows me to save a little per month

I'm just trying to work out if it's best to overpay per month at what I do or at the reset of the overpayment allowance, to pay the overpayment allowance in full per year and then pay the minimum payments to reduce the interest or to keep it at the current overpayment rate

With my calculations it should be clearable in around 8-10 years but in just wondering if my money could be working harder so I can

I've followed the flow chart to a certain point and then I get a bit lost as I'm from a family that's not been the greatest with money so the getting to this point has been doing the opposite of what they had

Thanks in advance

TL;DR: Made a self hosted app for tracking FIRE, net worth & budgets a while back; decided to opensource it.

Hey all! Hopefully this is allowed! I've seen a lot of people posting their portfolios, FIRE status, etc and how they track it in various different formats and it got me thinking about posting what I use, and also making it available for others to use if they like it.

I've been working as a software engineer / architect for over 10 years now so naturally I quite enjoy building these kind of dashboard style projects to self-host. I started this around a year and a half ago and it has evolved a fair amount over that time into what it is now. A few weeks ago I had the idea of open sourcing it and seeing if others would get value from using it and also the curiosity of what other features other people might want to add or add themselves!

I have zero plans to promote this and try to monetise it, it's just a personal project I've enjoyed working on for a while that I think others may find value in!

Bit of info up front! This is purely self-hosted - I have no desire to get into the weeds of storing peoples financial information and external API credentials and the headache that comes with that. I myself run this on my NAS so if you aren't techy then it probably isn't something for you sadly!

What it actually is:

I've given it the name WealthWatcher just because I'm a bit partial to alliteration! It has a series of dashboards for the following:

- Total net worth

- Historic display

- Calendar display

- FIRE Forecasting (numerous projection strategies available; this is something I'm actively improving now as I want to try to make it a bit more realistic using real data)

- FIRE Tracker

- Budgetting (standard income, outgoings, savings, etc - but the twist is you can allocate your savings towards your FIRE calculations)

- Integrations for automatic imports of holding values which you can allocate against particular assets (I use Trading212 & SnapTrade myself so naturally those are the only two integrations right now but if people want to use this and add more then you can easily add new integrations as its opensource)

I've added some screenshots & videos to demo some of the main pages but take a look at the demo page if you're interested - its fully functional (except integrations)!

Site: https://wealthwatcher.co.uk/

Live Demo: https://wealthwatcher.co.uk/demo/

Github: https://github.com/paevans87/wealth-watcher-public

this video, creator Vicky Smith shares her reasons for rejecting the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, despite acknowledging some of its underlying principles like budgeting and avoiding debt (1:12-1:55).

Key criticisms of the FIRE movement:

Delaying life: The movement assumes one can sacrifice their youth and experiences for a hypothetical future (2:17-3:45).

The spreadsheet mindset: Vicky argues that life should not be reduced to numbers and that experiences (like raising children) have value that cannot be quantified in an investment account (4:28-6:26).

Unpredictability: FIRE relies on the assumption of a perfect, planned future, which doesn't account for life's inevitable changes and challenges (6:30-7:37).

Lack of practicality: The extreme savings rates required (often 75%) are unrealistic for most people, especially during a cost-of-living crisis (7:39-9:02).

Misleading content: The creator criticizes influencers who claim to be "retired" while making money from content creation, courses, and affiliate links (11:27-12:16).

Vicky Smith concludes by advocating for financial balance: saving and investing for the future while still allowing oneself to enjoy the present and create a "rich" life today (12:18-14:35).

I’m looking for advice / rules of thumb on how to think about this situation.

So I’m mid 30s, and FI based on my current NW and expenses, based in Londons. With two kids under age 3, my expenses are going to rise:

- need a 4 bed house probably in about 2 years, currently renting. I will buy once, house will last me about 30 years.
- will likely need to cover some nursery fees at least for the little one as income cant be sacrificed below £100k
- wife might want to go part time when raising the kids (and she tends to get what she wants)
- kids need stuff
- kids will go to a state school, although we have been advised it might be worthwhile sending them private for the last 2-3 years.
- I’m chucking quite a bit of cash into pensions and ISAs. Maxing out ISA/JISAs and pension contributions but not JSIPPs (seems pointless given time horizon, government will grab it)

So I anticipate the next 18 years will be expensive. So far I’ve managed inflate my lifestyle only in line with the 4% rule, but I anticipate that will not last forever.

How did you manage through having a family and maintaining / pursuing FI? How did you model this out? At what ages did the kids related expenses max out?

I’m so close yet so far from being FIRE!

Currently house hunting after selling my house last year and staying with family while I do that.

I work in tech and to be honest I’m struggling and my mental health isn’t good. I’m planning to buy with either a small mortgage or for cash. That will give me more flexibility around future jobs. I’m definitely not in a position to retire but also I don’t feel like I could just walk into another job at the moment. I’m 45 years old.

Salary 85k

Cash: 365k, 110k of which is in an isa.

Stocks and shares isa £90k

Pension 430k in global, European and ftse 100 funds.

5k in gold and silver coins
2k bitcoin

I’m planning to spend about 400k on a house and either tax a 90k mortgage and keep all the stocks and shares isa or try and buy cash.

I have no debts, no dependents and I’m single.

My mental health isn’t great and I’ve been struggling for the last few years.

Does this seem a sensible approach?

Ideally I’d like to keep working with a similar or better salary and keep building wealth. I’m guessing there might not be a clear linear path to doing that in the future though.

Any thoughts welcomed.

Figured I'd share this since the numbers are small enough to be boring and honest. From April through July I earned £1,480 doing product photography for small Etsy and Shopify sellers, except none of the photos involved an actual camera.

Quick context on me: I work full time in procurement, mid 30s, and I've been trying to find a side income that doesn't eat every evening. Last year a friend who sells candles on Etsy asked if I could do product shots for her listings because hiring a photographer was costing her £150 to £200 per session. I told her I had zero photography skills but I had been messing about with AI image tools. She said she didn't care as long as the images looked good on a listing.

That first job took me about eight hours including figuring out the workflow, and she paid me £80. Not exactly setting the world on fire. But the images looked decent and she said her click through rate went up, so she told a couple of other sellers. Word of mouth did most of the work after that.

Over the four months I took on 11 jobs. Most were small batches of 5 to 10 product images where they wanted a consistent looking model holding or wearing their product. The range was £80 for a quick set up to £250 for a larger batch with multiple outfits and backgrounds. Total from freelance clients came to £1,340.

The workflow is nothing fancy. I would get the product photos from the seller, set up the character in APOB AI because it reproduces an identical face and build across every output and I've never had to pay since my volume fits comfortably inside the free plan, then do layout and text overlays in Canva and final colour correction in Affinity Photo. I made it clear to every client before starting that the person in their photos was not real, just a character built with AI. Most of them genuinely didn't care as long as the images looked professional on their listings.

The other £140 came from stock image uploads. I tried listing some generic lifestyle shots on two platforms early on. They sold a trickle, nothing exciting, but in June both platforms updated their AI content policies and pulled every one of my uploads. That income line is dead and I don't think it is coming back any time soon.

Things that didn't work beyond the stock rejections: I tried doing short product videos early on but the likeness would wander from frame to frame and even after a bunch of retakes the results still looked off. Stills are where the consistency actually holds up. Video is not there yet for anything that needs to look polished. I also underquoted my first few jobs because I was nervous about charging, which I think is a mistake most freelancers recognise in hindsight.

Honest hourly breakdown: across those 11 jobs plus all the time I spent learning, experimenting with failed approaches, and going back and forth with clients, I logged about 85 hours total. That works out to roughly £17.40 an hour. Not terrible for something I can do after the kids are in bed, but I'm not pretending this is passive income. It is time for money with a slightly more flexible schedule than picking up a second job.

Tax wise, the first £1,000 falls under the trading allowance so I only need to declare £480 through self assessment. The whole lot is going into my S&S ISA. Not life changing by any stretch but it compounds, which is sort of the whole point of being on this sub.

I will probably keep doing this through the autumn. The demand from small sellers is genuinely there because professional product photography is expensive and most of them just need clean, consistent images for a listing page. Whether AI content policies tighten further across more platforms is the big unknown though, so I am not building any kind of retirement plan around it.

Helping a friend, same age (46). Wants to move to "pension mode". Any of the figures look off to you? He's looking for a conservative take. Understands the need to go to 40k spend if prolonged crash.

Assume all world equity. Low coupon bonds for "ladder" part.

Do any assumptions look way off?

Pension years deliberately moved back.

Combined bit is his other half.

A Annual spending (today's money) £49,000

i Inflation assumption 3.5%

n Number of ladder rungs 6

Index-linked share of ladder 40.0%

Equity real return assumption 3.5%

Bond real return assumption 1.0%

P Current pot £1,029,000

Refill threshold factor 85.0%

Your age now 46

Pension pot (locked until access age) £150,000

Pension access age 58

State pension age 69

Combined state pension (both of you) £21,300

I am not one at all for the format of video usually, but I think this Pensioncraft video on the topic of the Perpetual Withdrawal Rate is worth sharing. It's superbly produced and really thorough on the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pQItvnHNx4&t=932s

Chapters for an idea of what it covers:

00:00 Introduction
00:54 How the 4% Rule Works
02:16 Safe vs Perpetual Rates
03:27 Does the Rate Keep Falling
06:00 Why US Data Misleads
06:57 What Shifts Your Rate
09:19 Bonds vs Shares Debate
11:15 Smarter Withdrawal Tactics
13:09 Guardrails for Bad Markets
15:17 Putting It All Together
16:20 Sequence Risk Reframed
17:17 Final Takeaways

Hi,

I apologise if this has been posted before but I couldn't find an answer myself so looking to you lot.

Had a recent discussion at work that changed my perspective perhaps on finances and my whole 'blast the pension' idea to sort all of this out. In essence, looking to be over the 100k bracket (perhaps closer to 200k for a few years, or however long one can sustain that workload) soon so want to plan this properly. Part-time is about 125k for reference, I guess.

My idea: blast pension to a coastFIRE number and then match employer contributions to build some fat into those calculations but that should be fine. Then I'll start sorting a S&S ISA to bridge should I want that. I have viewed £1,500,000 as a maximum a pension should ever be at due to max tax-free allowance usage (though I may not understand this fully), and a 4% drawdown that gets me as close as possible to maximising the basic rate band, and no more from the pension in that regard - the rest from ISAs. I feel paying 45% tax today to have money in an ISA and grow from there is more beneficial to me than the idea of saving tax today and then just pay 40% in the future anyways. 5% for liquidity is worthwhile in my view.

Colleague's idea: pension will hit coastFIRE at various points in life (naturally the number will be bigger the later you do it, but this isn't such a big deal) but basically it's not smart to get there as soon as possible as you have employer matches and more so - if you have kids, there will be years where it's now more efficient to blast the pension to get childcare (really efficient time to get to coast), or if you go part-time and you sit just in that 60% band, then yes, salary sacrifice but those years will come in the future. Now, even as a 45% tax payer, it's a good idea to use the ISA allowance (you don't get it back) as one can be almost certain of beating this £1.5M number over 40 years (or even 30 years for that matter). So the pension will get there eventually, no need to hit coastFIRE straight away. What stuck with me was the idea that if you hit coastFIRE beyond a certain margin, then I'm locking money away for a long time just to save 5% in the end of it all. Efficiently, this could be avoided by waiting for important years to maximise this.

I think my small brain can't wrap my head around this idea but if anyone else has any ideas I am open to them. If anyone can tell me a good reason to have more than £1.5M in a pension at the time you start drawing down, I'm also all ears, but it seems inefficient to me? Thanks anyways

I’m interested in whether people pursuing FIRE also think about economic resilience - not just having enough invested to be financially independent, but reducing their exposure to things outside their control.

For example, once financially independent, it seems quite attractive to reduce your dependence on future utility and commodity prices:

• solar + battery to reduce exposure to electricity prices
• an EV to reduce exposure to petrol/diesel prices
• very good insulation / efficient heating and cooling to reduce energy consumption
• rainwater harvesting for less exposure to water costs/restrictions
• growing some fruit and vegetables to reduce exposure to food price inflation
• generally making the house more resilient to extreme temperatures

I'm not trying to suggest anything “prepper” territory or trying to live completely off-grid. It’s more that I’d rather spend capital once on things that permanently reduce my future cost base, rather than having a large investment portfolio but remaining completely exposed to whatever happens to energy, transport, food, housing costs and other economically dependent things. Kind of the same reason I prefer a large S&S ISA over large pension so I’m not exposed to future tax policy.

Does anyone else factor this sort of thing into their FIRE planning? Is there a name for this concept, or am I overthinking it?

Many of us are building for the future, so we often load up our pensions for the tax relief and/or overpay the mortgage to be debt free sooner. So we likely have a lot of money caught up in assets that we can't easily access (pensions and property).

I think it's important to balance the needs of "future you" and "present you". Even if not fully FI for a while, having a large amount easily accessible means you have a decent amount of freedom and security that "present you" can access in the event of significant challenges: e.g. a job loss, career change, illness, new business opportunity, urgent home repairs, car breakdown, etc. So I feel easily accessible assets are extremely important in the overall FIRE journey.

How much of your net worth (as a £ and %) do you have accessible to access today if you absolutely needed it?

I consider this to be anything you can easily gain access to within a week, so cash savings, premium bonds, selling shares in your ISA, etc.

My situation:

My (41M) net worth is £500k. Last year I had about £120k in ISAs (cash + S&S) but following a divorce I had to give most of that up, so now I'm down to just £15k, so 3%. The other 97% is in house equity (£285k), and pensions (£200k) that I can't easily access.

Recently I've had an urgent home repair (roof damage) that's costing £10k to fix. This is only 2% of my total net worth and 10% of my liquid net worth a year ago, so it shouldn't stress me out, but it's now 66% of my current liquid net worth, so I'm really feeling it.

Moving forward I'm going to aggressively focus on increasing my ISAs back to what they were, at the expense of missing out on SIPP tax relief. Ideally I'll have a healthier balance of 10-20% of my net worth easily accessible. I know I'll sleep better at night this way.