2018 In Review, Let Decompression Commence

The fourth quarter of 2018 contained the pivotal moment of my FIRE journey so far – FIRE day.  Financially it represented the transition from rapid wealth accumulation to hopefully well managed wealth decumulation or drawdown.  As I write this though more importantly it also represented the start of what seems to be called the decompression phase of retirement and I’ll freely admit I’m finding this really difficult.  Prior to FIRE I had 60 – 70 hours a week either commuting or in the workplace where I would be seeing new data that would require action every 15 to 30 minutes.  I would then be paid reasonably well for this effort on a monthly basis with some being spent to live well while the majority was saved.

Now we get to do what we want when we want and there is no need for urgency but also if we want to eat I now need to withdraw from my wealth that will only be renewed passively.  I can’t speed it up without taking more investment risk.  So what emotions have I been experiencing?  Initially, mainly a lot of stress caused by giving a good work handover and pushing too hard on our relocation plans to Cyprus.  That has now subsided with us now having been here for about 6 weeks.  After the stress left I experienced euphoria!  I’d done it, I can now do whatever I want and am free to be where I want when I want.  That also has now subsided.

So what am I experiencing right now?  That’s have we done the right thing and should we persist.  There is certainly some fear in there as well.  Fear of running out of wealth, fear of not having enough wealth to meet our quality of life ambitions for the next 40 or so years, fear of my skills quickly becoming stale and not being able to re-enter my career when that occurs...  At one point I even thought about asking my employer if they’d take me back and I have also looked briefly at what jobs are out there.  Thankfully, I’ve bitten my tongue and moved on for now.

2018 HYP Review

A little over 7 years ago (late 2011) I started to build a UK High Yield Portfolio (HYP).  It was a much talked about strategy back in the Motley Fool forum days and today still gets plenty of attention on the Lemon Fool forums.  I continued building the portfolio until July 2015 by which time I’d amassed 17 shares across multiple sectors.  That included a token amount of Royal Mail Group (ticker: RMG) during the initial public offering in 2013 and the spin-off of S32 by BHP in 2015.

Today the portfolio is down to 16 shares because of the forced Amlin sale in 2016.  It was set up to be close to a low tinker portfolio with only a few mechanical rules that would be triggered if there were big changes to a share.  For example if the actual value of a holding became 50% larger than the median share holding I would sell 25% or if the actual dividend yield dropped below 50% of the FTSE All Share (I’m looking at you Pearson, ticker: PSON, although I didn’t follow my own rules when they cut the dividend in late 2017 and the share price is up 27% since making me think my rules might actually be rubbish).

There were no buys (or sells) in 2018 (making the maths pretty easy this year).  The complete HYP and the respective values of each share are shown in the chart below.  The purchasing rule that I followed was the amount of the next purchase was the median share value of the current portfolio (with the exception of RMG and S32).

Click to enlarge, Retirement Investing Today High Yield Portfolio

Merry Christmas

The organisation I up until recently worked for closes its year at the end of December.  With shutdowns between Christmas and New Year it meant that the run in to the Christmas bank holidays were always absolutely manic.  It meant long hours and little time to soak up the Christmas spirit until the physical bank holidays were upon us.

Christmas 2018 is my first FIRE Christmas and things have changed somewhat.  We’re already reasonably settled in the Med with our rental home for the next 6-12 months.  All our possessions have now arrived so there was only one thing for it.  We put up the Christmas tree and spent a couple of hours decorating it.  Then I felt inspired...

In years gone past we’ve always bought a Christmas Cake and / or Christmas Pudding from the supermarket.  Not so this year.  I attempted to make a Christmas fruit cake from scratch.

Click to enlarge, One dodgy looking fruit cake

Moving to Cyprus from the UK (Part 1)

It hasn't been all bureaucracy

It’s been 3 weeks since I FIRE’d (financially independent and retired early) and we are now logistically pretty much settled in Cyprus.  I thought it might be worthwhile to capture some learnings for those that might want to someday follow in our footsteps as well as showing a little of how it’s all fitting into the principles that I’ve been espousing on this site over the years.

Prior to moving we made a few preparations. About a year prior I joined a number of Cyprus forums, initially just lurked and then started to participate as our move date approached.  There are some really helpful people on these (you very quickly learn who) and they certainly helped simplify the process we have just been through.  Two notable ones were Paphos Life which is relevant for the Paphos side of the island and the Cyprus Eastern Forum which is relevant for the Famagusta side of the island.  There are some common themes so both were worthwhile pursuits.

I also started the process of gaining us private medical cover.  The company we went with were thorough in the screening process but I’m told by those that have made claims that they don’t quibble when you need care.  It included questionnaires as well as physical check-ups which had to be done in Cyprus for those aged over 40.  This was not a quick process taking us a little over 3 weeks from advising we’d like to proceed to being fully insured.  I’m therefore glad that I did as much as possible from the UK as it minimised our non-cover period in Cyprus.

From the UK we also booked ourselves 2 weeks in a serviced apartment as well as a hire car for the same period.  In hindsight we probably put ourselves under stress that we really didn’t need to by doing this for such a short time.  The removal company shipping time turned out to be 3 weeks which means we actually did the move in two shipments effectively camping in our UK flat for a week so that our belongings would arrive in a timely fashion.  It also meant we had to find somewhere to live quickly.  Having done plenty of online rental research I thought this would be easy but once on the ground it became apparent that a lot of the online inventory was already rented / ‘didn’t exist’, had been taken by very good photographers or were ‘winter lets’ which I guess are then put on Airbnb (or similar) over the summer.  Finding a place therefore took some time and caused some short term stress.  While costing a little more, if I had my time over I would have booked temporary accommodation for at least 3 weeks and probably 4 weeks as this was the main problem area for us so far.

Is the visible FIRE movement changing for the worse

When I started my journey to FIRE (financially independent, retired early) in late 2007 there wasn’t much on the topic in the public domain.  To my knowledge at that time the term FIRE hadn’t even been coined and the US based Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme was just getting going with his blog.

When I started this blog in late 2009, which was predominantly aimed at holding me accountable, learning from others and sharing my journey to early retirement in the small hope it might help some others, even Mr Money Mustache hadn’t yet arrived on the scene.  To my knowledge that didn’t occur until 2011.

Even at that point the UK FIRE blogger scene was still pretty quiet.  Of course the great Monevator was running full steam ahead but at that time my feeling was that his site was more investing focused for which I must once again tip my hat and say a massive thanks for everything he has taught me.  To my knowledge the UK FIRE blogs didn’t really start to ramp until around 2013 after which blogs like The FIRE Starter and Quietly Saving appeared who each continue to put their own unique and interesting spin on things.  This has continued to the present day with new unique blogs like Young FI Guy, Ms Ziyou, Gentleman’s Family Finances and Fire v London all sharing something new regularly.