“Are you not having a drink?” John asked me as we huddled into the crowded upstairs room of a fancy pub. We were there for the November installment of the ‘side-hustle’ meet up, hosted by the venerable Financial Independence London group. The room was filled with over 100 bustling FIRE advocates, sipping on expensive £12 white wines and £6 pints of beer. “I’ll stick with tap water and ice, thank you,” I said with a pang of envy. ...

I had a graduate email me the other day to thank me for getting him on the path to saving early (awesome email!) He had one question though: How do you calculate your savings rate? I then realised that I’ve never really explained in a post how you should calculate your savings rate and how I’ve set up the SNSS (Saving Ninja Super Spreadsheet ) to calculate that figure. ...

This is a Saving Ninja savings report. Go to How To Track Your Savings to check out the Saving Ninja Super Spreadsheet. Please note that I split my expenses equally with my partner and the savings rate, house equity and house value represent my share only. The spreadsheet calculates my savings rate based off £12,000 worth of expenses per year, even though my expenses are actually Less Than 10k Per Year . This is to create a buffer; I’m aiming for at least 12k to reach financial independence. ...

In part 1 of The Boggy Marsh we discovered that there was a secret financial blueprint that would allow even lower-income individuals to get ahead; if only life was approached the correct way. Today we’re going to delve into the specifics. How exactly will careful planning and execution help aid your journey through The Boggy Marsh, and how big will the impact be? O(2^t+m). What does this icky Math formula mean? ...

I’ve always believed in the notion of going through life in the correct way. However ambiguous it may seem, when it comes to personal finance and FIRE in particular, there’s definitely a way in which it should be executed in order to maximise efficiency. Don’t Swim Against the Current Each adventure through life should, of course, start with amassing enough of a nest egg as early as possible, in order for it to compound for longer. Saving money should be of the utmost import to the graduate because as the years go by, saving will become harder. Not just because their expenses will increase with the burden of children and lifestyle inflation, but because they won’t be riding inside the tailwind of compound interest. ...