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Roughly six years ago, I started a blog. Roughly six months ago, I semi-abandoned it.

It garnered a little attention. Attracted a small following. Won the occasional award.

In retrospect, this blog’s overarching theme was the self-indulgent musings of one man’s search for meaning. Exploring the influence and impact of the twinned behavioural sciences of economics and psychology, when viewed through a blinkered personal finance lens.

Initially, statistical hopes and spreadsheet dreams.

Later, happiness and contentment.

More recently, focussing on outcomes and value.

Turgid stuff! Until you liven up the narrative with brutal honesty about harsh realities of life. Complicated family. Marriage dumpster fire. The evil machinations of the Lockdown Kitten.

Six years ago, I was forty-something. A serial migrant. Husband. Father of two young children.

Renting in a high-cost-of-living locale. Plying my trade in a lucrative niche. Studying for fun.

Comfortable I had “enough”.

Financially independent, or thereabouts. In most parts of the world. But not where I lived.

Experimenting with a seasonal employment pattern. Winters working, bounded by blissfully idle summers invested in spending time with my kids while they still want to spend time with me. My alternative to early retirement, in the influencer clickbait hyperbole sense of the term.

Working on my own business, as opposed to working in a business owned by someone else. Convinced that if I was going to prostitute myself, selling off my life a day at a time, my efforts might as well enrich me rather than enriching others.

Objectively successful by most measures. I had coupled off. Reproduced. Owned a home. Seen the world. I was better educated, higher earning, and wealthier than any of my ancestors.

My family were comfortably fed, clothed, safe, and warm.

Our needs met.

Most wants satisfied. Well, most of the reasonable wants, that is!

And yet I felt hollow on the inside. Painted on smiles. Playing the part. Going through the motions. Was this all there is? I was like the proverbial racing greyhound who caught the lure. What do I do now that I’ve seen through the game?

Six years on, some things remain the same.

I am still forty-something.

Still a migrant, though re-evaluating that lifestyle choice. Ghosts and demons I had once sought to escape have been either slain or outgrown. Mirages and grass-is-greener fantasies I had once run towards have been dispelled or exposed. Happiness is a lifestyle choice, not a location.

Still the father of two kids, who are growing up far too fast. One preparing to fly the nest. The other commencing high school.

School drop-offs. Childcare fees. Christmas concerts. Sports carnivals. After fifteen years of daily lived experience, these things are suddenly fading memories.

Replaced by the luxury of free time. A feeling fondly remembered, yet rarely experienced, since the days before parenthood.

Six years on, some things have changed.

Still living in that high-cost-of-living locale, but now owning rather than renting.

One-third the outgoings, for a similar house in the same neighbourhood. A clear cashflow win.

However, on an inflation-adjusted basis, local property values have fallen by 25% over the last decade. Nominal prices may not have dropped much since my purchase, but they haven’t gone up either. A certain opportunity cost loss, and probably an uncrystallised capital loss too.

How does that look from a total return perspective? There is a reason that owner-occupied housing is sometimes considered an asset. Rarely an investment. Always a money pit!

One thing that makes personal finance hard is we don’t like asking uncomfortable questions.

In no small part because we instinctively suspect we probably won’t like their answers.

Without them, we don’t know what changes to make. Ignorance may be blissful, but it also ensures we perpetuate errant behaviours rather than correcting them.

Still plying my trade in a high-paying niche. Domestically.

That qualifier is an important one. I am acutely aware that domestic market is lagging behind much of the world on an after-tax, inflation-adjusted, purchasing-power-equivalised basis.

Not due to a dramatic market crash, nor Trussonomics style economic handbrake turn that the everyman would notice. Rather a slow compounding exsanguination from a thousand paper cuts.

Austerity. Hollowing out of vital services to society. Education and healthcare.

Bracket creep. Reducing purchasing power by passively increasing taxation via inflation.

Delaying and deferring infrastructure maintenance. Bridges. Dams. The Thames Barrier.

Underinvestment in things that matter. The things that make the future better than the past.

Outcomes only noticeable by comparison. Only experienced by those who travel or escape.

Six years on, I am working full-time in someone else’s business. Selling my time to make them rich. I do have an equity stake, but not a founder equity stake. Seasonal work patterns and financial independence sacrificed on the altar of home ownership and vanity renovations.

Six years ago, I had been a long-term portfolio landlord. A collection of doors both near and far, diversified across currencies, lending facilities, and regulatory regimes.

My properties weren’t my pension, but their free cashflows funded my seasonal sabbaticals.

Six years on, the cashflow numbers no longer add up on domestic residential real estate. Buy-in prices too high. Yields too low. Tax regime too predatory, for well-located residential property.

Further afield, the pendulum of regulatory balance has swung in favour of the tenant. Rent controls. Landlord licensing. Fossil fuel phase-outs. Mandatory insulation standards. The specifics vary by location. But the direction of travel is consistent: solve perceived housing supply shortages by squeezing out independent private landlords. Policies that can’t achieve their stated aims, but sound plausible enough to be blindly accepted by the unthinking masses.   

I sometimes wonder at what point does a long-term trend become a structural change? Recognisable while it is being lived in the moment, or only perceivable in hindsight?

Six years on, money has ceased to be “free”. Interest rates inevitably reverted to their historical norms, making the use of leverage to turbocharge investment returns a riskier proposition.

Higher costs, combined with sceptical lenders asking those aged 45 and over how they plan to service or repay loans once they are retired from the workforce, change the rules of the game.

Ageing not only produces grey hairs, wrinkles, and middle-aged spread. It also reduces potential loan durations, which in turn increase financing costs. A cautionary tale to those trusting souls who naïvely assume they can endlessly refinance to the latest headline honeymoon rates. Eventually, computer says no!

Six years on, the notion of early retirement has lost some of its allure.

Designing my life around my kids might have made sense while my kids were around and welcomed my company. A medium-term lifestyle choice, that is approaching its used-by date.

Parenting done right produces independent children capable of independent thought, applied problem-solving, and research skills. As parents, we should strive to make ourselves redundant, while being good enough people that our children want to be our friends as adults.

Not our dependents as adults.

“Failure to launch” might be an ironic meme, but it still suggests a failure at parenting.

Six years on, I never did find meaning. A purpose. My “why”.

After investing a lot of time, energy, and introspection attempting to find the answer to those big questions, I eventually concluded that there isn’t one. Occam’s razor suggests the simplest answer is usually the right one.

A tree doesn’t appear to have a “why”.

Ants don’t appear to have a purpose. They do mysterious ant things, for mysterious ant reasons.

The Lockdown Kitten doesn’t yearn for meaning. A selfish creature, he seeks only food and sunbeams.

Once I made my peace with that absence of something more, I stopped worrying about it.

I’m no happier nor more fulfilled than I had been. The hollow feeling persists, but I no longer believe it to be an aberration or glitch in the matrix. Rather, I suspect it is just another aspect of real life that doesn’t make it into fairy tales, influencer posts, or movie scripts. Much like bad sex, gift giving out of obligation, morning breath, and going to the toilet.

The typical human response to inconvenient voids include activity, addiction, religion, and self-harm. All forms of escape. Seeking solace in exercise, narcotics, surrendering personal agency to a higher power, or burying yourself in work.

Choose your medicine, then bury your head in the sand.

The alternative is to deal with it. Get over it. Move on. Easy to say. Harder to do. But possible.

Long ago, I learned (at the cost of a tooth) that running forwards while looking backwards is unproductive and more likely than not to end in tears. While we can’t change the past, it directly informs the future. There is a lot of truth to the claim that demography is destiny.

Equally, focussing too much on the dim distant horizon is just as unproductive, and potentially just as dangerous. We are likely to trip over obstacles located immediately in front of us.

The certainty of prediction is we’ll be wrong. Possibly wrong with confidence. But wrong just the same.

The best we can reasonably hope for is to be thematically correct if temporally wrong.

Life will happen.

Priorities will change.

Hedonic adaptation will ensure we forever prioritise novelty over contentment. Newer. Better. Different. More.

But predict we shall.

In six years’ time, I will no longer be forty-something.

One son should have graduated university and be charting his own course in life. The other will be enduring the ridiculous theatre of the university admission process.

Probably still a migrant. While it seems likely we each only get one life, disrupting my younger son’s schooling to indulge a personal whim feels like a selfish indulgence with more cost than benefit. That said, I’ve booked a trip for later this year to explore potential locales for future me.

In six years’ time, the last of my family ties worth keeping to my country of origin will be tied no more. The medical profession can only perform so many miracles before cancer or old age inevitably win the game.

That outcome raises some uncomfortable questions about possible future inheritances.

There are vast and systemic disconnects between earnings versus property prices. Student loans versus future earning potential. Domestic living costs versus the global skills marketplace.

Those fortunate enough to enjoy access to dynastic wealth stand a fighting chance of enjoying standards of living comparable to those experienced by my generation and those before it.

Those without such access are destined to do it the hard way. Demography is destiny once more.

Should there be anything left to inherit, after high aged care and healthcare costs, that money would make far more of a difference to my children than it would to me.

The Bank of Mum and Dad is a financial device often used to exert parental control and influence. A gift, or worse a loan, that comes with many strings and obligations attached.

I suspect the world would be a better place if that passed down Boomer wealth simply skipped a generation.

Egos might be bruised. Feathers ruffled. Senses of entitlement offended.

But ask yourself this: does an inheritance do more good helping a young person at the start of their journey, when they are likely struggling to finance childcare costs and mortgage payments from low early career wages further reduced by student loan payments?

Or funding a new car, kitchen renovation, or globetrotting holiday for a fifty-something approaching retirement. Someone who has already raised their children. Someone who has already made their fortune if they were ever going to?

The answer seems obvious to me, but your mileage may vary. Families are complicated!

In six years’ time, I’ll be able to see retirement on the horizon.

Not the variety of “early retirement” discussed at the shallow end of the FIRE movement. Featuring pretentious twenty-somethings gloating shamelessly from a developing nation tropical beach, as they cavort with umbrella drinks and celebrate living their best life just above the poverty line. When it is true, it is a commendable achievement.

No, this would be the more traditional version of “early” retirement, where under current rules private pensions become accessible, and the state pension remains a decade away.

In six years’ time, the only thing I’m certain of is that I’ll want different things, have different priorities, and imagine a different future to what I do today. That has been the case over all my previous six-year intervals. My values tend to remain relatively constant, but their manifestation evolves with age and experience.