I’ve read your blog on and off for the past year or three. I graduated from the London School of Economics in 2017 after which I went through the hardest few years of my life mentally and ended up unemployed or in dead-end low paid jobs.
I currently work in the motor trade for Jaguar Land Rover earning £35,000 which I can save most of as I live at home.
I’m now 28 and can’t seem to figure out how to begin my FatFIRE journey, in terms of a job/career what would you do in my shoes?
The temperature in the Middle East got even hotter in April, with Israel and Iran trading attacks on each other’s sovereign buildings/territory. Somehow World War III has never really seemed in danger of breaking out but it is a reminder that only change is constant.
Over in New York Donald Trump was falling asleep in court. You have to hand it to him he knows how to stay in the headlines.
The markets in April
Meanwhile the UK stock market continues to fill newspapers for the wrong reasons. Amidst all the doom and gloom – heightened at the end of the month by the takeover of Darktrace, a rare UK tech stock – you might have missed that the FTSE-100 is not only at a record level but in fact outperfomed other markets significantly in April.
All the markets seem to want to know now is when interest rates are coming down, and how fast. April saw expectations of cuts dampened / postponed, which appears to have dampened valuations of both equities and bonds. In the US this was heightened by an increasing sense that the AI-driven tech boom may have got a bit ahead of itself – there is still little to show for concrete extra revenue / cost savings (bar a few notables such as Klarna) but plenty of increased infrastructure spending.
I think I first clocked Warren Buffett’s (and Charlie Munger RIP’s) Berkshire Hathaway around the year 2000. I loved the story. Starting from, as the story was told back then, humble beginnings and a paper round, Warren Buffett (and Charlie – who I will stop mentioning but absolutely deserves practically half the credit) had built Berkshire into a giant.
Buy & hold – what’s not to like?
Berkshire was the holding company of an investing approach par excellence. Buy great businesses at a fair price, hold forever, reinvest dividends, job done.
The business had never paid a dividend or split the stock, which by that point had reached over $70k per (Class A) share. It had annual meetings in Omaha, its home town, which were already becoming a cult following.
There was also something about Warren Buffett’s penny pinching ways that appealed to me. He lived in his first house, he drove practically his original car. Part of his aversion to splitting the stock was the (tiny, in the scheme of things) cost of a stock split (though he did thankfully create the B shares in 1996, which are identical to A shares but a fraction of the price). He preached from the book of compound interest and his lectures were very compelling.
And yet
There was something sufficiently compelling about Berkshire Hathaway to me, as a baby FIREr back in 2000ish, that I named one of my assets after the business. That asset remains to this day, though it has sadly failed to prosper in line with the mighty BRK.
FIRE v London 