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?
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.
This time last year I wrote that my annual ISA update was many months late. I had delayed it until using my full annual ISA allowance(s), which took me much longer than usual last year.
This year I actually completed my ISA topups in April, within a few weeks of the start of the UK tax year. Somehow I have neglected to post an update. And despite the clamour from my blog readership (not!), I have let this year’s post slip until December.
Given this post is 8 months ‘late’, I am going to keep it snappy.
The 2022/23 tax year was pretty unpleasant for my ISA holdings. They lost over 16% of their value. One of my biggest ISA holding in April 2022 was AEWU, a high income property REIT, which lost over 25% of its value in the year. Another large holding was BHP, which sat at over £30/share (briefly!) at the start of the tax yer, and dropped 20% to £24 a year later. Another key holding, Scottish Mortgage, was already well on its way down from its £15/share peak; it started the tax year at £10/share and finished it at under £7/share. And while Facebook started and finished the tax year at $220/share, in the meantime it dropped below $100 and I ended up selling it at well below $200/share.
FIRE v London 