FIRE update: year five

I am writing this at 9.30 on a Monday morning, sitting in the garden. Mrs Accumulator has just waved to me through the window and I can scarcely believe she’s there.

The past year has been strange, full of awkward trials and tiny tribulations, but the moment that’s just passed between us – well, it doesn’t get better than that. ¹

About five years ago, ² I’d have been desperately fighting bin-fires at the office, with no Mrs TA within a country mile. 

Work would have felt like one of those mad videogames where pointless cack (pizza, pies, U-boats, whatever) hurtles at you down a conveyor belt while your energy bar ebbs away. 

Now I’m in a soggy garden with the scent of pine resin up my nose. It feels like heaven. 

God, that went fast

I haven’t had much time to reflect of late. To think about how chuffing lucky I am. Though the feeling bleeds through my every day. 

From one perspective, the past year has felt like an extra level in that crazy conveyor belt game: 

• Here comes a devastating diagnosis. Scratch one parent! (It’s not the end yet, but it’s the beginning of the end.)
• Now incinerate hundreds of hours on a communal endeavour with no ‘We’ in community. 
• Next, feel the spread of aches and pains that likely can’t be ignored much longer, nor fixed. Goddamn age. 
• Watch people you love trapped in torment. Feel powerless to help them.  
• Fail to fulfill some promises to good friends while you arbitrage the above. 

Yet from another perspective, I’m happy I met the challenges that came my way. Whether they’d feature among the golden beaches and labradors of a retirement brochure is beside the point. No-one else fancied it, so it had to be me. 

Perhaps I made a difference to my loved ones. And others further down my contacts list. Either way, it made me feel useful. That’s pretty vital for a retired male. 

Much of what I’ve done has no place on a CV, or Linkedin. It probably won’t make my memoirs (available soon!), or even a FIRE post about how amazing FIRE is. But I’m still glad I did it. 

It meant something to someone. It meant something to me. Certainly it was waaaay better than hitting the Q3 stretch target for BastardoCorps PLC. 

Virtually none of it was in the plan. 

This was the plan

Before I retired early, I sketched out an idealised structure for my week because I feared I might otherwise just lie in bed: 

• Monday – Walk, read, all day
• Tuesday – Monevator
• Wednesday – Monevator
• Thursday – New skill
• Friday – Volunteer
• Saturday – Day out with Mrs Accumulator
• Sunday – Day out with Mrs Accumulator

It all happens, but fragmented and frittered across formless weeks and months. No week looks like this. Also, the volunteer part has not featured me giving my time to a worthy cause, so I need to sort that out. 

Here’s a list of activities five-years-ago me thought I’d try with my oodles of spare time:

So there you go. I award myself a First Class Honours in pottering, prevarication and lack of application. 

Take that Mr Money Mustache! This is how you start a movement. (Time-wasters only, please.)

Take it steady, 

The Accumulator

P.S. Our FIRE budget for 2025-26 was £29,366 for two. Actual spend: £29,432. Ooh, so close.

1. The knowledge that it doesn’t get better than that was passed on to me by The Investor, quoting the wise words of a text message from his late father: “Eating fish and chips from the best takeaway in the world. Mum only ate half hers. Had to finish it off. It doesn’t get better than that.”
2. This update is late!

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