After a hectic summer and unplanned events taking over, I’m now looking forward to getting my winter activity programme together: Quite a list when you write it down. There’s plenty of other admin type activities as well, so my calendar will be pretty full. You can follow along in my diary to see how I […]| uncountable thoughts
At the time of writing (October 2025) stock markets are at all-time highs and plenty of people, myself included, are wondering whether this is the peak before a multi year period of steep decline. It’s tough at the top. In all honesty, I have literally no idea. I’m pretty certain in 15 years time, markets […]| uncountable thoughts
Once in drawdown there is a strategy called draining the SIPP which optimises tax efficiency over many years by fully utilising annual tax allowances that would otherwise expire. You can see the details of the approach here, but basic idea is to move investments from the restrictive SIPP wrapper to ISA where they can be […]| uncountable thoughts
Elisabeth is reminiscing about when we all used to remember phone numbers in the days before mobiles and everything else: At the time, I knew a lot of phone numbers: all my friends’, and of course our home phone landline. But now it’s a little horrifying how few I remember.…| uncountable thoughts
Although I’ve been investing purposefully since 1998, I have to admit I’ve never really experienced as prolonged market highs as we have been seeing lately (September 2025 at time of writing). Normally my temperament is quite well regulated, but there are definitely new emotions in play as both the FTSE100 and S&P500 have regularly broken […]| uncountable thoughts
I subscribe to over 1,000 RSS feeds. Sounds an awful lot, but does provide me with a high quality list of content to read every day. I keep track of them all using FreshRSS, which has proved highly capable of scaling up, without being overwhelming. Every six months or so,…| uncountable thoughts
Almost every modern website uses cards to display what content they have on other pages - usually an image, title and sometimes a short snippet. They are an excellent way to show readers what you have available, and I suppose also act as a tool to keep people within the…| uncountable thoughts
Saving is deferred consumption. There are all sorts of good reasons to save - a new car, an annual holiday, a house deposit. Almost everyone has savings with these and other goals in mind. The enemy of deferred consumption is inflation. Over the short term, it may not be noticeable…| uncountable thoughts
Of course, nobody knows what future returns will actually be. But you do need to have some idea of how much your portfolio will increase by, either so you can add more money to get to your target during accumulation, or so you can adjust spend during drawdown. Most people…| uncountable thoughts
In 1998, aged 30, I made a what turned out to be a major decision, to start investing so that I could retire early. I had saved some money, learned some financial modelling from a few years as an actuary and had been paying into a company pension scheme. Other…| uncountable thoughts
An important component of setting your investment objectives is the selection of a suitable benchmark to measure your investment decisions against. Suitable means a benchmark with some or all of the following characteristics: This rules out, for example, using a published index like the FTSE100. This excludes returned dividends of around 3-4% a year so […]| uncountable thoughts
I have a dev/ directory where I store the git repos for my code projects, and a pretty common pattern is to change to a directory and type code . to bring up the development environment. A lot of these are in remote containers, which I’ve been using for quite a while to develop in. […]| uncountable thoughts
I spent six weeks working intensively with AI to produce a fast, consolidated view of my two blogs which is hosted on my root domain uncountable.uk. This is purely an experiment – I’m not ready to give up my wordpress blogs just yet, but I have been impressed with how much functionality I could achieve […]| uncountable thoughts
I use wordpress to both create and display content for my diary and this blog. They are hosted on two different subdomains: diary.uncountable.uk and thoughts.uncountable.uk. It can be a pain managing two blogs, but they both have a very different purpose, identity and content. So I continue with both, as writing is more important, and […]| uncountable thoughts
Today is Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day. It occurs twice a year on the longest and shortest day and is a chance for volunteers to reflect on the list of things they do, and decide if some changes need to be made to prevent them burning out. I volunteer with several organisations. It’s a really important […]| uncountable thoughts
Do you ever wish you could go back and just have a Take Two? Just redo the the whole thing differently and work to a new outcome? I feel like I’m on Take Two of my fifties, with the Take One being the continuation of my forties which didn’t actually happen. In August 2019, a […]| uncountable thoughts
It’s been a joy hosting this month’s IndieWeb blog carnival on the subject of Small Web Communities. There were 20 submissions, and together they make up a pretty nice snapshot of the evolution, purpose and culture of online communities. The common thread that shone through each piece was just how important they are for the […]| uncountable thoughts
During May 2025 I was the monthly host for the IndieWeb blog carnival on the subject of Small Web Communities. I’ve participated in a few over the last year, but this was my first time hosting. The round up post has got all the wonderful submissions, but I wanted to record my hosting experience without […]| uncountable thoughts
I’m participating again in a brilliant and simple idea from Robert Birming to connect and share during the month of June. I will update this post throughout June with links that inspire and deserve to be shared. -------------- Thanks for being an RSS subscriber! If you have a blog, contact me and I'll add your […]| uncountable thoughts
Each week, I interview someone about their financial journey and their approach to money. By reading experiences shared by others, I hope you will be inspired to improve your own financial outcomes a little. Today is the turn of Ruslan Osipov who settled in the US in early adulthood and is building a robust strategy […]| uncountable thoughts
Ruslan has written an excellent summary of how the role of junior engineer will evolve with AI and also some very practical steps on how this transition can be navigated: Let’s be clear: the old model, where experience was often gained through highly repetitive tasks, was never perfect. It was simply the established way, the […]| uncountable thoughts
I have released the tool I use to model my net current assets in order to see how well they cover my expected future cash outflows. One key input variable is the Non-discretionary lifestyle fund multiple. It’s not immediately obvious what this is, but it’s critical to understanding the coverage of your assets. So this […]| uncountable thoughts
Each week, I interview someone about their financial journey and their approach to money. By reading experiences shared by others, I hope you will be inspired to improve your own financial outcomes a little. Today is the turn of Interactive Investor community member AAH who talks candidly about health and money. Tell us a little […]| uncountable thoughts
An important component of setting your investment objectives is the selection of a suitable benchmark to measure your investment decisions against.| uncountable thoughts
If you invest in the stock market, there are two strategies for selecting which stocks are in your portfolio: Active. This is where you make specific decisions to hold a position. This could be individual stocks chosen by yourself or an active fund where the fund manager decides what to…| uncountable thoughts
There are four principle components that influence how much wealth you can accumulate over a working lifetime. Your ability to achieve financial independence will depend on how focused you are at managing them. In order, these factors are: Regular contribution Maximising tax shelters Temperament Investment return Inexperienced investors often assume…| uncountable thoughts
Financial independence is a point in time when you are able to sustain your desired lifestyle for the remainder of your life without having to exchange your labour to do so. It's hard to achieve, and unless you win the lottery, it's unlikely to happen unless you put a plan…| uncountable thoughts
One rather obvious item which you need to understand after stopping work is how much your annual outgoings are going to be for the remainder of your life. Quite often the advice on this topic is rather flimsy, usually boiling down to estimating an annual amount needed at the start…| uncountable thoughts
If you choose to invest in equities, you also need to select a strategy to guide you on that journey. Once you start to implement that strategy, you will do so in one or more markets around the globe. This implementation mix will define a benchmark total market return for…| uncountable thoughts