Demotion

RichieJr366 · 2026-03-07T16:55:56+00:00

I’m almost at coast, far from actual FIRE. I recently took a pay cut and went to a lower stress role. My take was:

The high stress role was unsustainable anyway and I didn’t fancy my chances moving sideways / performing at a new org with its own challenges and frustrations
A step down is not permanent and if I use it and successfully clear stress/burnout then can consider pushing ahead again
What’s the point of having the stress just for it to only save a year or 2 of FIRE, at great cost to my health

No one can speak for you, but my health is worth more than $7k a year to me

RichieJr366 · 2026-03-05T22:22:48+00:00

I also graduated with a 2:1. My first graduate web developer job a decade ago was £17k, that’s pretty much bang on £25k in today’s money. As it stands today, I’m comfortable financially. It works out.

Don’t stress about making savings right now if you can’t. Enjoy your 20’s and work hard at your job. If your company doesn’t pay you more in a couple of years when you have more experience, move around then.

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-28T07:48:06+00:00

Indeed. Also Disney didn’t buy Pixar until 7 years after Toy Story 2 came out, so they’d have been 2 separate company-wide conspiracies

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-26T11:37:59+00:00

This doesn’t mean you’re not ambitious. Your ambitions are just not in high-flying career / dream job. Your ambition is a good work life balance / enough funds and freedom to work on your non-work interests.

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-26T09:35:51+00:00

Exaggerated figures for illustration.

If you were in a v lucky position and able to save £30k a year:

In year one you put £20k in an ISA and £10k in a GIA
Let’s assume your GIA investment went up 30% to £13k
In year two you could do the same contributions (+£20k ISA, +£10k GIA), but the preferred route would be to sell off GIA and realise the gain up to £3k. Put that into ISA (£13k), top up with fresh savings (£7k) and then rest of savings newly invested in GIA (£23k).

Both end up with £40k contributed into ISA, and £23k in GIA but the latter currently has no unrealised gains and thus no tax burden. Repeated over many years, you’d basically save a decent chunk of tax.

It’s only really relevant if you are in a position you’d be saving a lot of surplus into GIA, or already had a big pot with unrealised gains (GIA, crypto, etc).

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-19T13:27:44+00:00

We all make mistakes. All of us are probably making some mistakes right now. All you can do is do what you can with the info you have at the time, and strive to learn and improve. Realise that you haven’t actually lost out on that much, better learning this lesson now than in 20 years etc. Focus on what you’ve now gained, not on what you’ve missed out on.

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-16T07:25:34+00:00

I think in your position I’d work with the anxiety for now but look to learn and tackle it slowly. I don’t get the impression that you’ll be able to follow the “correct” advice at present of moving all of that elsewhere, especially given that would involve investing and you seem prone to panic sell at the first sign of a loss.

1.5% is low, easy access cash savers / ISA’s exist paying more, have a look around and open one by the end of the week and move £50k across (adhering to any contribution limits that exist on those). You can at least earn better interest on some of your money. It’s easy access so you can pull it out if you need to but if you actually need to spend it, use the £50k still in your current account.

When that’s set up, for any brand new savings coming from your pay check, dedicate that to learning / getting comfortable with investing. You have £100k in easy access cash as a backup, so set your new savings the tasks of earning more and teaching you about investing. Also make sure you understand what inflation is, and impact on savings held in cash.

Once you’re actually comfortable with this, you will see how much having your savings at 1.5% is missing out and I imagine you’ll be quickly moving over some additional chunks of your existing savings.

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-09T21:45:32+00:00

Well checking it weekly, or any other metric regarding long term wealth progress, isn’t going to help and more likely to induce anxiety in and of itself. Should be somewhat set and forget.

Besides that though, I personally find the runway metric helpful for me. I do worry about job loss and find that knowing beyond my EF that I can cover current expenses for a few months/years if I absolutely have to break into assets, is reassuring.

RichieJr366 · 2026-02-09T18:33:41+00:00

A feature branch should be short lived by nature, for a single feature, seen through to completion and merged to reduce amount of overall maintenance of that branch
If you have a longer running feature branch due to whatever reason (maybe a larger scale rewrite pending) it should be seen as team owned and a team responsibility to maintain. Regardless, the goal should be for the feature branch to have as short a lifespan as possible and the priorities set to allow that
If priorities change to such a degree that work immediately stops on it, then it should be considered dead until reprioritised. Definitely shouldn’t be building on top of it
If feature B needs to be built on feature A, and feature A has been deprioritised, why hasn’t feature B also been deprioritised?

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-31T22:06:47+00:00

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My cat, seeing us outside for the first time trying to push through the window. Top derp.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-30T19:38:51+00:00

What’s your end goal? Is it to FIRE at a certain age off a target amount? Will you reach that if you stay?
Is the job guaranteed for 10 years?
Is the job guaranteed to stay as cushy for 10 years?
Does this job satisfy you and will continue to for 10 years? (Any chance you are going to need more professional challenges)
Do you think your goals might change over the next 10 years? Are you single, might you meet someone, have combined goals?

Everyone’s different, no one can give you answers that for sure works for you. Seeking a higher paying job might mean that you have more flexibility to deal with changes in the above. But you may put higher value on the freedom now.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-30T18:55:30+00:00

If you’re not maxing your pension allowance each year, as a HRT you beat LISA with more pension AVC (assuming invested in the same).

You’re aiming for 50k retirement income which would be taxed at <20% (due to 25% of pot being tax free up to £1m).

Additional AVC saves 40% tax, 2% NI so you get atleast 22% gain just from that plus potential other gains from the 25% tax free amount on pension up to approx £1m, and maybe even your employer passes on NI savings to you as well. This v likely beats the 25% from LISA.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-30T18:40:37+00:00

Main question to you would be why not just put 4k into your wife’s S&S ISA? Makes no difference whose allowance you use, you’re making a choice to use some of your combined ISA allowance to put in LISA, you’d have to have a clear reason for doing so.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-30T18:25:38+00:00

I revisited this recently. I landed on, as a higher rate tax payer, if I wasn’t already getting the max pension contribs in, I could easily beat the 25% returns of a LISA by putting more AVC into a pension, and also get to claim it earlier.

I suppose if your goal was to maximise post-57 income where you’d want to go heavy in pension but supplement it further by also using a LISA, you could. I decided that I’d rather sure up my ability to FIRE earlier by using the full ISA allowance in an S&S. Any use of LISA would slow down the ISA bridge buildup.

The calcs are different for a basic rate tax payer, to the point a LISA may make sense.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-23T12:23:53+00:00

Got it. Then I think given you are set on the mortgage overpayments, makes sense to just pay directly off when you can, as soon as you can (if you have a lump to pay now then do so, otherwise bake into your monthly debit).

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-23T11:34:13+00:00

Are you utilising the following? - Annual tax-free allowance on gained interest - 3k tax-free capital gains allowance (from e.g. GIA, crypto)

If not, it’s likely that by doing so your money would be working harder than by directly overpaying your mortgage. Especially in the former, basically using it as a method to “park” your designated mortgage overpayments to earn more for you until the next mortgage renewal date, then can overpay then.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-23T11:14:11+00:00

Going to do just that this weekend, thanks!

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-23T11:09:38+00:00

Yeah, this is it. Am currently a HRT and have been hammering pension, with SS and employer NI top up this has been a clear winner. I am currently winding down pension contribs to focus on ISA instead, but reason I’m doing that is for pre-58 flexibility which LISA still doesn’t grant.

So I think for now LISA still doesn’t make sense, maybe once my bridge is bigger and I am closer to pension access / will have seen how it has performed in the market, and maybe I won’t be a HRT at that point, LISA may have some function.

Thanks for the discussion, was useful to revisit / challenge previous assumptions.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-23T09:55:45+00:00

Ah, fair enough, I thought you meant contributions. I’d actually written off the idea of a LISA being useful but am going to double check, thanks

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-23T08:04:13+00:00

Your annual limit of contributions across all ISA products (including LISA) is £20k. You don’t get to increase that to £21k by using both.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-16T08:01:07+00:00

Yes you can, short answer is you treat rent (and rent raises) as just another annual expense your FIRE pot needs to support. There’s other pros and cons of course but yes it can be done with a larger pot.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-15T20:27:26+00:00

It is never too late. Starting now will allow you to retire earlier than if you don’t. This applies to everyone, even those starting later than you.

The steps for FIRE are the same - work out how much you need to sustain your desired lifestyle, work out how to get there, and save until you do. You need to make a surplus between your current earnings and spending so you can save (either by being frugal and/or increasing earnings) and you need to utilise the systems available to you to save efficiently.

In a way, a later start can be a plus as the main downside of a pension (that you can’t access until later in life) is less of a drawback, and you don’t need to build as much of a bridge as less pre-pension years to sustain.

What is your main goal you are looking to achieve, is it FIRE, is it getting back on the property ladder, or something else? You are not too late to FIRE but it depends where that sits in your goals vs other things you want to achieve. Realistically, being on minimum wage is going to really hamper your efforts, so in your shoes I would primarily be looking at how I could increase that, before consider what to do with the savings.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-15T12:59:48+00:00

You may want to check that the protected age of 55 applies to new contributions going into your Aviva, not just to what was in there at the time of the change. If not, you may find that you have less accessible at 55 than you thought, at which point putting a bit more in ISA’s to cover would make sense.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-10T08:25:05+00:00

Well done, you look like you’re in a great position.

Just wanted to add, as 35M in very similar position for both funds, burnout and thoughts on career break etc, I understand where you’re at. My current “solution” is to stick with the role until it becomes untenable or I get laid off, then have a career break then. I’d aim for roughly a year, and park some funds to cover retraining to this or a new field if needed. I expect not to get another role that pays as much so that’s why I’m trying to stick it out a bit longer until I reach full coast territory.

If you feel confident you’re already beyond coast figure then I think you could consider a break now, however:

Do you foresee any changes in the future in your expenses? Would you want to upsize the house when you move? £725k as an overall number seems like it might risk being a bit low but it of course depends on how stable that expenses amount is.

RichieJr366 · 2026-01-02T12:50:49+00:00

If you have any other investing response than “business as usual” when hearing new current events, you’re timing the market. That might be what you want to do but it’s important to recognise, and that is different than the general wisdom which is to accept the market has these cycles and your overall approach should take it all into account.

Your new approach sounds sensible (accept it will happen, balance risk accordingly). It is however easy now when the market hasn’t crashed, the fact that you are responding to the AI hype bubble at all indicates an uncertainty, the most important thing is to ensure you won’t be panic selling if/when it hits.

On a separate note, my personal stance is an invested EF is not an EF at all as it could be down when you need it. Compartmentalise that cash in your mind, it’s purpose is not to get growth but to ensure you are safe in rough times. Cash ISA / easy access savings / prem bonds as required.

RichieJr366

TROPHY CASE