Tap. Tap. Tap. Is this thing still on?
Anyone still following me or is everyone watching people dance half naked on TikTok now?
Anyway, here’s my rather large update.
My office closed last year. It genuinely sucked. I feel awful for my colleagues. Smart, experienced, massively talented people suddenly out of work in a development sector that has been decimated by budget cuts. Overall tens of thousands of jobs are gone. Almost no openings. Brutal odds.
I just happen to be okay.
Not because I am smarter.
Not because I saw it coming.
Not because I have something else lined up.
I’m okay because for my entire working life I did the boring thing. I saved first… put a big chunk of my salary away as soon as it arrived in my bank account. Every. Single. Month. Then I spent whatever was left.
No heroics, no crypto moonshots, no putting everything into NVidia on a hunch. Just boring ETF investing on autopilot with numbers that worked, which meant that when I got the news last year, at 46 years young, I didn’t need to panic.
Here is the uncomfortable truth no one likes to mention:
Your job is not permanent.
Not in IT. Not in non-profits. Not anywhere.
Planning your life around “this will probably continue” is not a strategy, it’s skydiving without a backup chute…
I was preparing for FIRE long before my office closed. So when it did, work did not disappear, it became optional.
That is the ultimate FU money.
Not fancy cars.
Not expensive watches.
Not a big house that’ll make your friends envious.
Freedom.
It feels great to be okay, but I also have guilt. Why couldn’t I get my colleagues on the same path years ago? Did I try hard enough? Should I have done more? Was there something I could have done better? I do know some of them used to read my blog, maybe I should have kept writing even though my office asked me not to…
I truly hope they’ll be okay. They deserve to be, after working so hard for so long to make sure the poorest were okay.
But if you’re still working you’ve got time to make yourself recession proof. Don’t plan to need a 45 year long career to get you to a safe retirement, you might not get that chance.
Aiming for FIRE isn’t just about retiring young so you can do what you want every day, it’s about building a life where money quietly shuts up and stops stressing you out. Forever.
And now for the fun part.
What will I be doing in 2026 and beyond?
Well four years ago I bought a very old boat. Over the internet. Without seeing it or having it inspected. That’s textbook for how not to buy a boat.
The engines were toast, every wire a death trap, and every through hull valve a sinking waiting to happen. My wife and I rebuilt it completely. I replaced the diesels with electric motors and for the last 3 years we’ve been living on it.
Because it’s 100% solar powered it costs way less to run than a normal boat and delivers a ridiculous amount of joy per rand. We’ve already taken it through three countries, Italy, Croatia and now we’re in Greece. For now I’ll just keep doing that, but without needing to sit on my laptop 8 hours a day.
Here’s what a typical day in our life currently looks like:
It’s a fantastic life, and I can do this, forever if I like, because I saved first, spent later, stuck to the plan, and most importantly never assumed my job was forever even though to all of us it appeared to be…