There is nothing like investing when it comes to exposing yourself as a weak-minded gimboid.

I know all about buying stocks low and selling high. I understand the rationale behind Warren Buffett’s aphorism, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

Yet when my portfolio hits red, I fret. And when my return numbers glow green, I feel the pleasure centres in my brain light up like Vegas.

The uptick in fortune means it will cost me more every time I buy additional equities, of course. But hang the expense, I want to be a part of this now! The party’s on and I need to get my snout in the trough, quick.

I know this because despite being a good passive investor who pound-cost averages and rebalances annually, I am not an entirely mechanical man.

And oh, the flesh is weak.

Only flesh and blood

You see I long allowed myself a measure of freedom when investing – a certain amount of money to put into the market every year that wasn’t dictated by the calendar.

Don’t get me wrong. This was never a gambler’s float, used to punt on some company that’s rumoured to be on the verge of discovering cancer-curing jam.

I invested my discretionary dollop in index trackers. However I was free to do so whenever I wished.

Sounds good? The snag is that in reality I struggled to take the plunge when the market did. I wasn’t always been brave enough to blow my ammo when equities were relatively cheap. I held on and on until the upswings, and then I got less for my money.

Oh I had my excuses. Especially when I hadn’t yet escaped the rat race, and so was still subject to the whims of The Man as well as Mr Market.

Impure instinct

Especially before full-strength financial independence had my back, my brain was always on hand with self-justifications to reassure me that reason was actually in control, not instinct:

• I was worried about my job.

• My company was restructuring.

• My monthly drip-feed was already casting cash into the cavernous cake hole of the capital markets.

• “I better not throw in any more in case I’m axed! I’ll need every penny.”

The reality was that the overweening fear of loss was in charge.

What these optional investing side quests actually taught me was I am just one of the herd. A member of the cattle class.

I’m not special. I react and feel like everyone else who makes up the statistics that show this sort of irrational behaviour can cost investors dear.

Gorilla warfare

The truth is it takes willpower to overcome the apeman within, and there’s some evidence that willpower is in limited supply for all of us. We can’t bank on having enough in reserve when we need it.

This in turn means the fewer decisions that are left up to my meat-bag of a brain, the better.

Passive investing would be much easier if we could program a robot to handle it all for us and to physically prevent our continued interference, like some benevolent Dalek with a taser.

Perhaps the AI revolution will give us all the cold-blooded reptilian investing agent of our dreams?

Once it’s emerged from the primordial slop, I mean.

Well, perhaps. But until we can trust an agent to run our portfolio without it going rogue and selling the house to bet everything on pork futures, it’s up to us to manage our all-too-fallible frontal lobes.

Don’t just do something

Back when I still stacking my escape-stash, automatic investing droids were nowhere to be seen. So instead I automated as much of the investing process as possible.

You see, the one human behaviour that always worked for me is inertia.

• I never messed with the direct debit that funnelled money out of my bank account and into my broker’s.

• I kept hands-off the regular investment scheme that piped cash straight to my chosen funds.

• I dared not touch lock-in wrappers like ISAs, pensions, and fixed-term bank accounts, where a cost is imposed for premature evacuation.

Inertia is the great human pacifier. It’s a force that’s more powerful than fear in my world – especially if the fear is something intangible, like an investing loss.

Eliminate all carbon units

There are other weak points where human intervention can easily scupper the best plans.

For instance, you might fiddle with asset allocation every time you choose the next fund to buy. And, boy, what mischief you can get up to when it’s time to rebalance…

“Sell those lovely equities to buy more bloody bonds. In this market?!”

Putting my investing on rails did help me to resist the urge to keep thrashing my winners.

But it sometimes also took a stiffening of resolve, and a quick prayer of deliverance to the passive investing gods.

Older and colder

Since I declared myself FIRE – and declared to my bosses where they could shove The Accumulator’s Personal Growth and Development Plan V4.6 – I’ve found it easier to leave my portfolio to do its thing.

I suppose the same fully-funded sangfroid that enables me to do some work on the side without getting sucked back into the office is also helping me to ignore the market noise.

Have I then reached some state of investing transcendence?

Doubtful. So far so good, but I’m regularly tested and I’m still only a passive investor.

I stayed the course during the Covid crash, true, and I learned more than I lamented during the recent bond-a-geddon.

But who knows how a real humdinger of a bear market would hit me?

Better to stay humble and self-aware.

Automatic for the people

If you recognise these frailties in yourself, then there are various tools you could explore to take the human edge off – from automatic investment plans at online brokers, to all-in-one personal finance apps that limit your investing choices but also your horizons.

They can still be enablers when it comes to self-destructive fiddling, though. And they can be relatively expensive.

These days there’s a lot of talk that AI agents will soon do everything for us. In theory it sounds like automatic investing nirvana. But when you think about how obsequious the typical chatbot is, would you really trust one not to egg on your worst impulses?

Besides, from what I can see AI is so far mostly being deployed to tempt investors off the rational path.

All-in-one not one-for-all

Perhaps the closest proxy for a truly hands-off investing robot is a good multi-asset fund.

Made popular in the UK by Vanguard’s LifeStrategy products, a multi-asset fund is an index-tracking, fund-of-funds with built-in rebalancing features – truly automatic investing.

All you need do is pick the asset allocation of your choice, set-up a direct debit to keep it oiled, and then let the program run.

With this sort of investing the human being is taken off the table – which is the point of the exercise after all – and everything is left to the robot. No more pesky emotions.

Of course, you might eventually start to worry that your multi-asset fund hasn’t got all the assets you want. Not in the right doses, anyway.

Perhaps you’re being greedy or fearful, or perhaps you’ve become better informed. Humans are not incapable of judgement, after all. It’s the rash decisions we want to tamp down, not the strategic thinking.

At least with your investing machine whirring away in the background, you can take time to explore your options with the serenity of a wannabe Cyborg Buffett.

Batteries not included.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

The post I, Robot appeared first on Monevator.

What caught my eye this week.

The post Weekend reading: Who wants to see a billionaire? appeared first on Monevator.

A recent Monevator piece about Gen Z and pensions quoted a young reader stating flatly: “I don’t believe that I’ll be a recipient of a State Pension.”

I’ve read a lot of responses to that sort of line. Mostly they’re some variation of “don’t worry, it’ll be fine”, which is unconvincing and slightly patronising because nobody actually knows the future.

Indeed while the recently-mooted shake-up of the State Pension’s triple-lock from 2030 is pitched as making it more sustainable for the long run, some people will instead see it as proof that politicians will always be tempted to tinker it away, or at least introduce means-testing for what’s now a universal benefit.

So let’s take concerns about the future of the State Pension seriously. Because if you genuinely think the State Pension won’t be there for you, the useful question is what your alternative plan will cost you if you’re proven right. Work that out and you’ll find out what you’re really arguing about.

I run a free pension calculator, which is how I ended up doing this arithmetic in the first place.

Be warned: the number is bracing!

What you’d replace with a DIY State Pension

For the purposes of this article we’ll assume the pension triple-lock continues in its existing form. We don’t know who’ll be governing the UK in 2030 – and thus we can’t be sure if and how the triple-lock will change. Modest tweaks don’t alter the central premise, anyway.

The full new State Pension is currently £241.30 a week for 2026/27, or £12,547.60 a year (Source: GOV.UK). Call it £12,548.

We should focus on the State Pension’s specification rather than that number, though, because the specification is the expensive part:

• The State Pension is paid for life, however long you live.
• It is currently uprated every year under the triple lock, by the highest of earnings growth, CPI, or 2.5% (Source: House of Commons Library).
• You’re not relying on an insurer or an investment fund to deliver the income.
• It isn’t means-tested.

If a private company sold this as a product, it would be the most conservative one on the shelf.

The market price

The nearest alternative to the State Pension you can buy is an RPI-linked annuity.

Hargreaves Lansdown publishes best buy rates. As at 17 September 2026, a single-life RPI-linked annuity with a five-year guarantee paid £5,566 a year per £100,000 at age 65. ¹

Hargreaves Lansdown doesn’t quote for age 68 – the State Pension age a 25-year-old is currently legislated to reach. Its table runs 65 then 70, at £5,566 and £6,338 respectively.

However interpolating those two numbers gives us roughly £6,029 per £100,000 at 68. (That’s my arithmetic, not a quote, so treat it as indicative.)

• Divide £12,548 by 6.03% and you get £208,000.

Thus £208,000 is what it costs, today, to buy the income the State Pension gives you, at the age you’d get it.

Note that a few weeks earlier the same table showed £5,585 at 65. The rate moved by around a percentage point over that short period, and the replacement cost by thousands of pounds with it. So please do take every number in this section as just a snapshot of one week’s pricing.

For more context, replacing the same income three years earlier at age 65 would cost about £225,000.

Or – if you’d settle for a level annuity that never rises – £156,000.

That last figure is the one people quote when they want the State Pension to look cheap. But it’s not a fair comparison, because inflation will eat a level annuity alive over a 25 year retirement.

And £208,000 is a low-ball estimate…

An RPI-linked annuity tracks RPI. But the State Pension currently tracks the triple lock, which is the highest of the three measures cited above. The State Pension has therefore generally run ahead of prices since the triple lock was introduced.

The Commons Library notes that the basic State Pension’s value relative to average earnings climbed from around 16% in the 2000s to roughly 26% under the triple lock. So an annuity that merely keeps pace with RPI is a worse product than the thing it’s replacing.

Also, RPI itself is changing.

From February 2030, RPI will be aligned with CPIH, which has historically run about a percentage point lower. Anyone buying an RPI-linked annuity today is therefore buying an index that is scheduled to become less generous within four years.

I suggest then it’s best we treat £208,000 as a floor.

What this all means if you’re 25

Here’s where the analysis gets more cheerful.

That £208,000 – in today’s money, 43 years away – is not an unthinkable number. You can achieve it through a monthly direct debit, wise investing, and a lot of patience.

How much your direct debit – your contribution – needs to be depends on what you assume about returns:

That’s a spread of more than two to one – from £90 to £205 – in terms of how much you’ll need to put away each month, just from changing the growth assumptions.

It’s an open question as to what the most accurate figure is to use. Anyone giving you a single number is probably trying to sell you something!

Many happy returns?

It’s worth saying where the return assumptions in my table above sit compared to the regulator’s:

• The FCA makes providers project pensions at 2%, 5% and 8% a year, with inflation assumed at 2%.

• That is roughly 0%, 2.9% and 5.9%, after inflation.

• My calculator’s ‘cautious’ 4% therefore sits above the regulator’s central case, and its ‘optimistic’ 6% sits above the regulator’s top one.

I’d rather be upfront about this here than have it pointed out in the comments.

Again, please read the three settings as a range to think about, not a forecast.

Tomorrow’s DIY pensioner today

Let’s now consider a 25-year-old on £39,000 (the ONS median for full-time employees in April 2025) who pays the auto-enrolment minimum of 8%, and who retires at 68.

Firstly a few things about how my tool turns the resultant pension pot into an income:

• The calculator assumes that you take the full 25% tax-free lump sum at retirement and then draw 4% a year from what’s left.
• The resultant retirement income figure includes a full State Pension.
• Everything is in today’s money.
• The tax-free lump sum sits outside this income figure, so it would be money on top.

Here’s the money shot:

Source: Pension Sprout

A pot of £620,000 could produce a retirement income of about £31,000 a year. Of this income, £12,548 – roughly 40% – is the State Pension.

That £31,000 is the number I’d put in front of anyone who thinks the State Pension is irrelevant to them. On this central case, it makes up two-fifths of their retirement income. Moreover it’s two-fifths that’s inflation-proofed and can’t run out.

Switch the same person to the cautious 4% setting and the pot falls to £488,000:

Source: Pension Sprout

We haven’t changed the contributions, but the final sum used to buy an income is £132,000 smaller due to lower investment growth. The State Pension share of our pensioner’s resultant income climbs to 46%.

What if our 25-year-old wants to self-fund the whole thing, so that losing the State Pension entirely wouldn’t change their retirement income?

In this case they will need to lift their own contribution from 5% to about 7.8%, which takes the total from 8% to 10.8%:

Source: Pension Sprout

The higher contributions add about £212,000 to the final pot in this forecast, which covers the £208,000 extra the market would charge. It would cost around £90 a month at today’s salary, rising with pay.

I think that’s manageable beginning at age 25. (It’s brutal if you’re starting at 55 – which is a whole other lesson!)

Buying into what the government is selling

Now we get to the comparison that made me want to write this article.

You can buy extra State Pension. A year of voluntary Class 3 National Insurance costs £18.40 a week, or £956.80 for a full year. For someone who needs 35 qualifying years for the full new State Pension, one additional year adds 1/35th of the full rate.

So £241.30 ÷ 35 = £6.89 a week, or £358.50 a year, index-linked by the triple lock, for life.

Work out the implied rate:

• £358.50 of annual income for £956.80 of capital is 37.5%. That is, it pays for itself in two years and eight months.

The open market offers around 6% on the equivalent product, whereas the state charges a price that implies about 37%.

We can push this further. If you could buy all 35 qualifying years at the price of voluntary contributions (spoiler: you can’t!) then it would cost just £33,488. The annuity market will charge you around £208,000 for the same income.

On this crude but illustrative comparison, the State Pension is available at roughly a sixth of what it’s worth, which is a strange thing to describe as the benefit nobody expects to receive.

But before anyone rushes off to their online banking, some important caveats:

• You cannot buy 35 years of State Pension. You can normally only fill gaps in the last six tax years. And only years that aren’t already qualifying.

• Paying doesn’t always increase your pension, particularly for anyone with a pre-2016 record or a history of being contracted out.

• Check with the Future Pension Centre before doing anything. These payments are an easy way to waste a four-figure sum on a pension decision.

My comparison is just made to show you again what the State Pension is really worth.

So is the Gen Z reader wrong?

Not exactly, but I’d argue their fear is aimed at the wrong target.

• “The State Pension will be abolished” is a low-probability outcome. Mostly because pensioners vote.
• “The State Pension age will keep moving” is already happening in legislation.
• “The triple lock should get watered down” is now the stated goal of our prime minister. It’s previously been suggested by the OBR and various think tanks, too.

In my opinion then, it’s the risk of changes to the State Pension rather than it going away entirely that we might want to plan for.

So what would I say to a 25-year-old who doesn’t believe in the State Pension?

Fine. Work out your plan as though you’ll never get it. My sums suggest this will cost you about £90 a month on the central case. Or £206 if you use the regulator’s return assumptions instead of mine. You can make up your own mind and do the maths for yourself.

Suppose you’re wrong about the politics and the State Pension endures?

Then you’ll simply retire considerably richer than you planned. There are worse mistakes!

Just don’t confuse “I don’t trust it” with “it isn’t worth anything”.

For most of us the State Pension will be the largest guaranteed ², inflation-linked income we will ever have.

That was why I built my calculator – to put the number on the screen so people can argue about it.

If you want to run these figures with your own assumptions, you’ll find it at Pension Sprout.

Sam Parkinson built Pension Sprout after failing to find a pension calculator that didn’t ask for his email address. Sam is not a financial adviser and none of the above is advice, just information for your ongoing research. Figures correct as at 17 September 2026. They will need rechecking against the current tax year whenever you read this.

1. Note: The State Pension doesn’t come with a five-year guarantee, which is an additional useful benefit to the annuity.
2. i.e. Government-backed.

The post What would it cost to replace the State Pension yourself? appeared first on Monevator.

The tale is one of double-digit equity gains, dragged down by bond fund ankle weights:

Actually, the story of 2026 is the story of the portfolio’s lifetime.

The equities bloc (in the green zone below) has performed creditably to amazingly. The 13.7% annualised return of Developed World ex-UK going back well over a decade is extraordinary:

However nominal UK government bonds have almost single-handedly stolen the icing on the cake. The gilty party has lost 3% per year, leaving the Slow & Steady with a 7.6% annualised return since launch.

(Which I’m happy with, to be clear. The objective was only ever to be average.)

The Slow & Steady is Monevator’s model passive investing portfolio. It was set up at the start of 2011 with £3,000. An extra £1,360 is invested every quarter into a diversified set of index funds, tilted towards equities. You can read the origin story and find all the previous passive portfolio posts in the Monevator vaults. Last quarter’s instalment can be found here.

All returns in this post are nominal GBP total returns unless otherwise stated. Subtract about 3% from the portfolio’s annualised performance figure to estimate the real return after inflation.

Too good to last

There was a plot twist in the story that led us to this chapter.

You may recall bonds had a remarkable ten-year run from 2010. But they then fell off the cliff, down 39% from the high point:

Data: Vanguard U.K. Government Bond Index Fund: 31 Dec 2010 to 02 Oct 2026.

Here’s an action-replay of the upward leg of the chart above:

Vanguard’s gilt tracker racked up 6.6% annualised returns from 2010 until its peak in March 2020.

Now for the shocker:

The same fund has dished out a -5.7% annualised loss in the six-and-a-half years since.

Bonds have recovered a little since their October 2022 trough – picking up 2.8% annualised to-date since then. Still, that’s little consolation when inflation has averaged 3.4% and World equities 13.5% in the meantime.

Are bonds broken? Is it a buying opportunity? I’ve read commentary that cuts both ways.

But…

I wouldn’t start from here

If I were starting a similar passive portfolio from scratch, then nominal bonds would be allocated a reduced role compared to the Slow & Steady, given what I know now.

I’d likely split the defensive allocation evenly between gold, commodities, short index-linked bonds, and nominal bonds.

If I rerun the historical tape from the end of 2010, that alternative Slow & Steady earns 8.2% annualised instead of 7.6%.

The difference isn’t huge. The portfolio is about 10% bigger. So it’s less about what could have been and more about what may come next.

A multi-layered defensive array is better fitted for the range of threats that menace passive investors. Not least the storm clouds of inflation and economic uncertainty.

This portfolio only has four years to run, so I should think about making those changes anyway.

New transactions

Every quarter we blow another £1,360 on the market dice and hope to roll sixes. Our stake is split between our seven funds, according to our predetermined asset allocation.

We rebalance using Larry Swedroe’s 5/25 rule. That hasn’t been activated this quarter, so the trades play out as follows:

Emerging market equities

iShares Emerging Markets Equity Index Fund D – OCF 0.18%

Fund identifier: GB00B84DY642

New purchase: £108.80

Buy 39.4804 units @ £2.76

Global property

iShares Environment & Low Carbon Tilt Real Estate Index Fund – OCF 0.18%

Fund identifier: GB00B5BFJG71

New purchase: £68

Buy 27.9077 units @ £2.44

Developed world ex-UK equities

Vanguard FTSE Developed World ex-UK Equity Index Fund – OCF 0.14%

Fund identifier: GB00B59G4Q73

New purchase: £503.20

Buy 0.5395 units @ £932.72

UK equity

Vanguard FTSE UK All-Share Index Trust – OCF 0.06%

Fund identifier: GB00B3X7QG63

New purchase: £68

Buy 0.1833 units @ £370.90

Global small cap equities

Vanguard Global Small-Cap Index Fund – OCF 0.29%

Fund identifier: IE00B3X1NT05

New purchase: £68

Buy 0.1188 units @ £572.42

UK gilts

Vanguard UK Government Bond Index – OCF 0.12%

Fund identifier: IE00B1S75374

New purchase: £285.60

Buy 2.1336 units @ £133.86

Global inflation-linked bonds

Royal London Short Duration Global Index-Linked Fund – OCF 0.27%

Fund identifier: GB00BD050F05

New purchase: £258.40

Buy 237.9374 units @ £1.09

New investment contribution = £1,360

Trading cost = £0

Average portfolio OCF = 0.17%

User manual

Take a look at our broker comparison table for your best investment account options.

Or learn more about choosing the cheapest stocks and shares ISA for your situation.

You might also enjoy a refresher on why we think most people are best choosing passive instead of active investing.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

The post The Slow and Steady passive portfolio update: Q3 2026 appeared first on Monevator.

The first Weekend Reading every month can be read by anyone on the Monevator website. Subscribe for free to our email newsletter or become a member to ensure you see the rest.

I thought it notable there wasn’t more pushback in the comments last weekend, when I cited a growing consensus that something must be done about the pension triple-lock.

A few of you raised thoughtful questions, mostly about what really drove the convergence of pension-age income with that of the rest of the population.

But there were no pitchforks, no curses. No shaking a fist at the unfairness of it all.

With hindsight, this eerie quiet further suggested that most of us can see the pension triple-lock is fair game – unsustainable in its current form.

And sure enough, on Tuesday the Prime Minister pulled the bandaid off.

The triple lock would be tweaked to reduce its long-run cost, Andy Burnham said, and any savings used to fund later life social care.

Triple-topped

As the BBC recaps:

The triple lock was introduced in 2010 by the coalition government and designed to ensure the value of the state pension was not overtaken by the increase in the cost of living or the incomes of working people.

It means the state pension rates rise every April by either inflation, earnings growth or 2.5% – whichever is the highest.

Burnham said this will stay in place until 2030, at which point he would like to “adjust it”.

He said: “The state pension will continue to rise every year at least by prices or 2.5%. And it will hold its value relative to earnings over time so that pensioners will always share in the rising prosperity of the nation.

But this change will generate significant savings which we will use to build up our national care service.

Some may not realise it but older people with nothing more than the state pension, or only a little more, can find themselves paying care charges today from that small income. Under my plan, this will no longer happen.”

On first blush it looks a sensible compromise. I think most people support a reasonable State Pension, if only because we’ll benefit from it ourselves.

But its ‘every way’s a winner’ ratchet made the old triple-lock system increasingly unviable. It’s already forecast to cost around three times as much by the end of the decade as originally expected.

Burnham’s tweak should reset the built-in escalation. According to the IFS:

The new, reformed version of the triple lock still contains three parts.

Inflation, earnings growth and 2.5% are all important.

But the new mechanism means that each year the state pension will instead increase by the maximum of:

• CPI inflation
• 2.5%
• the amount needed to ensure the state pension keeps up with average earnings growth since the introduction of the new policy.

Essentially Burnham is saying enough is enough on the catch-up we saw last week. The new tweak effectively cements the status quo, relative to average earnings, in the long run, while still providing protection against everyday inflation.

Here’s an illustrative scenario:

Source: IFS

Sense and sensibility

At first blush it looks like a good change to me.

The old mechanism was becoming too expensive. This new triple-lock will still protect the real value of the State Pension – and it will still be increasingly costly to fund. But the revised link with average earnings at least ties that cost implicitly to the taxes that will pay for it.

The tweak also seems like a pragmatic one – announced without bombast, a sensible timeline to delivery, and made in the face of some political risk.

Finally, funding social care for the elderly is a huge issue, as anyone who worked through my co-blogger’s deep dive a few years ago knows.

I don’t like the means-testy sounding way that Burnham is pitching his fresh look at the issue. Ideally I’d prefer some kind of paid-in insurance system that meant everyone would get to live in a care home for free in the end if they needed to. This would remove the lottery element to end-of-life planning, making it much easier to save (and spend) accordingly.

But at least it’s a real and weighty problem to tackle, unlike the phoney wars of the past decade.

Obviously it’s too early to declare that UK politics has returned to a reasonable centre ground. But might this too be a tweak in the right direction?

Have a great weekend!

From Monevator

Our updated guide to help you find the best broker – Monevator

Their first home: the next buying opportunity? – Monevator [Mogul Members]

From the archive-ator: FIRE-side chat: domestic geo-arbitrage made it possible – Monevator

News

Relaunch of Help to Buy with new Your First Home scheme – This Is Money

Crackdown announced on ‘cowboy’ leasehold property agents – BBC

UK borrowing costs up as gilt yields hit 6% for first time since 1998 – Independent

Average homeowner mortgage rate doubles to 4% for first time since 2009… – T.I.M

…but house prices are the most affordable since 2015 – This Is Money

UK disposable income rises as benefits payouts soar ahead of wages – City AM

Jaecoo 7 UK’s best-selling car as Chinese brands take nearly 25% of market – Autocar

TPG joins race for Monzo stake after end of £10bn bid talks – Sky

Barclays softens return-to-office plans for UK staff after backlash – Guardian

London’s Oxford Street to be pedestrianised from October – BBC

UK diesel price hits record of £2 a litre – Guardian

EVs up to nine times cheaper to drive than petrol cars in UK – Carbon Brief

Products and services

^{Disclosure: Links to platforms may be affiliate links, where we may earn a commission via a tracking cookie. This article is not personal financial advice. When investing, your capital is at risk and you may get back less than invested. With commission-free brokers other fees may apply. See terms and fees. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.}

Three major lenders lift mortgage rates as sub-5% deals disappear fast – This Is Money

Barclays switch offer: Get up to £300 – Be Clever With Your Cash

Get up to £1,500 cashback when you transfer your cash and/or investments to Charles Stanley Direct through this affiliate link*. Terms apply – Charles Stanley*​

The zero-bills home: how one family is beating the energy price hikes – Guardian

Dine at Michelin-starred restaurants across the UK for as little as £20 – Which

Get up to £3,000 cashback when you open an Interactive Investor SIPP via this affiliate link*. Terms apply – Interactive Investor*​

Is Amazon Prime worth the money? – Be Clever With Your Cash

Seven things to know before taking advantage of Free Wills Month – Which

Homes for sale in landmark towers, in pictures – Guardian

Comment and opinion

Index investors probably aren’t missing much in private markets – A.W.O.C.S.

Ten ways to feel rich – White Coat Investor

People are too worried about the bond market – Fortunes & Frictions

A brutal bond market [US but relevant] – A Wealth of Common Sense

Financial lessons – Humble Dollar

FIRE makes taking on more debt a non-starter – Financial Samurai

Exponential wealth: centuries of stock and bond returns – CFA Institute

Five things worth paying for – Dan Haylett

Stop obsessing about the safe withdrawal rate… – Use Your Wealth

…though here’s yet another way to improve on it if you do [Research] – SSRN

More recent academic research – Alpha in Academia

On the job mini-special

Work hard – and be less precious – when you’re young – Slow Boring

What’s eating the office? – Dror Poleg

The invisible way companies are using AI to set salaries – W.S.J. [h/t Abnormal Returns]

Naughty corner: Active antics

Steps to take if you own a lot of stock in your employer – The Joint Account

What makes Warren Buffett unique – Jason Zweig

Shopify, the snowboard shop that redefined e-commerce – Fiscal.AI

The looming AI earnings and accounting headwind – Tker

Most stocks are losers – A Wealth of Common Sense

AI is boosting interest rates, not inflation – Morningstar

Anthropic’s S-1 pre-IPO filing mini-special

The numbers behind Anthropic: an FAQ – The Ringer

Anticipating the risk factors in Anthropic’s prospectus – Shivaram

Kindle book bargains

The Man Who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman – £0.99 on Kindle*

Money: The Story of Humanity by David McWilliams – £0.99 on Kindle*

The Price of Money by Rob Dix – £0.99 on Kindle*

Risk and Reward by Ben Carlson – £0.99 on Kindle*

Environmental factors

Heat pump sales soar across Europe after states cut electricity taxes – Guardian

The US state replacing power plants with home batteries – BBC

Wolves did not save Yellowstone – The Conversation

A conservation success story for New Zealand’s heaviest insect – Phys.org

Racing to save the Florida orange industry from collapse – WSJ [h/t Abnormal Returns]

Robot overlord roundup

Where’s the ‘intelligence explosion’? – Ramez Naam via Noahpinion

How Anthropic and OpenAI got serious about business models in 2026 – Tom Tunguz

Apps, agents, and aggregation – Stratechery

More words that explain AI – Dror Poleg

A critique of Ed Zitron’s AI prediction track record – Dan Luu

AI risks and you mini-special

Will AI agents cause the next corporate bank run? – Treasury Spring

Why many people fear AI will ruin their retirement… – Mr Money Mustache

…and why many people don’t fear AI enough – Behavioural Investment

Not at the dinner table

Brexit referendum ‘possible’ in Labour election manifesto, says Burnham – BBC

US-China trade is unravelling as American’s deficit shifts to other partners – Econovis

The US “Who You Gonna Believe?” election – Paul Krugman

Off our beat

Random is as random does – Tim Harford

A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal – IEEE

The 12th-century military disaster that forever changed global finance – Big Think

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket – Oliver Burkeman

How Japan’s geography determined its history – Uncharted Territories

Men are having a purpose crisis, and things are getting weird – Next Big Idea

People who walk more or walk faster live longer, study finds – Harvard Medical School 

M&S Custard Cream Spread: Britain has completed food – Central Bylines

And finally…

“A world equity index tracker is the only equity investment a rational investor ever needs to own.”
– Lars Kroijer, Investing Demystified*

^{*Links marked with an asterisk are affiliate links.}

The post Weekend reading: State Pension to fall out of lock step appeared first on Monevator.

All economies are cyclical. But in recent years the UK economy has been like a baroque town clock – one where a cuckoo pops out every 60 minutes, a peasant girl emerges every four hours to chase the geese, and at midnight the clock face spins wildly around before ending up exactly as it started.

The post Their first home. The next buying opportunity? [Members] appeared first on Monevator.

Vacuuming Buck House with a straw would be more fulfilling. But it would not have produced a quick and easy overview of all the main execution-only investment services.

Investment platforms, stock brokers, call them what you will… we’ve stripped them back to basics for you to eyeball over a cup of cocoa and a handful of your favourite stimulants.

What’s changed with this update?

^{Disclosure: Links to platforms may be affiliate links, where we may earn a commission via a tracking cookie. This article is not personal financial advice. When investing, your capital is at risk and you may get back less than invested. With commission-free brokers other fees may apply. See terms and fees. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.}

Not a vast amount of movement, pecking-order-wise. The main players are as you were.

Still, Chip has chipped in with a SIPP, continuing the trend for fintechs to round out their packages with pensions as their user base develops grey whiskers.

Quilter Invest has SIPPed up, too.

In both cases, the choice is restricted to essentially a single multi-asset fund brand.

That’s a pretty good idea in my view, given how analysis paralysis stalls many a budding investor. (Including my twenty-something self).

Who’s the best broker?

It’s impossible to say. There are too many subtle differences in the offers. The UK’s brokers occupy more niches than the mammal family. And while I know which one is best for me, I can’t know which one is right for you.

What we have done is laser focus the comparison onto the most important factor in play: cost.

An execution-only broker is not on this Earth to hold anyone’s hand.

Yes, we want their websites to work. We’d prefer them to not screw us over, go bust, or send us to the seventh circle of call centre hell. These things we take for granted.

So customer service metrics are not included in this table. It’s purely a bare-knuckle contest of brute cost for services rendered.

On that basis  our ‘Good for’ column reads as below.

Commission-free brokers

• InvestEngine, Freetrade*, Lightyear*, Prosper*, Trading 212*, and IG

These are commission-free brokers. It’s always worth looking at a commission-free broker’s ‘How we make money’ page because – rest assured – they will be earning a buck, one way or another.

Just search that topic on their websites.

If you find commission-free brokers unsettling, then stay under the FSCS £85,000 investor compensation limit or use a broker that charges fees directly. You’ll find some very competitive offers in our table.

Prefer paying directly?

ISAs and GIAs

• Scottish Widows

SIPPs

• Vanguard up to around £60K portfolio value
• Interactive Investor* £60K – £100K
• Fidelity* and AJ Bell* £100K+ (ETFs only, not funds)

The best choice for you depends on how often you trade and the value of your accounts, plus your personal priorities around customer service, family accounts, flexible ISAs, multi-currency accounts, and so on.

Our ‘Good for’ choices are cost-based. We assume 12 buy and four sell trades per year. Buy trades use a broker’s regular investing scheme when available.

Using the full table

We divide the major UK brokers into four camps:

• Flat-fee brokers – these charge one price for platform services, regardless of the size of your assets. In other words, they might charge you £100 per year, whether your portfolio is worth £1,000 or £1 million. Generally, if you’ve got a large portfolio then you definitely want to look here. Bear in mind that fixed fee doesn’t mean you won’t also be tapped up for dealing monies and a laundry list of other charges.

• Percentage-fee brokers – this is where the wealthy need to be careful. These guys charge a percentage of your assets, say 0.3% per year. For a portfolio of £1,000 this would amount to a fee of £3 – but on £1 million you’d be paying £3,000. Small investors should generally use percentage-fee brokers. However even surprisingly moderate rollers are better off with fixed fees. Many percentage-fee brokers offer fee caps and tiered charges to limit the damage.

• Commission-free brokers – these upstarts apparently don’t charge you at all. Their marketing departments have it easy, simply pointing to £0 account charges and trading fees costing diddly squat. So why don’t these firms go bankrupt? Because they make up the difference using other methods. Revenue streams can include higher spreads, no interest on cash, and cross-selling more profitable services.

• Trading platforms – brokerages that suit active investors who want to deal mostly in shares and more exotic securities besides. Think of noob-unfriendly sites like Interactive Brokers*, Saxo, and friends.

Our table looks complex. But choosing the right broker needn’t be any more painful than checking it offers the investments you want and running a few numbers on your portfolio.

Help us find the best online broker for all of you

Our table’s ongoing vitality relies on crowd-sourcing.

We review the whole thing roughly every three months. But it can be kept permanently up-to-date if you contact us or leave a comment every time you find an inaccuracy, fresh information, or an investing platform you think should be added.

Thanks to your efforts as much as ours, our broker comparison table has become an invaluable resource for UK investors looking to find the best online broker.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

*Links marked with an asterisk are affiliate links.

The post Our updated guide to help you find the best online broker appeared first on Monevator.

What caught my eye this week.

The post Weekend reading: Make mine a triple, but what about the hangover? appeared first on Monevator.

A friend of mine expects to receive a modest windfall from an inheritance. Their now-deceased relative was sufficiently twice-removed to make the money both unexpected and also unencumbered with emotional baggage. (Notwithstanding my envious side-eye…)

“Well, I’d put it in a pension,” I said.

Just because the money had effectively fallen out of the sky, that doesn’t mean they should flush it down the toilet.

“Of course,” I continued, “I am not your financial advisor. Everyone’s situation is different so seek professional advice if you need it.”

Now it was my turn to get the side-eye.

“Also,” I whispered, leaning in, “Your capital is at risk, and you may get back less money than you started with.”

My friend did not get the joke. But they did buy me a coffee to hear more.

Why invest an inheritance in a pension?

My friend expects to receive about £30,000. That’s a significant amount of money for most people, but not a life-changing one.

Certainly not if they blow it on a car and a luxury family holiday to St Lucia.

For perspective, the average inheritance in the UK is around £11,000. Those average folks will have to pick either the car or the hols, I guess.

None of these sums will seem very big to Monevator readers well on their way to financial independence.

Indeed even if you’re younger, assuming you’ve calculated the vast wodge you’ll need to create a post-work income, you’ll know £11,000 doesn’t touch the sides.

However we should never underestimate the power of time, global equities, and compound interest:

Yes yes, 10% is an optimistic return. And that £191,943 will probably be worth only £100,000 or so in three decades’ time in today’s money, assuming vaguely on-target inflation.

Then again, global equities have done about 10% over the past few decades.

What’s more, if you think returns are going to be a lot lower, then that’s even more reason to invest the money. You’ll need it!

Fun-sized frittering

A quick note before we get into taxes – I know, contain yourselves – on the hedonistic alternative to investing an inheritance in a pension.

I’m talking about the holidays, the conservatory, and the fancy cars.

I get it. Yes, I’d invest the money. But I said that’s what I’d do. I know myself!

For many people, spending an inheritance on something fun or meaningful – or both – will seem like a bigger bang for their buck than watching it vanish into a SIPP.

You might even decide that’s what the money was meant for. Especially if it’s something that enhances your quality of life on an enduring basis. Say a house extension, or a trip to see much-loved but far-flung relatives.

We all tend to mentally bucket money. Windfalls and inheritances for most people will land in a different – and perhaps entirely new – receptacle.

A compromise could be to tithe off some of the windfall for these non-investing purposes, then resolve to invest the rest. I’d suggest a percentage rather than some arbitrarily-sized fun fund. Cut your cloth, in other words.

Then again, you might know that your relative would have preferred you to save or invest the windfall. In that case investing will come easier.

What about the mortgage?

Sensible money goals like paying off your mortgage or – heaven forbid – any other outstanding debt sits alongside investing in the sound choice bucket.

Paying off your mortgage or investing is a live decision for anyone seeking financial independence. Especially so if you’re on a quick march.

But you should revisit your plan after a chunky windfall.

You might decide the lump sum gives you the luxury of being more risk averse, and hence paying down the mortgage.

On the other hand, perhaps it gives you the confidence to invest more instead?

Only you can decide what works best for you.

A puffed-up pensioned legacy

Let’s get back to doing something really fun with your money – like investing it in a pension! (Hey, this is Monevator. We do things differently here…)

The big bonus of putting your bequest into a pension is the immediate boost you’ll get from tax relief.

(I’m assuming here you’re still in your working years, rather than that you’re passing down wealth through a family of Methusalehs…)

Getting tax relief on pension contributions is the nearest thing to free money since, well, an inheritance.

Say you’re a higher-rate taxpayer. In this case your £11,000 pension contribution gets 20% tax relief upfront (£2,750).

That’s now £13,750 invested inside the pension.

As a 40% taxpayer you can then claim another 20% tax relief via self-assessment or your PAYE tax code. This will effectively refund you another £2,750 in cash.

Show me the money!

All told, your £11,000 inheritance has already ‘returned’ 66.67%:

• You have £13,750 inside your pension
• This cost you £8,250 (£11,000 minus the £2,750 higher-rate relief)
• Turning £8,250 into £13,750 is a 66.67% return

We have a choice as to how we model the subsequent return in the pension over the next three decades. That’s because we technically only have £13,750 in the pension pot. The rest of our initial return came as 20% cash tax relief.

To keep things simple, here’s how £13,750 would grow, again at 10%:

You won’t need to sit down with a stiff drink when you see that putting more money in upfront means you end up with much more at the end.

However, this understates the benefit of making the pension contribution as a higher-rate taxpayer – because of that additional £2,750 in tax relief from HMRC.

Let’s say by reinvesting the relief (which would generate more tax relief) and/or contributions from a salary, we are able to put the full whack into a pension.

We saw that the initial tax relief amounts to a 66.67% uplift on our net outlay:

• £11,000 increased by 66.67% is £18,333.70

Rounding down and redoing our table based on that figure:

By investing the £11,000 inheritance over 30 years we’ve 30-bagged it. If anyone is looking down from anywhere fluffy and beatific, they’d surely be proud.

There will be taxes to pay when you withdraw the money from the pension, of course.

But that’s always true with pensions. Most people pay a lower tax rate in retirement.

Yeah but…

Of course, caveats and sidebars abound.

Besides the later tax you’ll have to pay, you might argue some people are already maximising their pensions, or that it’s a faff to fiddle with your schedule when you’re an employee versus a freewheeling self-employed type like me.

But there are ways to manage all this.

For example, you might have to increase your contributions from your salary to get the full benefit in the final table above, but you could use the tax relief as spending money in the meantime.

You’re saving on income tax in this case.

What’s more, if you’re able to use the contribution to reduce your salary below key thresholds then you might avoid nonsense like the £100,000 tax trap or losing child benefit, depending on your situation. Your effective return will therefore be even higher

Again, everyone’s strategy will need to be different. We’re talking big picture.

Rich but not dead yet

Perhaps you’re retired and you think none of this applies to you?

Remember you can still contribute £3,600 a year to a pension. If you’re under age 75 you should get 20% tax relief.

More importantly, this discussion might help frame how you think about giving.

I’ve put a 30 year row into the timetables above. But most inheritance receivers would be lucky (or perhaps more tactfully: unlucky) to get their money so early.

Gifts are different. If you’re 60 and you have 30-year old children, then passing on wealth now to go into their pensions could be far more effective than leaving them to inherit money that’s much less valuable in a couple of decades time, with all that potential tax arbitrage having flowed under the bridge.

It’ll also help with inheritance tax planning, if that’s something you worry about.

Naturally you’ll need to trust them and explain the plan if this is your goal.

Big boys trousered

Of course some lucky people will receive inheritances far in excess of the modest five-figure average we’ve considered above.

If you’ve found you now own the big house, a parlour full of Joshua Reynolds and George Stubbs knock-offs, some 5,000 acres, and a coterie of staff headed up by a man called Jeeves – or more likely these days an efficient Polish lady – then your mileage will vary. Not least the long crawl down the drive getting back from the funeral.

I’m sadly unqualified to offer much useful insight in this case, though I would love an invitation to the opening day after you’ve turned the whole lot over to the National Trust on seeing the first winter’s heating bills.

I suppose you could read this dusty article on the wealth preservation strategies of the rich.

What if your inheritance is chunkier than the usual, but not boosted up to Bertie Wooster levels of wonga?

Well, there are limits to how much you can put into a pension each year. You’re probably already contributing to a workplace pension or SIPP too (if not, why not?) and so stashing away, say, £300,000 is going to take some time.

Should you invest in buy-to-lets, or something even sillier like a start-up or a restaurant?

I probably wouldn’t. I’d put the money somewhere safe – cash, multiple FSCS protected bank accounts and National Savings & Investments – and have a ponder.

Firstly, look into carried forward allowances for pensions. This enables you to make use of unused previous pension allowances from the past three years. You might be able to pension away more of the windfall than you realise.

Once you’ve done your sums, you could find that between ISAs and your pension, you can get all the money into tax shelters within a decade or so, say.

That’s a long time, but remember the rest of your inheritance isn’t doing nothing while you wait.

On the contrary, it’s providing a rock-solid safety cushion. One that should be earning a respectable rate of interest at the time of typing.

This means you can probably adjust your asset allocation inside your tax shelters in the meantime, while you gradually move the money across over the years.

Let’s say your pensions and ISAs are currently tilted towards something like a 60/40 portfolio. So 60% in risky assets, and 40% in less risky stuff.

Factor in the newly-acquired six-figure inheritance onto the safety side of the ledger, and you might now effectively be running a 40/60 shares/bond split, for instance. That is, you’ve got much more in safer assets than had you targeted.

In this case you might ramp up your risk exposure in your invested portfolio in the tax shelters, by selling some bonds and buying more equities.

You can do this because the cash waiting to be invested is substituting for some or all of your previous safety cushion.

Your money, your problem

Of course your percentages will be different. I’m deliberately being vague throughout this piece because:

• Inheritances vary wildly
• Effective tax rates vary wildly
• The pension rules are fiddled with far too often
• Investment returns vary wildly, at least in the short term
• Risk tolerances vary wildly…
• …and might change after you inherit a life-changing sum
• Everyone’s goals are different

I’m afraid there’s nothing else for it but to roll up your sleeves and dig into the Monevator archives to work out your own plan.

I’m sure it’s what Great Uncle Reggie would have wanted.

The post Why you should invest an inheritance in a pension appeared first on Monevator.

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!

The post FIRE update: year five appeared first on Monevator.

What caught Frugalist’s eye this week.

The post Weekend reading: Well, that escalated quickly appeared first on Monevator.

Imagine retiring early at 34… but not on the back of a decade at a US tech giant, selling a start-up, or even retiring from the Premier League, but after crossing the globe on a bicycle and then finding an edge in the early prediction markets. Few of us will follow a path like that of Pablo – a Spanish FIRE-ee who declared the game won in 2022 – but his unique story can inspire anyone headed towards FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).

A place by the FIRE

Hello! How do you feel about taking stock of your financial life today?

Happy to do it. I spent years on the road being asked how I could possibly afford to keep going, so talking about my life is familiar ground. I’m a little nervous too, because I’ve told the story in pieces for years but never the money side of it in one sitting.

I read a few of the previous chats beforehand, so I know the level of honesty you’re after.

Money stopped being something I stress about a long time ago. I guess that’s the story I’m about to tell.

How old are you? What’s your relationship status?

I’m 39. Not married, but I have a girlfriend. We met after I’d already retired, and we’ve been together for four years.

Do you have any dependents?

A daughter, two-years old. She wasn’t in any of my FIRE calculations.

For most of my life I was sure kids weren’t for me. Then life changed. I met someone, and the idea came to look different.

One of the things I loved most in my travelling years was taking someone along for a stretch of the road and watching them light up at what was possible. Doing a version of that with my own kid sounded like it could be pretty special.

It is.

Knowing I could afford to do it comfortably – with all the support that makes it easier – honestly helped me decide.

Whereabouts do you live and what’s it like there?

Greater Lisbon. I love it. The city is full of people from everywhere, and when everyone is new, everyone wants to meet people. Making real connections has been the easiest of anywhere I’ve lived.

The weather is comfortable all year round, though I still escape to somewhere warmer for two or three months each winter, because I hate winter. And it’s an outdoor life. I can play sports outside nearly all year.

When do you consider you achieved Financial Independence and why?

A few months before I stopped working. It was always a number for me, and by January 2022 I had basically crossed it. I took a whole month off in Tenerife, decided I was done, and the last two months of trading were just padding the number for comfort.

Why that number? It was enough that my spending would sit safely under what the pot can produce forever, with room for the life I actually wanted, rather than the cheap one I’d previously been living on the road.

What about Retired Early?

I stopped trading in April 2022, moved to Lisbon, and I’ve been retired since, from 34.

I still build things. Lately it’s a website full of the calculators and guides I wish had existed when I was working towards my own number. I’m also reviving my old travel blog, and a few other random projects.

But all of that is for love, not income. Retired, for me, just means nobody decides my day except me.

Assets: owning the world

What is your current net worth?


Seven-figures. The exact number I keep to myself. I’d rather it never becomes the first thing the internet says about me!

What matters for the story is it’s enough that a crash never forces me to sell, and my spending sits comfortably under a withdrawal rate the pot can sustain more or less forever.

What are the main assets that make up your net worth and are there mortgages or other debts that offset it?

Almost everything is global equity index funds, all accumulating, spread across a few brokers.

On the Spanish platforms, MyInvestor and Selfbank, I hold Vanguard index funds. On Interactive Brokers and Trading 212 it’s ETFs, mostly Vanguard’s all-world fund, VWCE, plus the iShares world and emerging markets ones, SWDA and EMIM.

When I retired I was 94% equities and 6% cash. These days it’s more like 98 or 99% equities, and 1 or 2% cash depending on how recently I’ve sold.

No property yet, no pensions, no business, no crypto, and no debts.

The one thing on the way is a flat. I’ve paid the deposit on a place that’s being built.

What’s your home like?

I rent a four-bedroom apartment overlooking the river, in a new building, with a nice terrace. I took it when I first moved to Lisbon and had more space than I knew what to do with – yet somehow, now that we’re three in the apartment, I’m running out of it.

The deposit I mentioned is on a flat being built in the same area, slightly bigger than where I live now. It wasn’t really a financial decision. It was a ‘make it mine’ decision. I want to set up a home exactly the way I want it, and have a base that doesn’t depend on a landlord’s plans or what happens at the end of a rental contract.

Do you consider a home an asset, an investment, or something else?

I guess it depends where you sit. An asset, yes. An investment, possibly, and whether a good one or a bad one is another story. I’ve turned this question over enough that I ended up building a buy-versus-rent calculator.

What I don’t like is having a big chunk of a portfolio stuck in one property, in one city, in one country. That’s a concentrated bet on the politics and economics of a single place, and I don’t want that exposure.

The way I look at it, your home can sit in your net worth, but be realistic that you can’t draw a percentage from it. It pays you in rent you don’t pay, and it charges you back in taxes, insurance, and repairs.

Earning: running the numbers

What is – or was – your job?

There was never one job – there was a sequence of ways to fund freedom.

I started working at 18 and left my parents’ home at 19. That same year I had a few months of online poker, which taught me something that shaped everything after: odds are something you can study, and sometimes you can be on the right side of them.

By 23 I was managing a restaurant in Gijón, in the north of Spain, with the safe career path laid out in front of me. In January 2011 I quit and left with a backpack. That was the real career decision of my life.

Everything after that fed the same project, one way or another. I taught myself web design to run my travel blog, and that turned into building websites for people while I moved. I picked up a camera, and within a year I was selling photography to magazines and campaigns, and running workshops.

The blog won best travel blog in Spain in 2015, and the trip ended up in a good stack of magazines and newspapers.

Nice! Did that contribute financially to your achieving FIRE?

Directly, no – and not for lack of opportunity.

I never tried to make the blog earn. I wrote it for the fun of it, for the pleasure of sharing what I was learning and researching along the way. Every idea I had for monetising it died the same way – it felt like selling my soul. 

The way it did pay me was sideways. I taught myself web design to run it, and people who found it started asking me to build their websites. That became work I could do from anywhere. The photography and the press came through the same way.

So the blog brought some income during the road years indirectly, but the pot itself was built in the trading years.

Got it. Onwards!

Between backpacking and the bicycle trip I spent about a year and a half in Manchester, working as a waiter, saving up for a bicycle, a tent, and enough money to ride around the world without running out of it.

Then, from January 2014 to December 2018, I cycled from London to New York the long way round. That’s about 47,000 kilometres through 30 countries.

After the ride I went full-time into trading prediction markets, which means pricing probability better than the people setting the odds. That’s the chapter that produced ‘the number’.

A few years of it, and in April 2022 I stopped, moved to Lisbon, and retired.

What was your annual income?

It changed with every chapter. The restaurant paid a normal Spanish salary. In the UK I made a killing on tips working as a waiter. In the travelling years I lived on around €10 a day backpacking and €3 to €5 a day on the bicycle, and the photography, the websites and the odd stretch of work along the way covered more than the life cost.

During the trading years it grew month by month, year by year, to the point of making six-digits monthly, until it was enough to retire on.

None of it ever came as a salary.

What was your edge with trading? I’m guessing it’s that early prediction markets were not super rational – a bit like early online poker? 

Since you ask straight, I’ll answer straight, then explain why I stop where I stop.

The markets were sports markets, and the counterparty was the bookmakers. I built models that priced the probability of outcomes, compared my number with their number, and took a position only when the gap was on my side.

So your poker instinct is the right one. What poker taught me at 19 is that odds are something you can study, and this was that lesson with more spreadsheet. Anomalies rather than big-picture calls – the systematic kind you find, verify, and then execute over and over without getting creative.

What was your typical day like?

Gloriously unglamorous! Maintain the models, watch the prices, act when the numbers said so. Log everything, review. Tracking the game was the whole game.

My vagueness past this point is deliberate, and only half of it is privacy.

I had a real edge and I checked the maths constantly. I don’t want my story read as an invitation for a reader to try the same without either – because that version of the story ends with less money, not more…

How did your salary progress, and to what extent was FIRE part of your plans?


There was no career ladder, so there was no progression in the usual sense. The progression was in freedom. Each chapter bought more of it.

What I knew early – long before I’d heard the term FIRE – was that freedom was the most important thing in my life, and that I had a very open mind about unconventional ways of making money. Once the trading started working, financial independence stopped being a direction and became a number.

From then on the plan was simple: reach the number, stop, make the freedom permanent.

Did you learn anything on the way that you wished you’d known earlier?

If I could send one message back to 20-year-old me, it would be: go now.

The world was the real education, and it didn’t properly open up to me until I left at 23 and discovered that everything was possible. Everything since has been a natural progression of the way travelling taught me to look at life.

But honestly, I wouldn’t skip a single step. Every job I had I enjoyed until I didn’t, and then I moved on with my life. That’s served me better than any career advice I ever got.

If anything, the pursuit of freedom was the career, and everything else was logistics.

Do you have any sources of income besides your main job?

Not since I retired, no. Everything I’ve done in the last four years has been for the love of it: hosting investment meet-ups, talks, and roundtables in Lisbon, the website, the tools I build for it, and a book I’m writing about my whole journey.

Any of those could probably make money if I pushed, and maybe one day I will if I feel like it, but it would never be the point.

I stopped doing things purely for money a long time ago. If I don’t enjoy it, I don’t do it.

Saving: the 3.33% rule

What is your annual spending? How has it changed over time?

These days, somewhere between €90,000 and €100,000 a year.

It has never needed a belt-tightening – it’s under the 3.33% of the pot that I’m comfortable drawing for it to last more or less forever. So I spend freely within reason, splurge when I feel like it, and it hasn’t been a problem yet.

The change over time part I find funny. I once travelled for a month on zero euros, as a challenge. The backpack years cost about €300 a month, the bicycle years €100 to €150 a month.

Today I spend in a week what once lasted me years. I couldn’t honestly tell you my happiness has moved much either way.

Do you stick to a budget or otherwise structure your spending?

No budget. Ideally once a month I pull my bank statements into a money app so I know what’s going on. In reality I sometimes let it pile up for two or three months and then procrastinate a bit longer. I properly look at where it’s all going maybe once or twice a year.

That’s the whole system. It works because my spending never threatens to get out of control, so there’s nothing to control. I’m aware of the costs, not stressed by them.

Are you using the 4% rule or a similar strategy to manage drawdown and spending?

My version is a 3.33% rule, and staying under it. Drawing up to 3.33% of the pot – roughly one thirtieth – is the level where I’m satisfied the money lasts practically forever, whatever the markets do.

What’s the mechanics of running this?

They are simple. I keep a cash buffer, and when it starts to run low I sell – at least six months of spending in one go. This way I’m not constantly selling and shuffling money around, and there’s always cash sitting there for any sudden expense.

If the moment feels like a bad one to sell, I can wait; if the cash runs out before a better moment shows up, I sell anyway.

I like to buy peace of mind. The system has been stress-tested twice since I retired – in 2022 and in spring 2025 – when markets dropped hard. I sold nothing either time. The buffer worked, so bravery didn’t come into it.

What percentage of your gross income did you save over the years? 

I never measured it, and the honest answer makes a percentage a bit meaningless. On the road there was barely anything to save, yet I finished five years of cycling with more money than I’d left London with. That life cost so little that stretches of work along the way – a bit in Georgia, a bit in China – paid for more than the entire trip.

In the trading years this flipped: I was too busy making money to spend it, so I was saving nearly all of it, without trying.

There was never a savings plan in either chapter. One had no spending to speak of, and the other had no time to spend anything!

What’s the secret to saving more money?

Find out what a good life costs you. Not in theory, in euros (or pounds), but rather: for your own life.

In my twenties, I used every trick to spend less, and sometimes I overdid it, but the answer was worth it. My good life turned out to be shockingly cheap for years. Even now, with the flat coming and the steaks and the winters away, it’s a number that doesn’t scare me.

Once you know that number, saving stops feeling like sacrifice, because you can see what you’re actually buying with it: free years.

If we are thinking on how to save money to reach FIRE, then, for me, after you have looked at your expenses and cut what makes sense to cut, you should next focus that energy into finding ways of making more money – ideally something you can scale – instead of stressing and wasting energy on cutting a few euros or pounds per month.

Any hints about spending less?

The month I travelled on zero euros taught me more about spending than any book. I’m not suggesting anyone live like that, but once you’ve seen how little a day can cost, the fear goes out of spending less. A lot of expensive habits reveal themselves as habits rather than needs.

My practical hint is boring: know where the money goes. Pull the statements into an app or spreadsheet once a month and just look. The leaks are usually things you don’t even enjoy.

Do you have any passions or hobbies that eat up your income?

Plenty, and I don’t fight any of them. Padel is the current obsession, with the rackets and lessons that come with it. It’s actually the first sport I’ve paid to learn properly.

The others I just kept buying gear for: rock climbing, ultimate frisbee, and even historical European martial arts, which is as niche as it sounds!

There’s also the gym, and a longevity habit that adds up: blood tests, supplements, sauna. What’s the point of being financially independent if the body fails first?

We have a babysitter for our daughter, which is some of the best money I’ve ever spent.

Travel is the big line – two or three months somewhere warm every winter, comfortably these days, a motorhome trip around Norway last year, and next winter we’re thinking South Africa or Southeast Asia.

And meat. I like good meat – sirloins, entrecôtes, the odd chuletón or tomahawk, and I enjoy reverse-searing big pieces at home. I look at what any of it costs and I have no reaction. It’s what the money is for.

Investing: a life more ordinary

What kind of investor are you?

Passive, boring, and glad about it! Global index funds and ETFs, all accumulating, low fees from day one, and I’ve never churned a thing.

The portfolio I set up is essentially the portfolio I hold. I’m 98 to 99% in equities, and I genuinely think 100% equities is the best play for an early retiree, as long as you don’t panic.

That caveat is behavioural, not mathematical. The numbers say a global portfolio recovers – the question is whether you’ll still be holding when it does. My answer to that is the cash buffer. I never want to be urgently selling shares in a crash to pay for groceries.

Honestly, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t panic either way, cash buffer or not. The buffer just means I never have to prove it and keeps my stress levels down.

What was your best investment?

Leaving Spain at 23 with a backpack. Everything I have compounded out of that one decision: the confidence, the open mind about how money can be made, the discovery of how little a life costs, and eventually the number itself.

Years later I managed to put what it taught me in one line: “Fear does not prevent death, it prevents life”.

Second best, keeping an open mind about unconventional ways to earn. That one definitely paid off.

Did you make any big mistakes on your investing journey?

A very British one, for those reading this. Between the backpacking and the bike trip I lived in Manchester for about a year and a half, working as a waiter, and I put most of my savings into an ISA. The cash kind. I wanted the money accessible and stress-free while I cycled around the world, so it sat there, safe and going nowhere, for five years in which I barely touched it.

Knowing what I know now, that was exactly the situation a stocks and shares ISA in a global index fund was invented for. A cheap mistake as mistakes go – but five years of compounding is five years of compounding!

The other mistake took longer to spot. Long after I started to make significant amounts of money, I kept optimising like it was still the €10 days. There are cheap flights from those years whose savings I couldn’t tell you now, but whose miserable hours I still remember perfectly. Being frugal served me for a decade – being unable to stop cost me real comfort when I could afford it. It took time to change my mindset and relax about spending money.

If I’m understanding correctly then, your strategy was saving hard to get some seed capital, living frugally, and then investing that capital for a few years – ultimately parlaying that via Prediction Markets into your final retirement pot?

The index funds never built the pot – they are how I am keeping it afterwards. The engine was the edge itself.

The starting capital was whatever survives five years on a bicycle, nothing significant. What the frugal years really bought me was runway. A life that cheap meant the markets never had to pay my rent before they were ready to, and I could give the method my full attention for as long as it took.

From there it compounded the boring way. The results grew month by month, year by year. I was too busy making money to spend much of it, so nearly all of it stayed in. As it piled up it moved into global index funds, and when I stopped in 2022, the funds took over.

So: edge first, index funds after. Saving hard was never the wealth plan. 

What has been your overall return, as best you can tell?

A confession: I had never looked until you prompted me to – I normally just look at the current net worth total in the app. The money app I pull my statements into tracks it automatically, so the number had been sitting there all along: around 75% overall.

I started buying in during Covid, so the smaller early purchases have appreciated enormously and the later ones much less. The ETF I bought most recently – which is the one I sell from first because selling it realises the smallest capital gain – is up around 60%.

I suppose the reason I never looked is that the number changes nothing. But there it is, measured for the first time, for this interview.

How much have you been able to fill your ISA and pension contributions? 

My complete ISA history is the cash one from your mistakes question, which I suspect makes me unique among your interviewees. If I’d found Monevator ten years earlier, that chapter would probably have gone differently.

Beyond that, nothing. Spain doesn’t really offer worthwhile wrappers, and I’ve never used pension products. Everything sits in plain taxable accounts with low fees.

Keeping it that simple has one advantage: it works the same wherever life takes you.

So tax incentives and shelters didn’t influence your strategy?

Hardly at all. I use accumulating funds, which is the sensible default for a European investor anyway, and when I sell I sell the lot with the smallest gain first to keep the tax bill reasonable. That’s the whole strategy.

Rules differ in every country and change all the time, so I never wanted a plan that only works because of one paragraph in one tax code. I optimise where it’s cheap to optimise, and I’ve never let tax decide anything important.

How often do you check or tweak your portfolio or other investments?

Far less than anyone assumes. I pull statements into the money app monthly, in theory, look properly at the spending once or twice a year, and the portfolio I leave alone.

I’ve never had to change the allocation. The only recurring activity is selling for cash flow, roughly twice a year. My most active investing behaviour is procrastinating over the statement import.

How do you account for the new flat in your FIRE projections? Will you pay out of cash and accept a lower portfolio return, or take a mortgage and treat it almost like you’re renting to yourself? 

The projections never lean on the flat. The pot that has to last is the liquid one. The flat will sit in the net worth column, not in the drawdown maths.

What changes when I move in is the shape of the spending – the rent line disappears, the owner costs arrive, and the total still has to sit under the 3.33%, with the flat fully absorbed.

On the how: I’m buying the flat off-plan, so I’m paying 30% while it’s built and the other 70% at delivery. The plan for that 70% is a mortgage, so pretty much your renting-to-yourself idea.

While mortgage rates sit below what I expect the portfolio to return, I’d rather owe the bank cheaply than pull a big chunk out of the market. I’ll make the final call when the building is finished and I see the rates on offer. 

How does your girlfriend fit into the financial picture?

We met after I had already retired, so she was never part of the plan or the number. It was calculated before she was in it, and it has room for the life we share now, but she contributes to our common expenses.

On the road: physically down but most certainly not out.

Wealth: a standing (desk) ovation

We know how you made your money, but how did you keep it? 

By making the keeping as unlike the making as possible. The money was made with an edge, actively, glued to screens. The moment it was made, its job changed: everything went into global index funds, the allocation was set once, and a cash buffer stands between the portfolio and my groceries.

No leverage. Nothing exotic. Nothing that needs me to be right ever again.

Which is more important, saving or investing, and why?

For me it was saving first, in the sense that learning to live happily on little is what made everything else possible. It kept me free for years with almost no money, and it meant my number never had to be huge. But the pot that keeps me retired is the investing’s work.

The thing I’d put above both is knowing what your life costs. The saving and the investing both exist in service of that number.

When did you think you would achieve financial freedom? Was it a goal with a timeline?

It was always a number, never a date. I knew roughly that it would take a few years.

The number itself moved once. My first target was smaller, priced for the road-cheap life I’d been living, and I revised it upwards when I realised I might want more from the next chapters of my life.

I’m glad I did. The life I have now, with the kid and the flat coming and the winters away, wouldn’t be possible with the first one. And in the end it came down to months, not years. I knew months in advance I was there, and the final stretch was just padding.

Did anything unexpected get in your way?

The markets never surprised me. My own body did. After five years of cycling I sat down at a desk and put on ten kilos without noticing, because I was still eating like a man crossing continents while burning the calories of a man in a chair.

I dealt with it the way I deal with everything: I changed the system.

Standing desk, a walking pad under it, and no more snacking as if I had 8,000 calories a day to replace. The weight came off and stayed off.

Are you still growing your pot? If you’re de-accumulating, how?

Both at once, which is the strange privilege of spending under the growth rate. I’m de-accumulating in the mechanical sense, selling roughly twice a year to live, and yet on paper the pot is bigger than the day I retired.

Inflation has been a bit crazy, to be fair, so the real picture is less impressive than the nominal one. But the division of labour is clear – the pot looks after itself, and I look after the spending rate.

It’s interesting to me that you could switch off that money-making machine when you hit your number. As an active investor I know I can’t! It’s addictive to ‘beat’ the system, no? Did you feel your edge was waning? Or was it charging too high a physical price to be glued to screens all day?

I think the difference between us is I never loved the machine, I loved what it was building.

There’s a pattern in my life. I go all in on something, get it where I wanted it, and then walk away without much ceremony. Poker bored me after a few months. The restaurant career I enjoyed until I didn’t. Trading was the first time finishing had an exact number attached.

And no, the edge wasn’t fading. The odds got sharper over the years, so each position yielded less, but my results were still climbing, because I kept finding new angles and kept raising the daily volume of positions. That was why the yield was going down over time – because I was widening the range of events I would be working with to maximise profits.

I stopped because the number arrived, because it had stopped being a challenge, and because I wanted my days to belong to something other than being in front of the screens.

You already have the ten kilos weight story. Behind it sits a simpler fact, which is that I had spent my whole adult life outdoors and free. Past the number, every extra month was earning money I had no use for and paying for it in the only currency I’ve ever cared about.

Do you have any further financial goals?

None. The game is over. The flat will get finished, my daughter will get a financial education, and the money just needs to keep quietly doing its thing.

What would you say to Monevator readers pursuing financial freedom?

Freedom is not waiting for you at the number. I was freer at 24, on €10 a day, than most people with a full pension. If your plan is misery now in exchange for freedom later, fix the plan. The years on the way are your life too.

My whole life has been a search for freedom. FIRE did not start it, and reaching my number did not end it – it just made the freedom permanent.

In the weeds: you can go your own way

When did you first start thinking seriously about money and investing?

About money, early. I was working at 18, out of my parents’ home at 19, and that same year I spent a few months making money at online poker, until it bored me. So I always knew money as something you could figure out.

About investing, embarrassingly late. Until the last years of the bicycle trip I genuinely felt like a genius parking my money in deposits and savings accounts at 3 to 5%.

Then somewhere on the road I started reading properly, met the idea of index funds, and quietly stopped feeling like a genius.

Did any particular individuals inspire you to become financially free? 

Honestly, no. What I was taught as a kid was the opposite of all this: get the safe job, build the good career, get a state paid pension, and rest at the end.

Nobody around me was modelling financial freedom. I just decided the default wasn’t for me and worked the rest out backwards along the way.

How do your parents feel about your journey? You mentioned a life was laid out for you, but you’ve taken a very different route. Was there any tension or conflict?

There was never a big scene. My parents are both teachers, and the script I grew up with was the one they lived themselves – solid job, long summers, the same rented house by the same beach every August. A happy childhood, and a strict one.

When I quit my job and started traveling in 2011, the reaction was worry rather than anger. They didn’t understand what I was doing, and for years the most generous reading available to them was that it was a phase. My furniture went into the family’s storage rooms, and I think they accepted before I did that I wasn’t coming back for it.

Today I think they’re amazed at what I’ve pulled off. They always knew I was capable. What they could never see was how any of it added up to a safe life, and safety was the one thing they wanted for me.

In the end I got exactly that, by a route they still can’t quite comprehend.

I guess they’re proud.

Can you recommend your favourite resources for anyone chasing the FIRE dream? 

Three, and each one was useful at a different step of the journey.

Mr Money Mustache, specifically the early explanation of index funds. It was the first time investing sounded simple enough to actually do, and it pointed my money in the right direction.

The FIRE subreddits. I love skimming around and absorbing random information that way, with hundreds of real cases and real mistakes. It suits how my brain likes to learn.

Finally, a calculator – the ‘Will your money last?’ visualiser at Engaging Data. I stared at that thing a lot while I was working towards my number, watching the odds pile up on my side. Very comforting at the time.

I ended up liking that genre of tool so much that half my own site is calculators now.

What is your attitude towards charity and inheritance?

Charity: I’m generous with causes that matter to me when something crosses my path, but I don’t run scheduled donations. I’d rather get my hands dirty on something that matters to me. It’s case by case, like most things in my life.

Inheritance: I’m not planning to play that card for a long time. But everything is arranged so that if something happens to me, it goes to my daughter, with enough for my girlfriend to raise her comfortably.

I’d rather not die yet, though.

What will your finances ideally look like towards the end of your life?

My whole philosophy is that the money has to last no matter how long I live. I’m optimistic about technology and medicine within our lifetimes, and if that optimism pays off, this pot might have decades more work to do than the spreadsheets assume.

So I keep the withdrawal rate at a level where the pot never meaningfully shrinks, and no, Die With Zero is not for me. I’m playing the game where the money outlasts every version of the future.

If I knew for certain I had, say, a year left, I’d loosen up. But I wouldn’t burn it down for fun.

My daughter should grow up with a good financial education, so that whatever she inherits one day, she knows exactly what to do with it.

That, more than the money, is the inheritance I care about.

My thanks to Pablo for sharing a very different perspective on life with this story. Thoughts and feedback are welcome, but please keep it constructive! This is a personal story, and I’ll delete anything I deem mean or uncivil. Also check out his website: The FIRE Exit. And read more of our FIRE-side chats.

The post FIRE-side chat: travelling and arriving appeared first on Monevator.