Shortbread and I were chatting about some of the things we remember experiencing and thinking about when we were children. We thought it might be a good topic for a post! I’ll go first, she will post hers later.

“Every man has his price”

When I was about 10, I remember spending some time with a friend of the family we called Uncle Clive. He was a friend of my Grandad’s and I remember looking up to him because he knew about cars, guns, and other things a nerdy boy was in to. I remember Uncle Clive talking about a traction engine that he really wanted, but it belonged to someone who wouldn’t sell it. While traction engines bored me to tears*,   I wanted to contribute something to the conversation so ended up enigmatically saying “every man has his price.” Where did a 10-year-old pick up this mafioso-esque tidbit of insight into the human psyche? Probably cartoons.

In any case, I remember Uncle Clive explaining to me that, in this case, this wasn’t applicable. Apparently, the man who owned his coveted traction engine got a lot of joy out of it, lived in a comfortable house, was retired and generally did whatever he wanted. There was literally nothing in the world that could be offered that would tempt him.

I was fascinated by this at the time. I always assumed that money was a motivator for everything, but to be faced with the idea of someone so comfortable in themselves that no monetary figure could even tempt them was hard to understand. I wondered how it was possible to get to a state like this. I think I concluded that it must be extremely rare for people to live like this.

25 years later and it turns out that my supposition was correct! Financial Independence is a means to achieving this. If you want to get to a stage in your life where you no longer have a price, pursuing FI is what you need to be working on!

“I want enough to be comfortable”

I wanted to be a rock star when I was younger. I wanted the fame, money and the chance to show off. I literally could not imagine having too much money (growing up somewhat poor will do that to you). How would that even work? I remember the National Lottery getting started in the U.K. and listening to my parents fantasising about winning. One day, on the way to the Supermarket for the weekly shop, I remember testing different amounts of money on my parents.

“How about 20 million? Or 30 million?”

I was surprised when both my parents replied that 30 million was far too much. It seemed straightforward to me – more is better!

“Being that rich would be stressful, I want enough to be comfortable,” my dad said. The irony of this is not lost on adult me given how much the man spanked on frivolous nonsense – there was no imminent danger of having too much money in our household. That said, it made me really think about the idea of being comfortable. How much would that be? What did it mean to be comfortable? I had an inkling we were not as well off as some of my friends, but I had enjoyed a pretty happy childhood to that point. How much more comfortable could one be?

It’s only in recent years that I feel I understand this better. I interpret it as understanding what is enough for you. The concept of having enough is well written about by personal finance writers and can help towards working out your eventual FI number. Having enough is also related to the previous story in that you are satisfied with your position in life and do not need extra. Your lifestyle is about as inflated as its going to get, and money just doesn’t have the same meaning to you anymore.

I quite like the idea of having enough money where suddenly money becomes unimportant. It can’t tempt or stress you in the same way. You have made your choice as to what constitutes your personal “enough” and you can no longer be tempted or bought. My childhood money memories took a long time to be mixed with enough life experience to morph into something that passes as wisdom. It might take a while, but it’s so important for Shortbread and I to keep working until we have enough and we no longer have a price!

*A traction engine show is a thing of unbelievable nerdy beauty. Shortbread’s Dad also happens to like going to local provincial shows in the UK where men of a certain age drive up in battered vans, unload their steam engines, get them going and then…that’s it. You wander round the small field having a look at other mostly identical engines and wait for the inevitable rain to come. Your only comfort is your packet of crisps to go with your crap ham and butter sandwich for lunch. You might get a cup of badly made tea if it stops raining before everyone begins to pack up and go home. God save the bloody Queen.

We are fortunate to live in a city where we are surrounded by just about everything we need within about 20mins. Public transport is generally cheap and fantastic and there is an abundance of shops just about everywhere. On top of that, domestic help, fast food and even laundry is quite cheap. In some ways the most difficult thing we have had to wrangle with is lifestyle inflation.

One downside of living where we do is the size of apartments. Kitchens are occasionally just a burner in the corner of the room so cooking can be a miserable experience. In some ways, this is a perfect encapsulation of the expat problem – it is far too easy to pay for the problem to go away. You could pay for domestic help to cook for you. You can pay for grocery delivery using services like Deliveroo. You can get restaurant food delivery. You can even pay for meals to be delivered to your place of work for you to heat up.

While some of these options are handy, we can’t help but wonder what is being given up by using them. We have heard many conversations where people justify the “convenience” of these options. I particularly like the line of thinking that when you factor in time and all the different ingredients you need to cook a meal, pre-made and delivered food ends up cheaper (how many ingredients? hundreds? thousands? what are people cooking??). I strongly suspect this is not the case- how often is paying someone for a service you could do yourself actually cheaper? It overlooks a more important reason to try and reject this particular lifestyle inflation: habits and skills.

The skills you develop by not outsourcing are so useful as well. It can be genuinely challenging to plan a weeks worth of meals and end up with no food waste at the end. It can be difficult to learn to cook with ingredients you find intimidating. It can be a real pain to wash up every evening! However, these are skills that can really make a difference to your life, as well as imbue you with a slightly greater sense of control.

Lastly, your future self is unlikely to remember the convenience you did or didn’t pay for. In which case, consideration of the outcomes of your decisions are worth considering as these are what become habits. How much of the irritation do you remember from doing a chore yourself? Probably very little, but you have formed a habit based in developing a life skill. It might be irritating at the time, but becoming adept at a skill always provides satisfaction.

• If you won’t remember the convenience (How many food takeaways do you remember?), you are left with less money and less developed skill. You are more reliant on the habit of having to pay others for something.
• If you won’t remember the struggle or irritation of a task you complete yourself, you are at least left with more money, more developed skills and the habit of relying on your own initiative and work.

This might be an oversimplification (it’s certainly Mr Money Moustache-esque – Financial freedom through badassity), but it’s a guiding principle that generally works for us. It helps to fight lifestyle inflation as well as making us feel more able to take care of ourselves. Obviously everyone has their own line in the sand, but the consideration of skills and habits you wish to form is worth spending some time on. Is this action turning you into the best version of yourself? Are you paying for a skill that you should be learning yourself?

As a return to the title: you won’t remember the convenience you paid for, but you might come to regret the skills and habits you didn’t develop or form.

The summer holidays have been a mixed blessing for expat teachers the last two years. The summers are (as so many in corporate jobs have long suspected) a huge perk for teachers. It really is as great as you think it is! Getting paid a substantial amount of money to spend the summer doing very little is great. Traveling is a genuine option, especially if you live in a place well connected to others. However, travel has obviously not been an option for the past two years. This is exacerbated by long quarantine periods in the place you’re traveling to and on your return.

This is where teaching differs from some other forms of work in that its recruitment is very seasonal. Let’s say you need to jump on a plane for an emergency and your school decides to terminate your contract. You may be waiting at least 6 months for recruitment season to roll around to be able to pick up work (and even then potentially not start work for several months after that). This is obviously an untenable predicament to be in if you are dependent on your salary as your only income.

Watching the fluidity of the quarantine rules mess with my colleagues the last month or so has been the strongest affirmation of JL Collin’s F-U Money concept I have yet experienced. Some have not seen their families in two years and are very emotional about it. That said, school policies in several organisations have had to be pretty clear – if you travel in the knowledge that you will not get back in time to start the new year you are potentially risking your employment. Certainly this was the case a while back where several teachers from schools in Asia found themselves unable to return when flights were cancelled.

While I have some sympathy with my colleagues (I’m not an arse!), I found it interesting how many told each other they would just quit if they couldn’t get their week or two with family. I admire the sentiment… but saw through it. None of them can really walk away from the remuneration that international school teaching offers. They certainly do not have the cash to support themselves for 6 months to a year.

Andrew Hallam’s writing on “expatitis” rings true for me. Turning up in a new country can be disorientating and a large pay check can very rapidly distort your perspective regarding lifestyle. Shortbread and I watched in genuine amazement just how far our peers lifestyles inflated over the years. Phrases like “I deserve it” became lexical norms. Saving is often something people do literally because they can’t spend all the cash they are earning (although many have no real difficulty in this regard). The number of people who proclaimed they deserved staycations was ludicrous to us – paying rent on two places in the same city for the same night?? This has come crashing down for many who have no long term financial plan due to the pandemic.

It hit me that breaking free of financial dependence on a salary is so much more than not having to work. It’s about genuine freedom. The golden handcuffs of international school teaching are very real. Watching people get so upset over not being able to return home for fear of losing the salary is humbling. What could be achieved if they had F-U Money? It certainly makes me double down on my belief that conscious living and FIRE are the most important things to achieve for us.

For us it boils down to a simple choice: make efforts and occasional sacrifices now and over the next few years to be able to break free of salary dependency for the rest of our lives… or be gilded slaves working until we’re either not allowed to work anymore (we have colleagues who have run into this issue) or we die. It’s obvious to us which is the better option.