Looking forward, looking back

Well this is late isn’t it? A review of 2019 at the start of February. Ah well though, I guess the deal is that if you put up a bunch of resolutions at the start of the year then you kinda have to hold yourself accountable and say how you did at the end. I have to confess that I was finding my monthly updates a bit tedious and time consuming so I stopped them. But we are at the end now so given that it’s, just, still January I’m going to channel the spirit of Janus and l’m going to both look back to 2019 and also look forward to 2020.

The TL/DR of this is that I smashed most of my goals except for the weight loss one.

For those of you that want more, here we go.

Money

I didn’t have a particular money goal for 2019. I didn’t need one. I’m on the long steady run in to Financial Independence. My finances are in pretty good shape. I have no debt, a paid off house and, a pension pot that (with some conservative assumptions) is almost as funded as I need it to be. I feel incredibly fortunate to find myself here.

As I talked about several times over the course of the year the main issue for me is to build enough savings to bridge the gap from now to retirement. Worst case scenario is that happens in around three years time but I have options that could bring that forward. I don’t see those options as needing to cut back on my spending though. My expenses feel under control and my savings rate is well over 50%.

So 2019 was just a process of adding to my stash. Maxing out what I can get from my employers pension match, filling my ISA allowance, putting money into my children’s pensions and Junior ISAs, and transferring money into more savings as and when I could. As most of that happened automatically I really didn’t need to think about it very much. I would just occasionally check in so that I could see where my numbers were at.  And when I did they were doing exactly as they should have been so I left them alone!

Weight loss

I’m not going to dwell on this one. The chart is below though. I lost a bit, I put some back on, at end of the year I was down a little but not very much. The kicker was when I started having to put in a lot more time at work and I allowed my focus to slip away.  As you will see I basically stopped even weighing myself by Q4.  What you don’t measure you wil struggle to manage and so it proved.

This whole area is something that I’m going to go at, again, this year. While I focus on happiness and Financial Independence in this blog, ultimately, without my health, all of those savings are for naught. What it is the point of having bought time if I don’t have the physical ability to enjoy it to the full? When I think about it I realise that a big part of my motivation to want to stop work is to give myself the space to focus on my physical health.

But I realise that I’m falling in the trap of believing that Financial Independence is a magic bullet. It isn’t of course, I will still be the same person whether I put on a hoodie or a suit when I wake up. My demons aren’t going to go away until I face them down myself and waiting until I have more savings doesn’t change that.

So this year I want to explore why, when I have the discipline to exercise control over my impulses when it comes to spending money I don’t have that same discipline when it comes to eating. I also want to think about why, despite really enjoying going to the gym I don’t go.

There is a whole lot here that will be tied up with my upbringing, and values, and guilt, and expectations, and fear, and a whole lot more. If I can crack my underlying issues behind this then it won’t just improve my health it will make the rest of my life happier.

 

Exercise

Frankly I love walking. I work in London and the default for most people is to take the tube when they are getting around. My basic rule is that if it takes 30 mins or less to walk somewhere then do that rather than take the underground. If the weather is nice then I push that out even more. Overall I add maybe 5 minutes to a journey overall and it makes my whole day much more enjoyable. London, as least the central bits, is surprisingly small so it’s now rare that I take the tube. That massively improves my quality of life.

In addition I’ve been enjoying walks along the beach on multiple occasions this year. There is something very relaxing about the combination of crashing waves and the slight give of sand or shingle underfoot. When combined with the ability to fill your lungs with fresh air it feels to me as if I am washing urban life our of my pores whenever I do it.

The net result of that is that I walked 5,294,174 steps in 2019. Actually it’s more than that as I decided to remove my tracker for two weeks when I went on my multi-generational family holiday in April. My target was 4.5 million and I went through that in October so a job well done

The breakdown is below and the takeaway from that is entirely unsurprising. Who would have thunk that I would walk more in the warmer months and less when it’s colder. The basic lesson for me here though is that I like to walk and I want to do more of it.

I also had a goal of building in an additional regular exercise activity. I started that well with starting to learn how to sword fight but by the middle of the year that had fallen away. I have another plan around regular exercise but I am going to wait until I actually do it before sharing.

 

Sleep

Sleep has been a bit of a mixed bag for me to be honest. Sometimes I go days or weeks where I am pretty good at getting the six and a half hours I targeted for every night. But then I will stop thinking about it and have much longer period of not getting nearly enough.

What I’ve found is that when I am not at work I am much better at getting enough sleep. My natural time for wanting to go to bed is around 11pm and then to turn the lights out around half an hour later. I realise that without an alarm I will do that and then naturally and drift awake between 7 and 7.30 am.

But, when I have an alarm that is going off at 6-something in the morning, going to sleep a bit before midnight doesn’t give me the window to get enough sleep. Honestly being able to sleep and so live according to my natural rhythms is another one of my major financial independence motivators.

Looking forward I’m not going to track it in 2020 as I have realised that it’s not a monthly issue. If I don’t get enough sleep for more than two nights in a row then things start to fall apart. Catching up on weekends to build a decent average doesn’t really work overall. What I’ve also realised is that my sweetspot is to get over seven hours of actual sleep. In practical terms that means being in bed with the lights out for at least eight hours.

Basically this is something that I need to work on every day. Turn off screens at least 30 minutes and give myself time to read for 10-15 minutes before turning the lights out. Leave the house and do something physical during the day. It’s not rocket science but it takes a level of focus. But, if I can crack sleep it should help to unlock many other things in my life.

 

Blog and social media

I started blogging about 15 months ago and while I was pretty consistent for the first 11 months or so I have fallen off the pace in the last few months. That has coincided with a fall off in my engaging on twitter and indeed reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. That genuinely makes me feel sad, guilty in fact. In large part that’s been due to work and my choice to prioritise family time when I’m not working (excuses, excuses I know). Sadly that is likely to continue for a the next few months. I would rather that were not the case but life involves choices. You make them and you own them.

At some point I will do a meta post about my thoughts after more than a year as a blogger but this post is about resolutions. So, while this is a bit geeky, for the curious, here are the stats behind my blog and social media.

Over the course of 2019 I posted 35 times and got 33,028 Pageviews or an average of 2,752 a month. Given that my goal was to post 50 times I failed massively on that but my goal was 1,000 pageviews per month so that’s goal was comfortably met. The monthly breakdown is as below. My most viewed month was September with 4,942 page views. The tail off in the last quarter is entirely linked to my lack of posting.

Can I say though that I have read, and appreciated, all of your comments even if I have not replied to them. It is continually perplexing to me that anyone would want to read my scribblings. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

When it comes to twitter my goals was 500 followers and I hit that by March and ended the year with 980 followers. Given that I have woefully neglected twitter in recent months that is amazing. Thank you all for following me. At some point I will be back on there.

 

 

Social and fun stuff

As I keep saying (possibly to make sure that I remind myself of the real prize) this blog is ultimately about happiness. So I need to make sure that I keep track of whether I’m having enough fun. And you know what, I did pretty well on that front last year.

Socially I wanted to make sure that I saw people outside of work colleagues and immediate family at least once a month. I was reminded regularly of how easy it is to slip into lazy complacency. As a result there were a couple of months where I literally just managed to scrape in with something, but there were also months where I felt like I was doing something social every week, sometimes multiple times. I KNOW that I’m happier when I see people so I need to keep focussed on it. Just looking at my contemporaries I can see that it would be easier to drift away from all of my friends and I’m determined not to let that happen.

Otherwise I aimed to read 26 books and I ended up reading 39. I watched 54 movies last year, massively helped by two long haul flights admittedly, so I smashed my target of 12. I also went to the theatre four times, three concerts and even snuck in to stand-up comedy gig. Given the plan was three theatre or concert trips in total, I feel quite good about that.

 

Resolutions for 2020

The naval gazing self-indulgent post is already a monster so a just a quick look forward to 2020.

Two big things for the coming year. The first is that I am going to make a proactive decision on my work future. I outlined my three choices in my post in the middle of December. If I am going to go down the long sabbatical route and stop at the end of 2020 then I need to pull the trigger in the summer. I’ll share my thinking as it evolves.

The second feels predictable but it is to lose weight. I have a SMART goal against that but I’m going to keep that to myself. What I do have this year is the motivation of a university reunion. I know that I should be able to just do this for myself but I’m much more shallow than I want to be. In my head I’m mostly still that 20 year old who was always late to lectures. With a bit of work I may be able to look a little more like him as well.

Otherwise I liked having the other goals as a way of keeping balance in my life and for motivating me to keep track. The social life one in particular has helped to combat my natural introversion. So my other goals are:

• Read 36 books (i.e. three a month) – up from 26
• Watch 26 films (i.e. average one a fortnight) – up from 12
• Go to the theatre or a concert 6 times – doubling from last year
• See friends or family once a month – same as last year

On the blog and social media side I know that having target is good for me so here we go. In rough terms I’m going to look to double my numbers. Why? I have no idea but if I don’t set a target then there is a risk that this blog joins all of those others that just disappear without trace and I would mis it if I did. So what that means is that I am going to look to have over 5,000 pageviews a month by the end of 2020 and 2,000 Twitter followers. That seems like quite enough of that sort of thing.