Life Changes & Winding Down the ISA Experiment

Sometimes plans change, especially when we aren’t expecting it! Over the past few months, a few things have come together to cause us to make a decision to move next year. In short, we’ve always wanted to live further west (within England), further away from London. We only moved to our current area because I

A Phased Approach to Emergency Funds

In my recent post on my approach to bonds and cash, I mentioned that I don’t have any dedicated emergency fund at all. I know this flies in the face of conventional personal finance wisdom, but I think I’ve got a pretty sound justification. My personal approach is not quite so aggressive as somebody like

Estimating Social Security for Americans in the UK

I’m back after a short break – a week on holiday in Cornwall, and another week just catching up. I’ll continue my withdrawal strategies series in due course, but this is another quick aside, which is related but not central to that series. A lot of people in the FIRE community, especially on the younger

My Asset Allocation (Part 2)

14Apr21: I edited my approach to where to put bonds, based on my post on Required Minimum Distributions. In Part 1, we discussed the first three of my six steps for asset allocation: Why are you investing? What are the goals? What broad asset categories do you want to invest in? Stocks vs bonds, US,

My Asset Allocation (Part 1)

Many of you will already be familiar with the idea of asset allocation – I don’t need to repeat the excellent explanations already out there (here’s a great primer from Bogleheads), but I did want to explore how I arrived at my own asset allocation and how you might go about thinking of yours. I

Before You Move

I’ve put together this list of things you might want to do if you’re a US citizen thinking of moving to the UK, but you haven’t left the US yet. Not all of these are required, and the list can’t be 100% comprehensive for everybody’s individual situation, but it might save you some serious pain.