2022 Personal Review – Mr Way

It’s time for my 2022 Personal Review – what a year it has been! 

First and foremost, Happy New Year to you all! Hopefully 2023 brings you health, happiness and prosperity.

My 2021 review promised that the blog would become a priority for us again. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened yet, due to the chaos of setting up our new lives in the Caribbean! Fingers crossed 2023 sees us finally find the time. 

Leaving It All Behind 

The start of 2022 saw us unravelling the lives we had built in the UK. I had lived in the same place for nearly 14 years. We owned our home and had lots of commitments, both personal and professional. We also had lots of belongings! 

Selling our house was a huge undertaking, but a very interesting process to go through for the first time. Alongside selling the property itself, we also got rid of most of our belongings. As someone who had been wanting to live a more minimalist life, having to fit everything you own into suitcases is quite a strong motivation to get on with it! 

We didn’t quite manage to achieve the goal, because we’ve left a lot of sentimental belongings at parents’ houses. Nevertheless, the process has been very freeing and is something we’ll try hard not to go back on without good reason.  

As well as the physical ‘stuff’, we also had a lot of loose ends to tie up. I was the Chairman of my local tennis club, which was upsetting to leave behind. However, I hadn’t been able to play for a while due to a long-term injury, which made the decision easier in the end.  

I was at the point where I really hated my old job so going into 2022, I was VERY happy to be leaving that aspect of my old life behind.  

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2021 Personal Review – Mr Way

First and foremost, Happy New Year to you all! Hopefully 2022 brings you health, happiness and prosperity. It’s time for my 2021 Personal Review – so much has happened this year! 

Happy New Year

Unfortunately, the blog has taken a back seat because we’ve had so much going on in our lives. Fingers crossed we’ll have more free time to spend on the blog soon, because of the decisions we’ve taken throughout 2020 – keep reading to see what I’m referring to! 

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2020 Personal Review – Mr Way

Well, what a year! It’s finally time for my 2020 Personal Review, and boy has it been a crazy one.

Nobody saw the global pandemic coming, but there have been so many other things going on in my life too! It has been pretty manic at times and hard to process everything that has happened. Hopefully my ramblings below make some sense as I attempt to put 2020 into some sort of order!

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The Benefit of Salary Sacrifice Pensions

I recently went through an interesting exercise at work and wanted to share the findings here. Essentially, my company don’t offer salary sacrifice pension contributions and I wanted to persuade them to consider it!

As you can probably tell, I’m bit of a personal finance nerd! I created a document showing the benefits of salary sacrifice to both employer and employees. I even added some Sankey Diagrams to demonstrate the difference it would make!

The information below shows what I submitted to my employer. Hopefully it will help explain the different pension contributions as well as giving you inspiration to request similar changes from your own employer!

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Why We’re 100% in Equities

Our investment strategy has always been 100% equities, with no allocation to bonds or other asset classes. There are several reasons we came to this conclusion, which we want to cover in this post.  

When we say 100% equities, this is within our actual FI funds, which are housed in our ISA and pension accounts. Our emergency funds are in 100% cash and cover roughly 6 months of living costs. For more info on how our FI funds look at the moment see our 1 Year of Blogging post.

Our 100% equities allocation consists of index tracker funds with a global spread. This reduces the risk of being over-exposed to any particular country.  

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Seeing Opportunity in Adversity

Our Coronavirus Journey – Part 2 

As we discussed in Our Coronavirus Journey – Part 1, we’ve been gradually adjusting to the changes in or lives since the Coronavirus outbreak started. While many of the implications are negative, we’re seeing opportunity in the adversity.

It would be easy to become overwhelmed and give up in such challenging circumstances. But there will always be new avenues to explore in unprecedented times.

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