Financial Decisions - A Way to Less

The money decisions that shape our lives

Pursuing financial independence isn’t just about saving and investing.

It’s about deciding what to spend money on, what to give up, where to live, how much to work – and when life matters more than the spreadsheet.

Over the years, we’ve made some big financial decisions. Some have moved us closer to FIRE. Others have temporarily taken us further away.

We’ve bought a home. We’ve moved abroad. We’ve sold most of what we owned. We’ve spent money travelling. We’ve had children. We’ve changed our priorities.

This is where we explore the thinking behind those decisions – and what we’ve learned from them.

Our approach

We don’t believe every financial decision should be made by asking, “What’s the cheapest option?”

Instead, we try to ask:

Is this worth the money?
Will spending this make our lives better?
Could we spend less without really noticing?
Are we sacrificing too much today for a future that isn’t guaranteed?
Does this decision move us towards the life we actually want?

Sometimes the answer is to spend less.

Sometimes it’s to spend more.

And sometimes the financially sensible decision on paper isn’t the decision we want to make.

The big financial decisions

Buying a home

Buying a home was one of the biggest financial decisions we’ve made.

It also had a significant impact on our FIRE progress. We used a substantial amount of our invested money to buy our home, meaning we had to rebuild our investments afterwards.

It was a reminder that financial independence isn’t just about maximising the number in an investment account. Housing, security and the life we want to build all matter too.

Read more: [2023 Financial Review]

Moving to the Caribbean

Moving from the UK to the Caribbean probably wasn’t the most logical decision from a traditional FIRE perspective.

We sold our home and around 90% of our belongings, moved across the Atlantic and found ourselves living on an island with a very high cost of living.

Financially, it wasn’t cheap.

But we gained something that was impossible to put neatly into a spreadsheet: an unforgettable experience with our first child and a chance to completely rethink where we wanted to live and what we wanted our life to look like.

And then there was the reality of paying for it.

Coming back to the UK

Moving abroad didn’t turn out to be permanent.

In 2023 we returned to the UK, which brought another set of financial decisions around housing, spending, work and family life.

Coming home also meant buying a house and rebuilding our investments from a very different starting point.

Read more: [2023 Financial Review]

The experience reinforced something we’re still learning: financial decisions aren’t necessarily one-off choices. Circumstances change, priorities change and sometimes the right decision for one stage of life isn’t the right decision for the next.

Spending money on experiences

We’ve never wanted FIRE to mean putting our lives on hold.

Some of the biggest things we’ve spent money on have been experiences – travelling through Africa, living abroad and exploring the world with our family.

Those experiences have cost money. But they’ve also shaped our lives in ways that are difficult to measure financially.

We’re increasingly interested in that question:

Was it worth it?

Not whether we could have spent less, but whether the money we spent actually bought us something we valued.

Financial decisions as a family

Having children changed the calculations.

Our financial decisions now affect four people rather than two, and questions about money increasingly overlap with questions about time, experiences, education and the kind of childhood we want to provide.

We don’t want to sacrifice our family’s present entirely for the sake of a financially secure future.

But we also want to give our children that security.

The question we’re now trying to answer is:

How do we build financial security without missing the years we can’t get back?

Decisions we’re still making

Our next big experiment is already planned.

On 1 January 2027, the four of us will leave the UK for six weeks travelling through Southeast Asia – Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

Our eldest will temporarily leave school for the trip, and we’ll be trying to make the most of the opportunity to travel slowly as a family.

It’s going to cost money.

It will also mean taking our children out of their normal routine and putting a significant chunk of time and money into an experience rather than investing it.

We’re deliberately doing it before reaching financial independence.

We’ll be tracking what the trip actually costs, how it affects our FIRE progress and, perhaps most importantly, whether we think it was worth it.

There isn’t an article about this yet – we’ll be documenting the decision and the reality of the trip as it happens.

The £2,500 question

One of our ongoing experiments is whether we can build a great family life for around £2,500 a month.

We’re not trying to spend as little as possible.

Instead, we’re trying to spend deliberately – cutting back on things that don’t add much to our lives while making room for the things that do.

We track our spending every month, but the annual picture tells a more useful story about where our money actually goes and why.

You can see all of our monthly spending reports on our Monthly Spending page.

Our FIRE numbers

All of these decisions ultimately feed into the bigger FIRE journey.

We’re tracking our progress separately, with our own invested assets and targets. Our current FIRE numbers are updated as part of our ongoing financial reviews.

Read more: [Our latest financial review]

For the bigger picture – including how our FIRE progress has changed over time – visit our FIRE Journey.

What we’re learning

The biggest financial decisions we’ve made haven’t always looked optimal on paper.

Moving abroad wasn’t the cheapest option.

Travelling through Africa didn’t increase our investment portfolio.

Buying a home reduced the amount we had invested.

Having children has changed what we spend and what we prioritise.

And our six-week Southeast Asia adventure will cost money that could otherwise be invested.

But that’s increasingly the point of A Way to Less.

We’re not pursuing FIRE simply to reach a number.

We’re pursuing financial independence so that we have more freedom to live the life we want.

Sometimes that means spending less.

Sometimes it means spending more.

Sometimes it means changing our minds.

And sometimes the best financial decision is the one that gives us a life we actually want to live.

Explore Money

FIRE
Follow our journey towards financial independence and see how our numbers have changed over time.

Spending
See where our money actually goes, including our ongoing £2,500-a-month challenge.

Financial Decisions
Explore the choices, trade-offs and experiments behind the numbers.