October 2023 – Another mining post

Okay, so there’s been more happening with the mining companies I watch/ invest in, and because this is as much a scrapbook of what I’m following I’m going to post about it, but rest assured next month is back to existential musing (working title ‘culture wars as a problem of thermodynamics‘).

I was very pleased with the 4x return (theoretically) on my Crowdcube holding of Cornish Lithium. But in actual legitimately traded stock news, my holding of Cornish Metals (yep, different company, see also British Lithium [private] and Cornish Tin [Crowdcube]) is pretty honking. Down 20%, and hovering near all time lows. I think this is off the back of the wider macro situation; people are bearish on commodities and miners, particularly exploratory guys like Cornish Metals, in the face of a wider tech slowdown and swirling recession impacting drivers for commodity prices like increased requirement of tin, copper etc for electric cars, chips and other wiring type stuff. I kind of buy this, but if anyone has a better explanation, or knows of a good write-up of one somewhere, I’m keen to read it.

This case doesn’t really put me off either. Per prior posts and the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre, commissioned by UK Gov (1), in the long run global industry is going to need a lot more of these metals to meet demands for increasing westernised, high-tech living standards. The ongoing trend towards re-shoring/ right-shoring or whatever other spin you want to put on reversing decades of outsourcing to cheap, far-away, possible antagonistic/ non-western-aligned countries is also going to push towards European/ American sources of minerals for European/ American companies. See here the ongoing restrictions in Chinese exports of critical minerals (2). This problem isn’t going away IMO, leading me to be long-term bullish on mineral prices – and probably more widely inflation. McKinsey recently put out some statements about the growing potential for a copper supply gap (3), and I am convinced that the EV, renewable, middle-class development of the world is an inexorable tide now, so the question becomes is there enough institutional interest already to be pushing investment in copper, tin etc mines such that we end up with an oversupply. I think some institutions are bullish there aren’t and prices will go up, hence the massive investment into Cornish Lithium by TechMet et al (4).

Back to Cornish Metals, and the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act from the US, designed to help this sort of work, neatly laid out by Bloomberg…

One year after US President Joe Biden introduced the Inflation Reduction Act, its impact can be seen in places like Cornwall where demand for the minerals used in clean technologies like EV batteries are seeing a comeback of mining.@ACBerlin tells us why https://t.co/TWyWKw3tMg pic.twitter.com/4HrbpYewln
— Bloomberg Originals (@bbgoriginals) August 17, 2023

hat-tip Bloomberg (5)

They’ve also been pretty busy getting the South Crofty mine bloody working. The massive pumps have now started to de-water the mine (6). Once dry they can then continue further resource estimation and commence phases to begin trial production. A September press release already demonstrated 31.6% more tin in the latest estimates based on updated drilling (7). Once I’m back to passive/active weight spec I may well buy more of this stock, because I’m a glutton for speculation.

Elsewhere I’m sniffing around Anglesey Mining Plc (8);

Great to see traditional demand still for copper getting some airtime!

Anglesey Mining’s Parys Mountain Project is the largest and most advanced copper project in the UK. Drilling of the Northern Copper Zone and high-grade Garth Daniel Zone is set to commence in September.

The… pic.twitter.com/rBA4EK6jLH
— Anglesey Mining plc (@AngleseyMining) August 18, 2023

Parys Mountain (small hill), on Anglesey where they’re speculating, is an absolutely bonkers post-industrial semi-wasteland, see here (9), and here (10). The whole hill was just one big pile of copper ore. Makes sense to go back there and see what the Victorians missed. I’ll be following them with interest as they update their inferred and indicated mineral estimates, and move towards full feasibility study status.

Parys ‘Mountain’, image credit wikimedia, Mark.murphy (10)

Finally, I’m continuing to watch Tungsten West (11), owners of the Hemerdon tungsten mine near Plymouth that was relatively recently operated by Wolf Minerals (12). Wolf went backrupt in 2018 when they couldn’t get the returns of tin and tungsten from the mine promised, and basically couldn’t make it pay. I’m skeptical about Tungsten West, especially given they recently had some press about needing a lot more cash runway to get the mine working and profitable, but we’ll see (13).

October 2023 Finances

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. My salary has settled now, and with the increase resultant from more on-call demands in my new post I’m seeing a good sum every month available for saving. This month it worked out to savings rate of 46%, with an overall increase in my net worth of 1.3%. In my S&S ISA I bought some more Vanguard FTSE Developed World ex-UK, which seems to have been doing the square root of bugger all for a while. The main jump in my net worth comes as I fill my emergency funds. These sit at £1,000 held in my current account (in a pot at 3.25%), £9,100 in cash ISAs (of a target of £10k, earning 4.5%), and £3,100 in Premium Bonds (of a target of £5k). Could well be hitting my target for the emergency fund ISAs by the end of the year.

Goals:

Goals for October:

Tick three things off the house DIY list – success
Tidy and clear up the garden for the winter – failure
Go through the grocery budget in detail – success
Chase down NHS pension valuation – success

To deal with the first two points, I took a week off and stormed through a list of house DIY bits. With impending baby No2 we are now seriously looking at moving to upsize, so we went round the house again to make a list of what needs doing ahead of staging the house to sell. Pretty bloody awful time to sell, but the local market seems (in our postcode at least) buoyant. The weather conspired against me for the garden, as I took what weather windows I could find to do outdoor DIY over gardening. A job for next month.

On the last goal, I finally set up my NHS online pension account and got an updated valuation. This has gone down a lot, from £247k to £128k. This illustrates why I don’t include my NHS pension in my net worth calculation. The figure provided by the NHS pension scheme is an annuity equivalent to the benefits provided by my current defined benefit from my membership. As interest rates have shot up annuities have become a lot more attractively priced, so buying the equivalent of what I would receive has gone from a big figure to a smaller figure. I’ll keep a vague eye on this, but nothing to worry about.

On the budgets; pretty much every month this year I’ve been running over budget on the household grocery shopping. The current nominal budget is set at £220/month, which I derived from three years (2019-21) of expenses. That hides a bit of story. Way back in the early days (e.g. Jan 2019) of this blog I pulled a number out of the air – £300/month, and used this a budget. In August 2019 my job changed and my salary dropped by a quarter. We tightened belts and the budget moved to £200/month. It stayed there and I pretty much kept to it through 2019 and 2020. I re-calculated things in January of 2022, using the average of the 36 months of data from Jan 2019 to Dec 2021. That upped things to £220/month. But my annual total for 2019 was £2,400, for 2020 £2,500, for 2021 £3,000 and now for 2022 £3,400. Inflation and a growing family has had a big effect. Updating and using just the 24 months from Jan 2021 to Dec 2022, I arrive at an average of £270/month.

To be fair, we do tend towards buyer nicer food and eat well. Most of our meals are cooked from fresh, using organic ingredients. Some of that is shop bought, some comes from a local co-operative veg box scheme or the high-welfare multi-award-winning butchers. We spend £60-80/month in the butchers, £35/month on veg, plus £20/month on other ethical local deliveries. If I then spent £50/week on other shopping in supermarkets we’d be looking at around £330/month minimum. If I split the difference of my data-driven and hypothesis-driven approaches I hit £300/month, which seems a fair number to try to target. Based on this I probably need to re-look at all my budgets, so a job for November…

Goals for November:

Tidy and clear up the garden for the winter
Work through the rest of my monthly budgets and re-calculate
Finish DIY to stage the house for sale

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: September £285, October £440, budget £300 – Yikes
Eating out & Takeaway: Sept £101, Oct £66, budget £50
Transport: Sept £106, Oct £125, budget £330
Holiday: Sept £0, Oct £0, budget £40
Personal: Sept £58, Oct £175, budget £120
Health: Sept £98, Oct 63, budget £150
Misc: Sept £919, Oct £580, budget £215 – More baby stuff
Work fees: Sept £148, Oct £473, budget £265

In the garden:

Cut the grass, harvested some pumpkins for Hallowe’en. Needs a proper tidy.

Other news:

Various vaguely interesting consumer market things happening. Next have bought Fatface (14). I like both these brands, which surely confirms my middle-aged slide. Six months ago a vegan mate was telling me how he thought most shops had massively over-stocked on vegan and veggie food, and that there were only one or two decent brands decent lots of new market entrants. If I was a smart man I would have shorted some of these companies. Alas I am not, so I just watch as Quorn and Beyond Meat lose money (15). There’s a great piece in the Guardian reviewing items bought from Temu (16). There are now very few things I hate as much as Temu. It is evidence of all that is wrong in the world. And fuck off with “shop like a billionaire”. Billionaires don’t ‘shop’. Absolute crock of shite.

In more meaningful news, hot on the heels of my speculation last month (what are you doing subconscious), here’s an article about China struggling to collect on it’s massive international loan book (17).

And if you want a window into the general fuckwittery that is medical administration in the UK, here’s an article going in detail into how doctors applying to the nationally administrated once-yearly route into training to be an anaesthetic consultant got royally shafted (18). Hint, some people were using vlookup in excel, while others were manually copy-pasting in results. They then screwed up telling people incorrectly they were unappointable, and told the wrong people! And guess what, those people are still in charge. Glorious!

Cheers,

The Shrink

References:

Quarterly Returns – Q3 2023

Quarterly return posts supplement my monthly Financial Dashboard, covering investments in detail and looking at my yearly targets. Here I track purchases and sales, document progress against my investment strategy, and discuss re-balancing and changes over time.

Hot on the heels of the Q2 2023 and September updates, here’s a round-up of Q3 2023.

Q3 2023 Returns:

Cash Accounts £20,100 (+5,400)
Investments £13,880 (+£1,000)
Property £75,000 (+£1,100)
Cars £7000 (no change)

Some massive great elephants in the room here. Number one, up by £5k in my cash accounts. How has that happened? Well I had a £2k invoice paid, the NHS finally worked out my salary is supposed to be 40% higher than they have been paying me for a while (hello backpay) and I integrated my old ‘just-in-case-tax-bill’ account into my main ISA accounts. I had been storing up 40-50% of my non-NHS pay to cover any future tax bill on self-assessment, but I actually got round to calculating the required tax and this enabled a bit of shifting to further up my emergency funds.

The other little bonus is my investments, which were up £1,000 despite only paying in £250 and most of my ETFs actually declining in value. On a graph this looks pretty good for the year:

How did this happen?

Investments:

Core/ Satellite Passive/ Active Split

My 2022/23 ISA is in Vanguard. I added £250 to my holding of FTSE Developed World ex-UK passive tracker in September. Despite this I’m 4% further overweight on my active picks, compared to 31% in Q1 and 20% as my aim. My crowdfunding holdings have increased as a relative share by 5%. I haven’t bought anything, but Cornish Lithium who I invested in back in their 2021 crowdfunding raises at about 5p/share have gone great guns. Since then they’ve had some bad press, almost getting wiped out as they burnt through their runway, which would have seen my speculation reduced to nought (1). Happily that didn’t happen, some institutional investors poured cash in, there were fluff posts about them becoming unicorns (in the same paper a few weeks later – 2), and then they did another Crowdcube raise at ~20p/share. My investment wasn’t large, but I’ll take a 400% increase. Similarly named Cornish Tin have also been doing a crowdfunding raise (still ongoing I think), with some nicely timed Crown Estate Gold prospecting rights, but I’m only up 20% there (3). It’s all on paper, and I am dubious about crowdfunding after the ongoing cash binfire of Freetrade, so we’ll see if that profit is ever realisable. Generally the next quarter is going to need some heavy passive fund investment.

2023 Goals:

Save 35% of my income

Some improvement, as I dragged my savings rate up from 28% to 34%. Hopefully continued effort will see me over the line. Score: C+

Finish the house renovations

Yes? Are they ever truly done? All the major work is now complete, so it’s just minor things like touching up paint work. There’s also going to be a re-jig as we start to embrace some minimalism (and stick things in storage) ahead of staging the house for sale later this year/ early next. B

Set and document monthly goals

Kind of low effort here, following the letter of the word but not spirit. C

Return (by end of year) to regular investing

I have made an investment, but it’s not regular yet. D

Continue (at end of year) to be learning a new language

400 day streak on Duolingo. Texting a friend in the new language. Generally positive. B

That’s all for now, cheers!

The Shrink

References:

September 2023 – Beyond the Chinese property bubble

This is probably another frequency illusion, but for the last month or so I’ve kept seeing bits and pieces about (a) the Chinese property bubble (maybe it’s over?!) and (b) belt and road initiatives. Potentially Google, Elon or other powerful government types are conspiring to nudge my subconscious bias in one direction. Or maybe it’s just coincidence. Either way, I’m trying to train myself to make links between news stories and potential downstream economic/ market effects, e.g. Wilko goes under, invest in B&M as they’re likely to profit from decreased competition in the low-cost cyclical consumer market.

The slow, chuggy bit of my brain has coughed up a new question – What’s going to happen if Chinese external debt can’t be serviced?

Frequently in the financial news over the last couple of years has been the stories of massive real estate companies, main protagonist Evergrande, defaulting on their debt because they promised to build enormous housing developments which no-one wanted with borrowed cash (1, 2) . Even now, as their shares return to the market and jump, they face a winding up petition due the end of this month (October) (3). Looks, from a news source where I have no idea of the bias, to have caused a small bank run already (4). It’s certainly caused consternation in those investors interested in China. Who knew there could be corruption!?

This is, according to The Economist, leading the average Chinese person to be pretty pissed off about the super-rich who ran and profited from these companies, while simultaneously risking a property price crash (5). And here I was thinking the UK had a monopoly on that sort of fear.

In order to link these developments up Chinese cities borrowed heavily to spend on infrastructure. The central government is now having to do all sorts of fun things like loan rollovers, bond issuance and bailouts to sort this out (6). Often they’re borrowing more to kick the can down the road, which with a structural population problem like China’s seems… interesting (7). The line is they will spend more (by issuing more debt) to increase growth. This seems plausible, and given the layout of the Chinese economy and society I think will probably work (8).

Circling back to infrastructure, amongst the HS2 furor I saw a couple of people mention how China have built thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it’s taken us to plan HS2; an argument for how shit our (UK) attitude to big infrastructure projects is. The contra argument is that no-one is using these train services. They built it, but no-one came. And now there’s a $842 million dollar debt on the balance sheet for empty trains (9).

The UK has been here before in a not very oft talked about stock market bubble, railway mania (10). Investors in the 1840s got so excited at the change and promise that railways could bring that speculators inflated the prices of railway shares, ultimately leading to a scare and a load of uneconomic lines. The Victorians continued to invest in boom and bust on sporadic railway lines and mines, but that’s maybe a story for another time. We’re also not going to mention Beeching.

I therefore wondered if China is sort of speed-running the financial scares of the west. And then this clip, taken from this film popped up on Twitter (11):

Chinese Contractor in the Congo Explains to Congolese Man why the Congo is so Dysfunctional pic.twitter.com/O1lnHrvgEc
— ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 (@kunley_drukpa) September 25, 2023

Ignoring the blatant racism it flagged an interesting thought. There has been some news coverage and hand-wringing about Chinese extension of (not-so) soft power through the Belt and Road Initiative. Lend money to less economically developed countries to build infrastructure using Chinese companies relatively cheaply and with kick-backs for China, e.g. the Whoosh high speed rail in Indonesia (12). Sounds like a pretty good play. The largest project, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, covered yesterday by the BBC runs to £49 billion and is paving the silk road (13). As the beeb flags it’s been beset by corruption, delays and environmental problems. The Pakistani side have been bailed out by the IMF recently. The BBC article also touches on the Chinese debt resultant, but then goes off on one about a G7 plan to boost investment in low and middle-income countries, yadda yadda…

I’m more interested in the debt. The UK has been here before. The British Empire was arguably built on the back of a very successful banking sector (see here great-great-great-grandfather Shrink), with bailiffs/ invaders in the form of armies (see here East India Company) (14). But these days you can’t just subjugate a population if they have something you want. Pax Americana etc. (Oh the irony). The west (i.e. the UK and US) set up, post-Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (15, 16). Externalised arms-length separate independent debt holding institutions. Not a drag on the nations finances.

Whereas China’s Belt and Road Initiative investments are debt to it’s government or private sector businesses, as far as I can work out (17). And they’ve been absolutely shovelling it on, growing their proportion of LMIC debt by 18% in 2010 to 49% in 2021 according to this World Bank report on global debt (18).

What’s it going to do when these countries can’t pay the debt. Global interest rates are increasing, costs of basic food and materials have gone up, and these are not countries with big budget surpluses or healthy coffers to cover changes in the financial landscape. China can’t do a Britain and steam a battalion of redcoats into the area. It seems like they’re going to have to bail out or restructure the debts (19), which dwarf the internal Chinese property market problem. This will likely cancel out some of the goodwill it’s Belt and Road Initiative has produced in the global South/ LMICs (20). It also offers a tasty international relations/ finance/ soft power opportunity to the US (and the UK if it didn’t have an absolutely incompetent government) (21). Just leaves me wondering what the fallout in terms of Chinese and global manufacturing and economic production will be, and how that will consequentially effect companies who have gone heavy into Chinese production and internal markets. Speed-run the Great Depression in 5…4…

September 2023 Finances

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. A big positive jump this month, as I was finally paid a large outstanding invoice and my NHS salary moves closer to being properly sorted out. Anyone working for the NHS will be unsurprised by this, but it took them six weeks to actually pay me the correct salary for my first month in my new post! NHS payroll would be on final written warnings in any other industry. The influx combined to provide my highest ever single month income, and push my nominal paper assets to about £200k (excluding pension). Before payday I had already paid off the last £5 on my credit card, and the last £100 of interest-free credit on our kitchen, leaving me now unsecured debt free. The cash influx therefore almost entirely went into boosting my emergency funds, which now sit at £1,000 held in my current account (in a pot at 3.25%), £7,400 in a cash ISA (of a target of £10k, earning 4.5%), and £3,100 in Premium Bonds (of a target of £5k). This corresponded to a savings rate of 71%, and boosted my net worth up by 3.5%.

Goals:

Goals for September:

Complete the major job on the house to-do list – Partial success
Finalise pre-baby two purchases – Success
Harvest last bits from the garden – Fail

The last failure is due to running out of time on annual leave with the first partial success. Without wanting to obviously DOX myself, I undertook a fairly large piece of DIY for our house doing some pro-active maintenance which required hiring in a load of equipment and a week dedicated to it. It took a bit longer than planned due to some issues identified while doing it, so there is a small amount left to do – just the things which didn’t require hundreds of pounds of hired kit. It was one of those faffy jobs that you do once every 25 years, but would have undoubtedly come up on a survey when we decide to sell. Now done, we can focus on the list of 10 small DIY jobs (e.g. touching up skirting) needed to get the house into a perfect sellable condition.

There were a couple of big bits to purchase for the impending arrival – a new baby seat and cot. The big back-salary payment helped cushion these blows. The garden is an absolute state and needs a couple of days dedicated to it, so maybe during paternity leave (insert hollow laugh).

Goals for October:

Tick three things off the house DIY list
Tidy and clear up the garden for the winter
Go through the grocery budget in detail
Chase down NHS pension valuation

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: August £410, September £285, budget £220
Eating out & Takeaway: Aug £74, Sept £101, budget £50
Transport: Aug £660, Sept £106, budget £330
Holiday: July £0, Sept £0, budget £40
Personal: Aug £10, Sept £58, budget £120
Health: Aug £70, Sept £98, budget £150
Misc: Aug £704, Sept £919, budget £215
Work fees: Aug £478, Sept £148, budget £265

In the garden:

A bit of fixing of broken things, but nothing majorly exciting. Grass needs it’s final cut.

Other news:

House-builders have released a report showing that the UK is the worst place in the developed world to try and find a home (22), but then they would say that. The BBC has a sob story about a pensioner who lost tens of thousands from unscrupulous sales work in the aftermath of the British Steel pension freedoms (23). I have some sympathy here, but equally wonder how much of this is down to naivety of the individuals concerned, and they’ve basically lost a harsh, expensive lesson.

Cheers,

The Shrink

References:

Quarterly Returns – Q2 2023

Quarterly return posts supplement my monthly Financial Dashboard, covering investments in detail and looking at my yearly targets. Here I track purchases and sales, document progress against my investment strategy, and discuss re-balancing and changes over time.

Started doing Q3 2023, then realised I have never actually posted Q2 2023. So here’s that:

Q2 2023 Returns:

Cash Accounts £14,700 (+950)
Investments £12,880 (+£30)
Property £73,900 (+£1,100)
Cars £7000 (-£500)

No new investments. Emergency fund being rebuilt. Salary was mediocre, and with added nursery fees and inflation to the household expenses there was nothing left to invest.

A continued steady increase.

Investments:

Core/ Satellite Passive/ Active Split

My 2022/23 ISA is in Vanguard, no new payments in for Q2, and not much happening. A lot more action from revaluation in my crowdfunding accounts, but I’ll do a bit update on that in Q3. No pretty graphs because I didn’t capture them at the appropriate time, but suffice I remain overweight active equities and crowdfunded holdings.

2023 Goals:

Save 35% of my income

Things were poor here. My savings rate slipped from 33% to 28%. I think this is down to increased household expenses and needing to spent on exciting big ticket items like a washing machine, etc. I’ve bumped up the emergency fund to try and suck this up in the future (£1,000 held on hand). Score: D

Finish the house renovations

Some progress, but not a lot, mostly because I booked annual leave to do the work on the house whereupon kiddo promptly got chickenpox and I had to use my annual leave to care for kiddo. We have managed to paint the last room that needed painting, and booked further leave in Q3 for the last major jobs. D

Set and document monthly goals

Somewhat improved. You get in what you get out. C

Return (by end of year) to regular investing

No investments at all. Very poor, but hopefully improving in Q3 with a chance of job and better salary. E

Continue (at end of year) to be learning a new language

Continuing my attempts through Duolingo. Now over 250 days practised, and starting to try conversing with those I know who use the language. D+

Fast and dirty update, a bigger one coming for Q3 which will go into more detail on what is happening with my crowdfunding holdings.

More soon,

The Shrink

August 2023 – Trust and awareness part II

Continuing the theme on what we’re away of and what we see, I saw a twitter thread that really made me think recently. It’s a bit crackpot conspiracy theory, but it got me going:

One of Britain's forgotten issues is that the government does not know who is currently in the United Kingdom, in any sense.

Allow me to explain:
— Stakeholder Consultant (@echetus) July 22, 2023

OP. I advise not reading the rest of their timeline. (1)

If you can’t/ don’t want to give the ~~Hank Scorpio~~ Elon Musk the page views, the argument flows thusly. We have no national ID card system in the UK. Efforts in the 90s/00s under the Labour government died a death, and an unlikely set of political alliances means that we’re unlikely to get one. Libertarians, far-right, far-left, small government types. None particularly likes the idea that a government department would hold information on who we are and where we live, costing money and being a potential privacy risk. Ignoring the fact some government departments already do most of this (health service, passports, driving licence), and plenty of private companies do too (insurance registries, credit agencies). As a result our population cannot be tracked by IDs and is based on the once-per-decade census. The census works on trust. How correct is it?

Are occupants of your average bedsit, sublet flat, group house going to give a straight up reply? Particularly if people are there with semi-unclear residence rights.

This is coupled with the fact that with Shengen and the myriad routes of entry into the UK it’s quite hard to police internally who is here.

The original twitter poster shows a few strings of evidence for this. The strongest in my opinion relate to evidence of undercounting on the census provided by the EU settlement scheme after Brexit. Essentially, based on census data the Government gave an estimate for the number of people it thought were in the UK from Europe who would require a formal settlement. These massively undercounted, e.g. the Government thought there were 700k polish people in the UK, when around a million applied for settlement (2). These figures may not account for some emigration, but it’s still a whopping 1/3rd out.

The other interesting source comes from GP registry data and reflects national planning around the COVID period. According to GP registrations there are 61.2 million people in England in 2022, link here if you want to do the sums (3). That’s not Wales, just England. According to the 2021 census the population of England is 56,490,048. So an extra 5 million people needing healthcare. There’s an interesting post from the House of Commons library that tries to resolve this discrepancy, or at least explore it (4). Doesn’t actually answer whether those people exist though.

Weirdly, last week I was mulling over this post as I drove to drop child 1 at nursery. Radio Four was on in the background, and the presenter asked whichever politician’s turn it was to get grilled about the potential use of national ID cards as mooted by the Blair-era Labour gov. Frequency illusion (Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon) at play (5, 6)? Maybe my subconscious is picking up on emergent clues. Either way it might be a way to introduce the old e-borders concept.

The big caveat to this is that actually if you want to work in the UK you already need ID. You need to get a national insurance number, and your employer needs a record of your right to work. Would the cost of an ID card system offset the benefit?

Circling back, I guess this just adds to my tally of things which are unknown unknowns. I don’t trust our press to be truly free and unbiased, and I wonder what isn’t being reported or said. Not necessarily in a conspiracy theory way, but more in an inconvenient, politically complicated and difficult to resolve way. Life isn’t full of easy one-line answers.

August 2023 Finances

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. Further progress, with things ticking upwards again. I added 1.3% to my overall net worth, with a savings rate of 30%. This was despite a fair dip into my emergency fund cash float (draining £500) to replace a broken car part and a washing machine that refused to spin. With both, in the aim of reducing waste and environmental costs, I endeavoured to fix the offending items but to no avail. The premium Samsung washing machine lasted 5 years and one month (5 year warranty). Convenient. We will not be buying Samsung again.

Goals:

For August my goals were:

Finalise ISA move – Success
Book and take some annual leave – Partial success
Make a list of essential things to do to the house before putting on the market – Success

Mostly good stuff here. The ISA has changed over using the NS&I and Principality’s service. Super easy and top marks. I booked the annual leave in August and am now sat taking it, writing this post. I made a list of jobs for the house and will be using my annual leave to start them. Hence…

Goals for September:

Complete the major job on the house to-do list
Finalise pre-baby two purchases
Harvest last bits from the garden

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: July £292, August £410, budget £220 – This is going to need a serious look at, because the budget is persistently blown and probably not realistic
Eating out & Takeaway: July £56, Aug £74, budget £50
Transport: July £97, Aug £660, budget £330
Holiday: June £0, July £0, budget £40
Personal: July £243, Aug £10, budget £120
Health: July £166, Aug £70, budget £150
Misc: July £659, Aug £704, budget £215
Work fees: July £589, Aug £478, budget £265

In the garden:

More beans, tomatoes and spring onions harvested. Last potatoes about ready.

Other news:

Various bits about. Fixed mortgage interest rates are dropping (7). The British Business Bank is losing money hand over fist (8). Interesting take that abolishing inheritance tax could crash the AIM (9). Global fertility is generally < replacement (10). Toyota have made solid-state battery progress which could make then a decent investment (11).

Cheers,

The Shrink

References:

July 2023 – Trust and awareness part I

Life has been tumultuous lately, hence the lack of posts. The usual NHS changing of the guard as all us non-consultants rotate through our next posts. Clinical demand in the new job is proving intense. At home baby number two is pending. Number one is a whirlwind. I’ve continued to track my finances, but not found time to share them.

A thread that has run through my thoughts over the past few months has come from a blend of twitter, various financial podcasts, and some political views (I’m listening to The Rest Is Politics more).

It started when this news article crossed my eyeline and stood out amongst the usual stream of “woe is me, I can’t afford a house” purely because they’re local. Wonderful that you’ve saved £50k, but why do you expect banks to lend you a ton of cash on tuppence-ha’penny salary. Oh, and there’s the critical phrase, that £50k came with help from family (1).

It made me reflect on how most of the boomers, gen Xers and millennials appear to have certain underlying expectations. I guess there’s an element that’s come out of “any Englishman’s home is his castle”, but equally people perceive they have a right to own a home, a right to live where they want, a right to have (at least a chance) and afford what they want and achieve their dreams.

I wonder at the reality. These dreams and hopes are politically expedient, they give the population some positivity in a culture/ society which appears to be in long-term decline. For most of humanities existence all the majority of the populace could hope was being warm, having a full belly and surviving another winter. Modern society has lifted people up, but it’s also got complicated.

Excluding the political flavour and avoiding conspiracy theories, my thought process touches on this awareness, plus some of what we know about consciousness. As far back as Thomas Huxley (grandfather of Aldous) there was the discussion that humans and animals were basically automatons (2). Most of our actions are unthinking. We go through life acting based on prior experiences. Free will is debatable (3). Our opinion of the world is shaped by biases, and isn’t always reality. There’s a disconnect between what we think the world is, and what it really is.

People believe X, but how aware of they of what the reality is. Cases in point are Brexit and inflation. Brexit was sold as pretty much whatever you wanted to believe it would be that wasn’t the status quo:

pic.twitter.com/O8oEsVaWyd
— Matt Hall (@hall_mj) July 30, 2023

Classic leopard’s ate my face from twitter (4)

Meanwhile inflation is a clear demonstration of how the population understands money and basic arithmetic. 32% believe falling inflation means prices go down…

Spare a thought for the 32% who think inflation falling means prices have already dropped.

That headline will cause headaches. https://t.co/lRu7DqSOsh pic.twitter.com/u9hganuDeS
— David W. Higgins (@higginsdavidw) July 19, 2023

Good, good (5)

How much of that lack of awareness leads to people getting taken advantage of? In small scales that’s scams, or the government doing something quietly dodgy. The dead cat strategy. But take advantage of enough of the population and people clock on. PPI. COVID PPE. Dieselgate. We live a pleasant fiction that everything is fine, and as long as the problem isn’t big enough to enter the gestalt cultural consciousness hidden it stays. If you’re part of the deluded majority then when reality breaks you might be quids in, compo for inappropriate sales tactics or similar. Bringing it back to finance, tapping into that gestalt consciousness would seem an access route to macro economic tides. The 2008 crash was a wave that built before it broke. Is the same happening with interest rates at the moment? The return to the long run average interest rates would seem like a solid probability, but how many of the population expect to see 4-5% as a standard interest rate in the next few years time?

July 2023 Finances

The update for July:

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. Not a bad month, with things kind of levelling out from June. The markets had a small bounce, which saw me up ~£500. Cash savings rumbled on to my increased goals. Altogether a solid total of 37% saved, and a 2% increase in my net worth. Not too shabby. There is bad-ish news on the horizon (for the month that follows this), as a number of big bills have dropped on my door mat. Relevance of the emergency fund proven.

Goals:

For July my goals were:

Open savings account and rationalise – Success
Re-calculate emergency fund – Success
Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast) – Fail
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies – Fail

Last month I found I could get 3.9% in a different Principality ISA (1). This has since gone up to 4.20%. My earnings for the year are ~£50-60k. I’m at the awkward point where I have already started losing the personal savings allowance (as I am well into the >£37k tax group), so only £500 in interest allowed, and now I also have to repay the child benefit received for No.1 kiddo at a rate of 1% per £100 over £50k earned. I’m therefore keen to tax shelter as much of my interest as a I can. New Principality ISA therefore duly opened, and I now need to go in branch to make the within-year transfer out of my NS&I cash ISA, and it’s paltry interest rate.

As part of this humming and hawing I’ve looked at my emergency fund (2). I have aimed for £12k in cash as an emergency fund for a couple of years based on six months of £2k/month expenses. I’m no longer sure that would cover it. Our joint account is routinely running around £3.5k/month (including £1,000 in mortgage and £1,300 in nursery fees). My personal account could be stripped back to £500/month for expenses I would not want to cut (car tax, insurance, work related fees, life insurance etc). So £12k gets us three months of everything. With No.2 kiddo on the way we are going to have a period (again) of single-income dual-kids expenses. Preparation is needed.

How far to go? It’s unlikely, but possible, for us to both have no income. We both have in demand jobs. If we cut nursery and treats back we could probably run the joint account at £2k/month, plus my own expenses. So £15k, plus a £1k float? That would do four months at full bore or six months pared back. If things got really bad we actually have sufficient (nominal) equity in our house to sell up and buy in cash in one of the cheaper valleys.

Conclusion; emergency fund reset to £16,000. £1,000 in cash in a Starling pot, £10k in a cash ISA for maximum interest, and £5k in premium bonds, for the hell of it.

On the other goals, I just have not been able to do them. Between the new clinical job, child, extended family duties and general housework, hobbies have had to fall by the wayside. Food has been eaten when and where possible. That isn’t going to change in the immediate future, so I’m going to remove those goals.

Goals for August:

Finalise ISA move
Book and take some annual leave
Make a list of essential things to do to the house before putting on the market

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: June £358, July £292, budget £220
Eating out & Takeaway: June £59, July £56, budget £50
Transport: June £502.95, July £97, budget £330
Holiday: June £0, July £0, budget £40
Personal: June £216, July £243, budget £120
Health: June £117, July £166, budget £150
Misc: June £555, July £659, budget £215 – I bought myself a treat
Work fees: June £267, July £589, budget £265

In the garden:

Harvested two rounds of potatoes, plus continuing courgettes, beans and tomatoes. Everything else just running wild.

Other news:

Two more twitter threads that tell an NHS story. Did the Tory’s not expect to be in power so long that they would see the consequences of their budget cuts (6)? The NHS at it’s best and worst (7).

Cheers,

The Shrink

References:

June 2023 – More mucking about with mining

My investment plan states that I aim to hold 80% (in theory) passive trackers. Most of that is Vanguard ex-UK. It holds a lot of US stock, and a lot of that is tech. I quite like tech, and the idea of growth, the future etc. We could well be close to the technological singularity of AI/ fusion (just 30 years away…) (1). Dipping toes into the financial benefits is appealing.

Problem is, I have an itch for companies that dig money out of the ground.

Mining is in my bones. I’ve lived in old mining areas for decades. It’s seeped into my soul. Or maybe that’s the tip run-off. In my teens my father, attempting to diversify his business, looked at buying a local stone quarry that was for sale. My grandfather was a geologist. There must be something deep in my genes.

I’ve written before about some of the UK-based mining concerns I follow. There’s been a flurry of mass media interest on this recently, most of it centered around access to critical minerals for future industry. For a primer on ‘critical minerals’ this Washington Post article is good (2). Moving to a net-zero economy¹ is going to mean a lot more lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, tin, graphite and rare earth metals are required, as neatly laid out in this International Energy Agency Critical Mineral Market Review (3). It’s worth noting the statement in the pre-amble that this report was in direct response to a G7 request to the IEA to look at critical mineral security. I think this is also where the media axe is being ground. It’s some soft international politicking, alongside not so soft direct targeting of China. China has the lions share of processing and production of most of these minerals, as this graph shows:

Source: IEA, *Share of top three producing countries in processing of selected minerals, 2022*, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-top-three-producing-countries-in-processing-of-selected-minerals-2022, IEA. Licence: CC BY 4.0

The G7 are getting twitchy about China hoarding all the metals needed for industry, not helped by China’s recent decision to limit gallium and germanium exports (4). Note the split between ore miners of the raw material and processors to usable metal. Hence the EU asking whether Aluminium and Zinc refineries/ smelters can make them (4).

The UK was once a major source for copper, iron, nickel, lead etc (for the empire [cue Land of Hope and Glory]). Could it be again?

On the processing point, I’m not sure. UK labour is not cheap, and a lot of our refineries and smelters seem pretty old and use out-of-date tech. I used to work in Port Talbot and won’t forget looking out at 4am to see multi-colour flames from chimney stacks (5). Still has ready access to anthracite though. Vale’s Clydach (Swansea) nickel works seems to be doing alright too (6). Summary: an area that we have expertise in, but as a sector would need quite a bit of capex to reach international significance/ domestic independence.

Actual raw mineral mining gets a lot more print centimetres, I guess because it’s more visceral for readers. Hard to imagine a steel refinery unless you’ve lived in it’s polluted shadow. Easier to picture a miner. Ergo, a tranche of media about the potential for UK mines to supply international markets (7). Most of this centres on lithium, and in the UK on Cornwall (8). For various fun geological reasons we’re actually quite internationally fortunate as the uplifting and folding has left the UK’s rugged western coastline rich in mineral veins. I think the focus on lithium is because of the more widespread knowledge of lithium from the batteries in laptops, toys and Teslas, the news focusses on this.

[OC] World’s Biggest Lithium Producers
by u/PieChartPirate in dataisbeautiful

Cornwall is a pretty good source of lithium (9), and there’s a few companies prospecting or actively mining. I’ve been watching British Lithium for a while, an unlisted (as far as I can work out) firm digging lithium in an unrefined rock ore form near the china clay pits of south Cornwall (10). They have recently signed a deal with Imerys to fund further work (10, 11, 12), leaving me wondering if I should invest in the big French company. Cornish Lithium are a smaller firm I hold a tiny crowdfunding investment with who are using a new method to directly extract lithium from brines which does not require further refining before use (13). There are some concerns about their short-term solvency (14), which have been responded to but not apparently resolved (15). Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I’m actually more positive about tin and copper (16). There’s quite a lot of both left in Cornwall, and I hold Cornish Metals, whom I did a deeper dive on previously (16). They have the rights to South Crofty and it’s massive high-grade workings, and are currently de-watering the mine (17). I also hold a bit of Cornish Tin, which are a similar deal but at an earlier prospecting stage (18, 19). In Wales there’s literally a mountain of copper, lead, zinc, silver and gold; Parys. I’m keeping an eye on AYM-listed Anglesey Mining who are looking to restart the mine (20).

The headwind here is that pretty much every nation is thinking the same thing ². The US has lithium reserves (21). So does Chile (22). Other places like Bosnia and Norway are closer to home (23, 24). We would have to compete on overheads and labour cost, but maybe with international shipping prices increasing and re-shoring that might become more practical.

Either way, a man can dream. Maybe I (my investments) will strike it rich in them there hills.

Footnote:

¹ I hate this bloody phrase, but how else do you say low fossil fuel and plastic consuming society with more renewable, recyclable and environmentally conscious economy without either using it, or sounding like you’re going to go throw paint at an unsuspecting athlete.

² I am deliberately excluding ex-state international waters deep sea mining, because I don’t believe it’s economically viable, per Victor Vescovo (25).

June 2023 Finances

The update for June:

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that my assets have fallen. Well so has my net worth this month, by 0.7%. Paltry maybe, but the wrong direction. My savings rate was also poor, at 14%. The former has two fairly simple answers; in preparation for my Q2 review I checked the valuation of my car (depreciated £1,000), plus Freetrade are currently doing a crowdfunding round, and the current valuation is lower than the previous round. It’s been updated appropriately on my spreadsheet, causing a £300 paper loss. The latter poor savings rate is more puzzling, but likely due to a spenny month as I had the new car serviced and we bought a couple of big ticket white goods for the house.

Goals:

For July my goals were:

Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast) – Failed
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies – Failed
Investigate savings account options – Success

Having recovered I had about two solid weeks where I managed both the hobbies and the fasting, before being hit like a truck by another child-vectored lurgy. This one had me sleeping 18 hours a day for ten days, and barely able to swallow solids. Miserable.

I did investigate savings accounts, and have mostly come up with a plan. One of my banks is Barclays, who offer a “Rainy Day Saver” linked to their Blue Rewards scheme (26). It provides 5% on the first £5k saved, so I was debating shunting £5k over from my Principality regular saver which is offering 3.5% (not great, but not far off the top). I’m a bit annoyed that my NS&I Savings ISA which shelters my tax bill is only getting 2.4%, but then found I could get 3.9% in a different Principality ISA (27). Since I’m sitting at the awkward inflection of the tax system, and with the improved rates of interest this got me thinking about tax sheltering the interest. The temptation therefore is to stick everything in the Principality ISA, and avoid the tax. I need to finalise the sums, but the Principality ISA is looking the winner.

Goals for July:

Open savings account and rationalise
Re-calculate emergency fund – Also needs a review
Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast)
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: May £259, June £358, budget £220
Eating out & Takeaway: May £130, June £59, budget £50
Transport: May £590, June £502.95, budget £330 – Servicing the car
Holiday: May £260, June £0, budget £40
Personal: May £10, June £216, budget £120 – New shoes and clothes
Health: May £56, June £117, budget £150
Misc: May £957, June £555, budget £215 – Big house items
Work fees: May £173, June £267, budget £265

In the garden:

Harvested peas and the first of the courgettes. Squashes growing well. Tomatoes starting to set and first early potatoes almost ready. Cut back apples that were setting to allow the tree to grow. Homegrown strawberries remain a treat.

Other news:

Oh look, house prices are falling (29). Anyone surprised? Definitely not Martin Lewis, who has been harping on about this for months (the ticking mortgage time bomb) in various media places (30). I’m not sure how I feel about it. I kind of think what’s the point of a credit score if as soon as you can’t pay your over-leveraged, under-covered mortgage and call up your bank you’re given a no penalty extension. How can a bank tell who is fiscally responsible? The concessions from banks haven’t been amazing, and the human-level suffering resultant probably justifies the means. Elsewhere, I’ve seen a flurry of stuff in more academic media about IBM working on quantum computers, so maybe respite for that beleaguered stock (31).

Finally, if you want a good overview of why doctors are striking, why the NHS is collapsing, and why the governments much vaunted plan for healthcare workforce is pouring water into a leaking bucket, this article in the Washington Post is an amazing overview (32).

Cheers,

The Shrink

References:

The Financial Dashboard – May 2023

Bit of a mish-mash this month. I’ve been fairly unwell and not tracked as much as I would have liked, or had the time or space to consider things. In terms of news articles or themes that caught my eye…

Bloomberg and others are suggesting the UK housing market is in a ‘correction’ (1). It’s one of the ermine’s favourite topics, so I won’t delve here (2). I have only limited sympathy for the leopard’s ate my face individuals you get in a certain type of article (or man shouts at cloud), e.g. Lisa from Hertfordshire who has an interest only mortgage on her house which is paid for by her benefits (3). How exactly did you ever think you would own your home? There’s the chat that fewer people have mortgages now (more like 30%), and that a 4% interest rate hike when your mortgage is 5x your dual salary household income is comparable to a 10% hike on your 3x single salary household income (of the 90s) (4). It’s noise. I’m one of those in their mid-30s who has seen successive once in a lifetime financial events roger my potential (5). Whingeing doesn’t get you anywhere. 1% interest rates were never going to last.

People’s lives are going to get poorer and harder. ChatGPT and other AIs may provide some help, but they’re unlikely to be a panacea. From my POV, as a user of limited AI and with some coding skills in their development, the market seems overblown, per here (6). I was watching a video-game streamer interacting with a live-generated conversation from an NPC AI. Very cool, but how significant in the associated financial alpha?

Meanwhile life goes on. How are these improvements going to impact on food scarcity, climate change or wars. An amazing New Yorker piece covering two weeks at the frontline in Ukraine really helped me put things in perspective (7). Things could be a lot worse.

May 2023 Finances

Here’s May’s update:

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. Basically the same savings rate as last month, running at 26.4%. The expensive holiday with friends was balanced out by some extra work, meaning credit cards are paid right down and emergency fund further topped up. Otherwise not much excitement.

Goals:

For May my goals were:

Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast) – Failed
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies – Failed
Read some fiction – Success

Travelling plus a week where I was laid up in bed, basically broke my first two goals. I wasn’t able to maintain an intermittent fast (some days I was only eating when I was awake in the evening), and dinner out with friends turn rude when you’re not eating. I did manage to read a fairly decent science fiction novel (Chasm City), which was absorbing if not earth-shattering.

Goals for June:

Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast)
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies
Investigate savings account options

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: April £420, May £259, budget £220 – A bit better, likely reflects the new reality
Eating out & Takeaway: Apr £95, May £130, budget £50 – Out with friends lots
Transport: Apr £118, May £590, budget £330 – Insurance bills
Holiday: Apr £0, May £260, budget £40 – Team trip away
Personal: Apr £25, May £10, budget £120
Health: Apr £112, may £56, budget £150
Misc: Apr £1270, May £957, budget £215 – Lots in this, various home things plus the trip away
Work fees: Apr £606, May £173, budget £265

In the garden:

Planting out beans, peas, courgettes and squashes. Potatoes coming along nicely. Everything generally going mad with the wet and then the heat

Cheers,

The Shrink

References:

Quarterly Returns – Q1 2023

Quarterly return posts supplement my monthly Financial Dashboard, covering investments in detail and looking at my yearly targets. Here I track purchases and sales, document progress against my investment strategy, and discuss re-balancing and changes over time.

Picking up where 2022 left off, and coming in fairly late, here’s an overview of how Q1 went for me in 2023.

Q1 2023 Returns:

Cash Accounts £13,750 (-£850; new figures end Q4 2022 £10,800, end Q1 2023 £11,800)
Investments £12,850 (+£750)
Property £72,800 (+£1,100)
Cars £7500 (-£500)

I had to go back and work out why my cash account was -£850 for this quarter, which involved me staring incredulously at it for a while and regretting not starting this post earlier. Answer: for all my work outside of my PAYE I skim 45% off and put it straight into an ISA to cover the year end tax. I have been including that figure in my cash accounting, but as this proves, it does kind of bugger the curve after the tax bill is paid. Therefore the new figures quoted are not including the cash ISA value. By those figures I’m up £1,000 in cash accounts for the quarter. Here’s a fun new graph to demonstrate:

No evidence of a compounding inflection point yet, but a nice steady regressed line. My emergency funds sit at £500 instantly available, a further £5,600 in less than 24 hours, and another £2,350 in 48-72 hours (premium bonds), for a total of £8,450. The aim remains £6k in <24 hours and £6k in 48-72, which will be completed by year end. Elsewhere investment holdings trended upwards, whilst my new car depreciated in value a bit. All to be expected really.

Investments:

Core/ Satellite Passive/ Active Split

My 2022/23 ISA is in Vanguard, and I put a small amount in across January and February, but it’s mostly been tracking flat.

Bugger all to say here really. Bought some more Vanguard FTSE Dev-World Ex-UK. Still 10% overweight on my active picks. Everything is trending very slowly up. More boring passive purchases to come.

2023 Goals:

Save 35% of my income

Close on this, saving 33.5% of my income over the quarter. If you exclude the weird buy-into-a-hypothetical-pot NHS pension that becomes 26.6%. Not terrible, but room for improvement. C-

Finish the house renovations

Kinda. I mean they’re not finished yet, but on my list of things to be finished I’ve ticked off two of the nine things. Some just need money thrown at them (new carpet), and others need actual times and effort. I think I’ll probably need to take a few weeks of annual leave and focus on them while the kiddo’s in nursery. C

Set and document monthly goals

Yes, though not maintaining a strong level of effort. C

Return (by end of year) to regular investing

I have invested, but not regularly. My excuse at the moment is that I’m rebuilding the emergency fund, and I could either reverse-debt-snowball my way into a fat back-up fund and then go whole hog on investing, or drip money into both. I’ve gone for the former. Intent to go back into the deep end of investing Q3/4. D-

Continue (at end of year) to be learning a new language

Actually enjoying this and seeing progress. Good job Duolingo on your gamification of the language learning art. B+

So there we go. Another quarter older, not much wiser, inching closer to my long term goals.

Happy spring/summer,

The Shrink

April 2023 – Strikes & job offers

As I near the end of my training I’m planning for the future, and I’m no longer sure it’s in the NHS. The summer of worker discontent continues. Unite, a mixture of healthcare staff, are setting more strike dates (1). So are junior doctors through the BMA over the border in England (though not here in Wales) (2). The NHS pension might be good, but I’m unconvinced the work load and treatment from patients is worth the opportunity cost of my NHS salary. This extraordinarily prescient paper from 1999 discusses the endgame of the NHS, and how it dies with a whimper not a bang (3). I think we’re well into that now, with outsourcing of the easy NHS work to private providers, normalisation amongst the middle classes of getting private care instead of waiting, and increasingly strident concerns among the general public about waiting times at A&E. Building a private A&E plus ITU and associated systems takes time, but I hear it’s happening in London. Free care at point of demand has become free care if we think there is a financial argument for your demand (4). But that 1999 paper is also a reminder that this is cyclical, and things were like this in the 90s pre-Blair. My older colleagues tell me they were never this bad, and PFI was an appalling bit of can-road-kicking, but it’s a question of political and economic will.

Over the border here in Wales we don’t have the internal market. Everything is NHS or private providers. The private providers aren’t supplying the NHS services. It cannot act as a bastion against private healthcare.

I’ve been a junior doctor for a decade. I, personally, have paid >£5,000 to sit (and pass) all the exams required to be a consultant. My training budget doesn’t cover my annual fee to the Royal College (and I can’t claim for it anyway), never mind my indemnity and GMC fees. I have responsibility for hundreds of patients overnight. If someone is suicidal and picked up by the police I assess them and decide if they are safe to go home, or have to be admitted to hospital. I have led on national projects, saving the NHS many thousands and improving patient outcomes. I have published reports, papers, articles, and spoken at international events (paid for out of my own pocket). I am currently paid ~£25/hr.

The private sector in the UK will pay me a lot more than the NHS, but I’m not sure I want to be complicit in this process. There is a global shortage of doctors, and it is cheaper to pay one to immigrate and get them up to speed than to train them locally. In New Zealand/ Australia I can earn slightly more than here, for a shorter working weak, less stress, and with a massive training budget and time allocation. I have a standing job offer from a contact in Canada, with a starting salary of CAD$300,00 (£180,000; £160/ hour), and support (financial and mentoring etc) to emigrate and align my training.

I’m left wondering what’s keeping me here.

April 2023 Finances

Here’s April’s slightly late update:

These are taken, as always, from my Beast Budget spreadsheet. My savings rate has bounced back a bit, 28% for this month, as things stabilise. I’ve been fronting up some bills via credit card for a group holiday, and after finally paying the balance on this I’ve been reimbursed by friends. I’ve also been paid some delayed invoices. My emergency fund is creeping up (about £9k now). Aiming to have that goal achieved in the next six months.

Goals:

For April my goals were:

Exercise twice a week – Fail
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies – Fail
Find out what we could borrow on a new mortgage from our current provider – Success
Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast) – Success

Time is currently my enemy. Pregnant MrsShrink has limited ability to do chores or parenting, so most of my time is currently taken up with that. That means no exercise, and no hobbies, as life is eat, sleep, work, childcare, repeat. The intermittent timed fast is quite good though as it takes no time, improves my metabolism and seems to be helping me sleep better. I spoke to our current mortgage provider to get a gauge of what we could extend our mortgage to if we moved currently. The result would be ~£430k max property price. This isn’t really in the target range for the next move, so we’ll be delaying it until later in the year once I’ve got some higher earnings.

Goals for May:

Do not eat between 7pm and 7am for five days of the week (intermittent fast) – This worked well, so rolling it over to keep momentum
Make a few hours four times over the month to pursue hobbies – Hope, more than aim
Read some fiction

Budgets:

As compared to my four year back-calculated mean monthly spend:

Groceries: March £413, April £420, budget £220 – Further oof, hello inflation
Eating out & Takeaway: Mar £147, Apr £95, budget £50 – Better
Transport: Mar £283, Apr £118, budget £330
Holiday: Mar £0, Apr £0, budget £40
Personal: Mar £145, Apr £25, budget £120
Health: Mar £55, Apr £112, budget £150
Misc: Mar £340, Apr £1270, budget £215 – Big ticket group trip
Work fees: Mar £134, Apr £606, budget £265 – That time of the quarter

In the garden:

It’s planting time! About 20 different varieties of crops have gone into seed modules or direct to the raised beds. The chickens are back laying, and some annual flowers have also been sown. Apple and plum trees are starting to show signs of life, which brings a bit of joy to my miserly soul.

Other news:

Reasons to grow your own; veg prices are going up (XX), and so are the prices of eggs (XX) – we have a glut at the moment. There was also an interesting series of features about the decline of the range of vegan food options in supermarkets (XX). Talking to a vegan friend, he was not surprised, as he essentially thought there had been a rush to market for a lot of mediocre brands in the last couple of years, trying to grab a share while there was lots of media attention. He just viewed it as standard market forces, with the crap food/ brands leaving the shelves.

Cheers,

The Shrink

References: