Decadence, drawdown and deceptive sales

Monevator has a weekend reading where the general sentiment is that investors have been taking some heat of late. I have become a pussy, it seems, as I can’t really say I have taken such a lot of stick, although the high rate of inflation makes that hard to observe. I found it hard to get excited about investing this year. I ended up buying some VGOV this year because I couldn’t think what to do with it, but I took @Jam’s comment on board. I’ve already given gold the order of the boot from the ISA and I don’t want to replace it with another bed blocker where there are acceptable alternatives. I kind of like @ZXSpectrum48k’s poetic comment

You don’t buy gold. You sell something else and gold is where you wait hoping for the problem to pass.

It’s true for those who trade it, which makes sense for younger folk. For me it is to reduce the ulcer index, so I don’t trade it against something else, its job is to help me look at other hits with equanimity, although I will take the CGT harvesting of gains/offsetting losses function. But it shouldn’t be in the ISA, until I have exhausted all other unwrapped investments. There is nothing wrong with trading gold, but you don’t reduce the ulcer index doing that. But you do get the profit from rebalancing – it’s a different aim, more suited to those in accumulation.

I clearly have no talent for this index investing malarkey, I buy in Vanguard, usually some in May and a larger part towards the end of October and then transfer these index holdings after April the next year to HL, where they go to die it seems. HL is my dump for Vanguard stocks, my main ISA is still with iWeb.

It’s not as bad as HL show, since the gain in Vanguard isn’t copied over, they are marked to market on entry to HL, but yes, I’d say the last couple of years has been a wash for indexy types. One problem is brokers show you P/L on the cost of buying the shares relative to current price. For a young gun who is all about growth that gives a good approximation to the performance, but for an old git shifting to income that writes off all dividend income, which I use to buy more shares, often in something else. Brokers treat that as you putting in more cash. In a transfer ISA you can’t put in more cash. I track the overall PL using Quicken and R.

There’s some scuttlebutt that Jezza may raise the ISA allowance to 30k. Dunno if that’s from next year, or if I can top up this year by 10k on top of a fully loaded ISA. I intend to grab about as much as I can of this, ahead of a change in government. The Budget is on the 22nd November. It’s a clear sop to the better off, while I was working it would have been a very serious challenge to fill a 30k ISA, and pay the mortgage, and get to eat…

decumulation diversions

I read Monevator’s recent decumulation post (paywall). TA has started his decumulation journey relatively recently, retiring a couple of years ago (non-paywall), and crunch from the shift of the gearstick from forward to reverse is hard on the nerves. It’s difficult to gauge your future ride. Maybe I am getting decadent, but I am now wasteful compared to TA. I suspect that TA has rather more in hand than the example, though he says it bears a passing resemblance to his situation. As he says ¹

any deaccumulation portfolio is going to be a one-size-fits-none affair.

Nevertheless, I am going to stick my neck out and agree that £28k for a child-free couple feels quite tight. I have lived the decumulation life for over 10 years now, I have gotten used to the sound of the engines in the final approach. They are old, and the sound is rough and noisy – there was a recent week when my networth saw more lift than the annual salary I earned at the high-water mark of my erstwhile career, there will be days of more suckout I am sure.

TA is a far more rational investor than my degenerate active self, his model self will need to push the boat out in years to come, I suspect 😉 TA’s article was predicated on the child-free, and the first question was ‘what about people with kids’.

As a grizzled old IFA said of his clients wittering on about how much they loved their precious kids

They would rather die with their riches like Tutankhamun, than see their children enjoy while they are alive. (Boomers unfortunately)

That IFA would like a word in your shell-like 😉

Moving on, it’s an interesting track through a similar pathless land I experienced, and it’s worth looking at how a sensible captain would have planned the journey. I started mine in my late forties, TA probably started accumulating earlier. He chose his time and place of battle with more control and intent, I blundered into the situation, as the GFC rotted my work environment, and I was either not resilient enough or other problems meant this did my nut in.

The classic planned FI/RE journey is like the track of an aircraft. Lifting up under power through your working life, and then as it reaches the edge of space the captain flicks a switch and cuts the power, the ideal is a glide path to landing, roughly your date of death, in practice because nobody wants to think about the date of death, we usually take age 100 as a serviceable proxy. It’s theoretically attainable but hardly anyone gets there², so it’s good enough.

I was late to start accumulating, and most of the power failed under the load in the ascent. But I had advantages – I was at the height of my earning power, had seen decent career progression, and had largely paid down my mortgage. I had paid it down because I had a rotten experience of residential property in the greatest financial mistake of my life buying a house in the late 1980s.

I do not list housing as any part of my networth, similarly ignoring the residential property in TA’s example, I inquired of Quicken how much I started off with, and it was about 2/3 of TA’s example, in real terms. Which was probably not enough. The fact I am here a decade later writing about it looking short shows that I got away with it, in that respect I am a lived example for a decent prognosis of at least one of the FireCalc tracks that would have applied in 2012. Acknowledged I am rather a long way off the mythical 100, decumulation is a race you can only say you’ve beaten the odds just at the point when it doesn’t matter any more 😉

I computed that I needed three years from the start point in March 2009 to get enough. I tried no end of spreadsheet wizardry to shorten the gap of working full-time, didn’t work. Really needed OMY.

I started before Osborne’s transformational 2014 SIPP changes so I had expected to buy an annuity with DC pension capital. This exposes you to sequence of returns risk along two axes. Only one could you mitigate through lifestyling your DC pension bond/equity mix. The other risk is what you get for your DC pension capital. In the financial repression years³ following the GFC it became very expensive to buy an annuity as annuity rates fell through the floor.

This is why DB pension providers offered incentives to either de-index or offload their liabilities by offering high CETV multiples for the annuities they offered, otherwise known as DB pensions. I’d feel sick now had I taken the unindexed higher start option, and that post was only written four years ago. My DB pension is predicated on average age of death 20 years after NRA, I would have taken a hit only a fifth into the average journey length!

So back to the story, a disorganised mustelid flings the key across the years to my future self. I took the chance of sweating another three years earnings. In general, dear reader, if you are faced with the choice of health or wealth, choose health. Like Time, you can’t buy it once it’s gone. I didn’t really have the option. If I made it, I had advantages that were only dimly visible at the time, some only in hindsight.

First off, I was at the peak of my earning power. Paying higher rate tax and several thousands in NI. The Firm offered salary sacrifice so I could get this into my hands by putting it into AVCs, which is a SIPP in all but name. Compound interest doesn’t help you retire early, earning more than you spend and saving hard does.

Salary Sacrifice can be transformational for FI/RE, but there’s a devastating catch. If you are a higher-rate taxpayer, you are probably a spendy sort of chap. I still remember the fellow at The Firm who, just before the GFC introduced me to how salary sacrifice works with pensions with the deathless phrase

“this opportunity is so good you’re mad if you’re working here past 45”.

It pulled the black tip of my mustelid tail because I was over 45.

Don’t. Pull. That. Tail. You’ll end up with needle-sharp gnashers ripping your flesh

I had the last laugh, checking him out on LinkedIn just now. Why could I do what he couldn’t? I could live like a celibate monk in a brothel to get where I wanted to go. He tried it for a while, but his wife and kids didn’t like the change in lifestyle, losing the holidays in Italy, the nice clothes, days out. If you want to make easy money, do something hard.

LinkedIn says he’s still at The Firm. I walked out the gate the last time 12 years ago now. “you’re mad if you’re working here past 45”. Quite, thanks for the tip 😉 I wonder if I should go to his retirement do which ought to be up soon, a ghostly white sinuous presence to remind him of those heady days fifteen years ago when it all seemed so simple. Although the charge of insanity stung, it pencilled in the faint outline of an exit ramp on the wall, with a red square “in case of emergency break glass” box.

VWRL, post GFC

Second advantage is that while the GFC enshittified my job, it meant that VWRL (as a proxy for the stock market) did this afterwards, because contrary to the passivista mantra, valuation and timing do matter, it’s just extremely hard to use⁴. The result is not quite as terriff as (90-32)/32/11 years =17% lift p.a because: inflation making it more like(90-44)/44/11 = 9% p.a. Nobody knew that was going to happen at that time. They could have gone with their gut, for sure, and some people called it right. But it was a tough thing to actually do. Back in the day, people could seriously think that they could get away with investment income of 20 or 25 times their desired annual income, an implicit safe withdrawal rate of 4 to 5%. Nowadays TA sets it at 3%, over 30 times annual income. Valuation matters…

I got a bung from Covid. You weren’t meant to short that. Tax-free, thanks muchly. The ISA took a gut punch, though it came back and more in the following years, which vindicates Do Not F’ing Sell. Luck there too – I survived to watch this from downstream, because to be honest from what is coming out of the Covid inquiry it was much more about luck than judgement from the Bozza⁵ stick a hairdryer up your nose and ‘let the bodies pile high’ crew, I was old enough to be one of those bodies but lucky enough not to be.

I also got some win from Covid by the simple fact that you couldn’t buy many consumer doodads for a while. Oh, and there was money off restaurants for a while, which apparently came as a surprise to the Covid team. The joys of joined-up government and the hubris of the boy who would be King discovering that his claim I’m the Führer, the king didn’t stack up would be funny if it weren’t for the collateral damage. But sure, it saved on the costs of eating out.

Finally there were the advantages of a paid down house and a DB pension. The toughest part of doing the RE part of FI/RE is that you are going against the grain of the typical professional career life track, in particular if you want to retire before you are 55 you are into the gap where you have to save money out of taxed income, which is a howling headwind. Not having a mortgage is money you don’t have to earn and pay tax on, the counter-argument is can you not afford to have a big cheap mortgage?

My younger working self was poorer in those last three years of work than TA’s illustration of £14k p.a, because I had driven my salary down to nearly the national minimum wage, salary sacrificing the rest into the AVC. I think the full-time NMW was worth less than it is now in those days. I drank homebrew then, because I couldn’t afford decent wine on NMW 😉

So I admire TA’s straw man/alter ego. Sensible captain flicks the switch, and he has a good flight plan for age 100, job done sorted. It’s a better ride – a year after he detaches from the mother ship IRL, in the twisted aftermath of a global pandemic, TA can write this calm piece.. Chapeau that man. It took me two years to even think about trying to work out which way was up.

I was also poorer than TA’s model in the immediate post-work period. I was self-employed but in my entire post-work time I never earned more than 10% of my full-time salary at The Firm. The CAD work which was the last work I did had a better hourly rate than The Firm, but my post-work self was a idler. So I never put the time in, and those were hit and run one-offs anyway.

While I can say that my younger self lived within TA’s analysis in the early days, I don’t feel it stuck over time. I have 12 years of lived experience as a retiree, and I wonder if I have seen ZXSpectrum48k’s hedonic adaptation critique in action. Those numbers would feel tight now, you can probably keep the wolf from the door with 28k as a couple but maybe not live graciously. I’m not talking Rich Kids of London, 28k probably doesn’t even cover rent in the Great Wen, I believe the presumption for that figure is a paid-off house.

Unlike TA’s model, I observed a very notable net-worth increase over time since retiring. Some of that is inflation. I would need £140 today to buy what I could have bought for £100 on the day I retired. But that long bull run has been kind to me, my networth appreciated by a lot more than 1.5 times, even after buying more house⁶ a few years ago. Don’t know exactly how much, because I never recorded the value of the AVCs/SIPP in the early days.

In the time between deciding to go and actually retiring, there were days when it seemed a lost cause, I would not last long enough to build a strong enough base. There was a song somewhere in the 1990s, by a French woman, I think it was in a minor key, called disenchanted. It was of the time, and I only have O level schoolboy French, so most of my relation to the song was guesswork, together with tracking the tone colour of the singing, emotive inflection is not so hugely different in French. There was a refrain, to the general effect of wandering in the unclear waters of the future, awaiting the end, followed by a section which still speaks to me

“If I must fall from high
may my fall be slow”

The aim of the AVC was to buy as much of this as possible before the unknowable time when the flame fails under the load. May my fall be slow, indeed. That’s why there are no records of the monthly sal sac purchases, pretty much from the month after Monevator sent out this transmission, signalling the low-water mark of the GFC. That drew around the the tail-puller’s exit-ramp sketch with a Sharpie. The AVC was invested in 50:50 FTSE100:Global. I have no idea⁷ what that did for me, though I got a good few years of tax-free personal allowance income out of that after converting it to a SIPP. People like to pretend that investing is rational, but it isn’t. It’s as much an act of faith, and you needed faith to buy in those long years.

There’s much complexity in TA’s dynamic harvesting strategy. That’s complexity I just don’t have. Spend up to the pension. That’s enough for now.  Then GIA dividend income. The SP (taxed) will be another £8k after tax in a few years. If I need capex then burn some GIA, cash savings or later on from the ISA. Annuity income simplifies drawdown no end.

I think TA’s decumulation plan is sound, I wonder if it needs room to breathe as time goes by. At the moment my DB pension covers my spending, so the ISA is still in accumulation. I am still a few years off the State Pension. It would make sense to run down some of my GIA first, specifically because spouses can inherit (not be gifted) an ISA retaining the tax-free wrapper. The childed may need to look to SIPPs rather than ISAs because pensions are a form of trust, so outwith their estate, but this is not my area of expertise. As that poor devil of an IFA with his head in his hands about Boomer King Tuts said, most people in that situation would rather bitch to the Torygraph about the iniquity of inheritance tax than y’know, give it to their kids while they are still alive 😉 It’s rewarding to give people life changing amounts of money without let or hindrance and watch the results, if you choose character well.

I am not a passivista, though I think having built networth lets me say that passive investing is not the only fruit that is unwormy. I have shifted to a broader-based more asset-class balanced, and more passive equity allocation, because capital preservation is more important to me now. I am not my younger self trying to hit it out of the park.

Given typical FI/RE career paths, passive equity gains and the fact that FI/RE folk will have shorter working lives because they want to retire early, compound interest’s contribution is more delulu than solulu. Maybe that’s the point, a personal finance Pascal’s Wager where the null result jollies you into saving for a pension even if the compounding cake is a lie in practical efficacy for FI/RE aspirants. Once you are retired early, if you have some in hand, it works slowly and silently, I have more respect for its wonder as a retiree than as a worker bee.

Why afterwards? The numbers are a lot bigger. I fiddled with Monevator’s CI calculator. From a standing start⁸ £1000 compounding for 10 years gets to £1.5k, the same endpoint as £425 gets to after 30 years. I earned three times as much in real terms at the end of my working life than at the beginning. It was easier for me to save £1.5k at the end of my working life than put £425 aside 30 years before. The contrast is made bigger by salary sacrifice, not servicing a mortgage, and not having to buy first car, furniture and all the paraphernalia of a household’s life. I will also acknowledge some gratuitous and wasteful spaffage of my younger self, less of that could have made his life easier too.

Of waste and white goods

I have had four coffee machines since the 1990s. A Tefal basic model that was lo-tech enough I could switch it on in the morning before work with a timeswitch to apply power. DxGF cracked the carafe on that and it wasn’t economically worth replacing. Two Krups machines, with the fond idea if I bought the same machine then I could firstly hang on to the carafe and then swap parts if it failed, without jumping to the problem that the most failure prone parts are always the same. Finally a Delonghi machine, where the spec was that it be cheap enough and not dire trash. I had to fix the power on off press button with one scavenged from a failed paint sprayer, after a year and a bit. I wouldn’t really describe that as merchantable quality, say it gets pressed twice a day that’s about 1000 operations, it’s meant to last 200k ops if you get this sort of thing from a decent manufacturer.

Among its many failings the damn thing consumed 12W doing nothing to power the circuit board that allowed De Longhi to use a cheap crappy low voltage switch I had to replace rather than a real mains switch. That’s over 100kWh p.a. or about £31 p.a. at today’s power rates. Bastards. Saving money can cost you a fortune, wastefully writing off the machine’s capital cost every two years. For comparison, that’s a third of what it uses if it makes coffee using 1kW for an hour each day, which is an over-estimate of power drain.

So I was in the market for a new coffee machine. Easier for me because I don’t like espresso or anything that needs steam, preferring bog standard filter coffee. Yeah I know, I have no taste. It saves me from the sort of consumerism that Monevator indulged in, though I admire his chops in busting cheap rubbish out of his life earlier than me. His machine has six knobs on it and a pressure meter, as well as an onboard grinder. I specifically don’t want one with an onboard grinder because it adds complexity and failure modes. I have a Krups burr grinder for that. Monevator’s machine strikes fear into the Ermine fur because anything that heats or steams milk is a bitch to clean out, and I detest hot milk in coffee anyway. Monevator benchmarked spend for me at less than £500, ideally not something that consumes power while turned off and needs fixing in a year and a half, Delonghi you spivs.

I read this article in August. I felt that the anecdote about being a sales droid back in the day reduced likelihood of him being an AI content farm as so many review sites are now, so I carried on reading. Why should I spend more than £100 on a coffee machine? A filter coffee machine is a very simple thing. Usually there is a U shaped tube with the heating element under the hotplate, a plastic ball in the pipe from tank to the heater that stops the heated water reflowing down easily, and the steam drives the heated water up and over a siphon into the filter. Job done.

Looks like the there were two premium machines, one made by the same crew that made Monevator’s machine, Sage, and Technivorm, they are poles apart in design concept. I favoured the simplicity of the latter. There’s too much of a tendency to complicate things now, so marketing can differentiate price points.

Simple living. No apps.

This is a gratuitous rant. I reserve a special place in Hell for smart anything. Domestic appliances need a very good reason to connect to t’internet and spaff data to the world. Fine in the case of a computer, less good in the case of a TV, and absolutely no bloody way in the sort of thing you can only use in the house. As for something that listens to you – WTF? I get it how Alexa might be terrific as an assistive aid, and that time may well come but until then no I bloody well do not need to enable any microphone – at least in Orwell’s 1984 the Ministry of Truth installed the listening devices, where now you get to pay for it yourself?

Some spotty yoof from British Gas fitted a Hive system when they replaced the 40 year old boiler in my mother’s house some years ago, which was bonkers and gave her no end of grief, her requirements were basically an on and off switch, but you don’t get such simplicity on their contracts it seems. I put smart meters in the same category, there’s no need for Them to be able to switch You off remotely without having to look you in the eyes.

I am all for monitoring your power usage and use Efergy for that. It’s me that needs to know the microdetail. They don’t, other than every quarter 😉 Sure, I do get the concept of a smart grid, I just don’t really think it’s anywhere near ready, and how the heck are you going to black start that after a widespread internet/power outage?

Anything that requires an app is planned obsolescence because any fule kno that manufacturers have no interest in supporting old models once the new has come out, and apps are dependent on a lot of infrastructure that changes all the time as Android/iOS are updated, breaking old apps and perfectly serviceable kit with gay abandon because nobody keeps a phone for more than two years. The rule is simple. If it requires a smartphone, then it has a limited service life of less than five years, and will be spaffing your details and data exhaust to entities that are trying to make you spend more money. This is Not A Good Thing and I don’t sell myself for that sort of convenience.

I don’t think the Sage coffee machine connects to the internet. But it’s overcomplicated for what it does IMO. “Multiple presets & customisable brew settings; More control over the brew than any other filter coffee machine ” gives me a tyranny of choice feeling, I don’t need to think first thing in the morning exactly what temp, what bloom time etc etc, getting able to think is what coffee is there to help with 😉 The cold brew function made me laugh, too. I was expecting some fiendishly complicated panjandrum that extracts the coffee with cold water, but no. You do this overnight, it makes the coffee with hot water and the machine lets it cool down. Pretty much like you’d do with any scumbag machine with the EU mandated switch off after an hour, fire it up late at night and leave the bugger, eight hours later, cold brew 😉 It’s what my mother used to do in the 1970s when she wanted iced coffee, made using a manual filter funnel on the top of a jug. Duh.

The Dutch machine scored for simplicity. And the fact that you can source spare parts, there’s something good about something that has been the same for a while. We used to have a machine made by the Moccamaster brand of Technivorm at work, it was in service from about 1995, and the main failure mode was people cracking the jugs, so I had a good feeling about the company. A lot of coffee ran through that machine, it was still in service when I left, and it looks like the modern jug would still fit the machine, which is not bad for nearly 30 years after first going into service.

So I bought one from Amazon. Despite the homely video about it being hand made and checked the first one had a spall in the enamel of the hotplate, and I could see that rusting over time, so I sent it back and got a replacement, which was fine. The instructions did educate me not to use the carafe to fill the tank which is a subtlety I had never got in 40 years of using coffee machines – the reason why is potential for swarf left behind⁹ if the filter paper breaks and you don’t rinse it painstakingly, then it gets into the tank. So I retained the old carafe for that. Not combining the hotplate with the boiler allows the hotplate to run at a lower temperature which is good, though I use a glass thermos to decant the coffee into. You can get machines with insulated jugs but I don’t want my coffee to taste of steel.

the silver coffee flask the same as mine is the only thing Liz Truss got right in her short sojourn

My Thermos is a Tefal flask and it did not totally please my fur to find that it was the same as Liz Truss favoured. I spent less than half of Monevator on this project. And there’s only two things to set – the amount of coffee relative to the water, and to make with the power switch. Job done. Plus I have a cold brew function too, just not labelled as such 😉 However, the Sage does have a feature my working self would have missed, the timer function, I am out of luck with that. The power switch is a mini contactor and needs power applied to hold on. It does, however, not draw power when switched off, something that is becoming a rarity nowadays. It also makes better coffee and faster, mainly as a result of attention to detail and a larger bore heating element.

vampire power loads

Parasitic power is a general problem, because the cost of a switch to control mains power is always going to be more than the cost of something sending a signal. This adds up in the manufacture of consumer goods, and the EU tried to do something about standby power. Obviously we are Great British Real Men and don’t putz about with such milquetoast flummery because We Are Macho and Hard. However, as the misbegotten UKCA project to Take Back Control of the CE mark found out, no manufacturer produces products specifically for the UK, and we had to wind our necks in and climb down about UK specific marking.

The government intends to introduce legislation to extend recognition of goods that meet EU requirements, including the CE marking, indefinitely, beyond 31 December 2024 for many products. This will mean that certain goods that meet EU requirements can be placed on the GB market.

Otherwise among the multifarious economic benefits of Brexit would be the fact that consumer goods would cost more in the UK to meet a separate compliance regime for a small outpost of what was the EU, we’re just not all that. Been a very long time since half the map was pink, Brexitards. Sic transit gloria mundi

A large English speaking region which is big enough for products made specifically for it shows the advantage. Go to any hotel room in America and try and use a piece of white goods and it’s much easier, because firms make them for this monolithic monoglot market with a slightly deviant mains power spec unlike much of the rest of the world. As a result the control functions are marked in English (well, American) and you can immediately understand what they do, whereas for the last 30 years in the UK and EU they have weird hieroglyphics you have to squint at to decipher the possible function, so one front panel can serve a polyglot EU region. There’s just nothing special enough about the UK market to justify the effort, so the UKCA initiative died a death. This article from the BSI is wrong because it doesn’t acknowledge the defeat of UKCA’s exclusivity though it’s otherwise a good description of the various markings.

I was lulled into a false sense of security by the EU directive when I bought my TV, because the EU directives states standby power should be 1W or less. I can’t get excited about chasing vampire loads of 1W, that’s 9kWh a year which is £2.37 p.a. I did not clock the difference between EU directive standby and network standby. You have to go though a shitload of menus to set the TV into standby, the default is network standby, which consumes 17W, where I had assumed 1W. You hardly ever see switches on wall sockets in other countries but they do help you bust the ass of wasteful vampire drains like that TV or the Delonghi coffee machine using 12W 24/7 to see if you have switched it on yet…

much commonality under the hood

I was puzzled to see that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority was giving the merger of two domestic goods brands side-eye. Exactly how powerful does Brexit Blighty think it is? We’ve seen this movie before with the MSFT Activision thing, the CMA sez no, but once the US FTC failed to put the kibosh on it then it’s oh, well that’s OK then.

All this shit is made in China, anyway, and to a large extent it’s all the same under the hood. The brand doesn’t help you at all with finding out what’s inside. I was treated to this godawful racket from our five year old dishwasher, and ended up grubbing about in a lousy underbelly of crap service and chancers on the make.

The dishwasher innards were a doddle to get at. I removed four screws, none of which I needed to. I could have got access to the faulty item with just my bare hands and a spudger. In times gone by you could get service manuals for things, but people don’t bother with that, there’s no demand, we don’t fix things now.

It also reminded me that plumbing is a young person’s game, because you have to fold yourself up in knots to get into tight corners.

My first reaction to the noise was to think good that there wasn’t water all over the place, second, look at what’s available, replacement was about £300. If that was it then I’d have a new dishwasher and a lot less frustration at dealing with incompetent chancers, but when I priced up actually getting this, I discovered that disposal was going to be £75, I’m not short of £75, but the thought just pissed me right off. I was OK with paying £25 for install, and a tenner for delivery, but paying a quarter of the capital cost on enviro-what’sittery, no, bollocks to that.

I have an alligator saw, and I’m not afraid to use it. I could take the pieces to the tip myself. There might even be some interesting parts to salvage. There’s a cottage industry of people selling used parts on ebay, but life is too short for that sort of side hustle for me. Indeedably summed it up well, old gits should stuff the hustle trap.

Less sensible when that time is reinvested in working. To earn more money. To buy more time. The hustle trap. Not living life, but using work as an excuse to hide the absence of a rich fulfilling life.

My younger self called that well with matched betting. But a few relays and triacs for the junkbox, maybe? I did know I was not quite doing the living well thing here, I could afford the 75 sods, it was the thought of being ripped off that jarred. There was a study that people react badly to being suckered, and paying good money to get rid of junk was that suckering for me. Indeedably again

Spend what it costs to be comfortable. […] Self-sacrifice and denial are not the way. They do explain why frugalistas and budgeteers are a miserable breed. Forgetting that money is an enabler, not the goal.

Ouch. I was a frugalista, though I note that compared with the people coming out of the GFC, the frugalistas have been run out of town, the FI/RE space has shifted towards Rich Kids of London, because RE had become the province of the wealthy. Who’d a thunk it, eh?

Or these frugalistas all discovered Indeedably’s frugalista misery and either went back to work or made their money on the back of the bull run. Grubbing about with the dishwasher wasn’t about saving money, it was about saving having the piss taken. Since I was going to have the aggravation of taking this out, I figured I may as well inquire as to what is making this earache.

Fault-finding white goods is tiresome, at least this was an honest and obvious fault, not one that comes and goes, intermittent faults are a bastard, how d’you know they are gone? I did consider paying someone to look at this, but figured I am going to eat a cost of at least £100 to get someone out, and then I will still have a five-year old machine which is probably closer to end of life than beginning. I didn’t really fancy that. The conundrum is summed up by this wag on ukwhitegoods

And to be equally honest, if you have managed to get 4 years out of a low end Chinese made dishwasher you are already quids in, don’t waste any serious money on it.

There are only really two sources of motive force in a dishwasher, the main circulation pump that also spins the spray arms by the reaction of the spray, and the drain pump. It’s possible to work out which was the problem by listening and observing the outfall and applying a bit of common sense. On pulling the circulation pump motor the problem was immediately apparent.

Look Ma, no screw required. Hence the integral shroud covering the vanes is loose and rattling about elsewhere. As the fellow said, after 4 years with a Chinese dishwasher you are in extra time. For the want of a M4x8 screw the machine was scrappable

The screw holding the impeller had gone AWOL/was never present in the first place, the plastic impeller loosened on the shaft and rubbed against the 2kW heating element and came apart, and the loose part rubbed against the vanes. Since I had already pulled the motor I clamped it to a bench and powered it up, with the time honoured mains plug to croc clips¹⁰ via a 100W incandescent bulb, it ran up and sounded fine. It appears this Chinese motor is used in all sorts of white goods, in my case it was the circulation pump, but it’s used in washing machines too. If you google the part number, Welling YXW50-E2 YXWN-50-2-2-2 you can buy a replacement for anything from £160 a a genuine Gorenje (who?) part from gorenje-spares, the same thing Hoover branded for £120 from partmaster and £70 from buyspares. It’s exactly the same part – the brand is irrelevant. Ebay has a few at a slightly lower range of prices. There’s a small industry of companies creating apparently branded webshops to sell punters spare parts at inflated prices. Sure, Gorenje and Hoover and everyone else use the same generic Welling Chinese motor, so strictly speaking yes all are a genuine replacement, it’s just the genuine replacement is identical for many other brands so the cheapest is fine!

Presumably your real white goods service wallahs buy their parts from some trade place that pays Google not to appear in their listings, all I know is that if you’re paying £70+VAT in parts to fix a £300 appliance there’s no margin in the job for the repair guy to pay his rent. Maybe he has a warehouse full of old machines like you used to get car scrap dealers where you could wander up with a bag of tools and ask to pull a used part like an alternator or lamp housing in exchange for some cash.

I was surprised to see how little there was in a dishwasher. In particular I was amazed to see there was so little water in it at any one time. This does get changed out a few times, but I guess it wouldn’t fill a washing up bowl.

Finding the fault was relatively easy. The plastic component was a tenner from Partmaster, where I went badly wrong was paying £7.50 for next working day delivery. I ordered it on a Thursday and expected to get on with the job Friday.

If the answer is DPD, the question is wrong

There’s nothing that DPD can’t foul up royally. They gave a delivery slot. I was there, and saw the SMS message sorry we missed you come it. I pulled the CCTV – the delivery droid never even bothered to come on site. Or indeed put the card through the door, the lying sack of shit. Presumably DPD incentivise their drivers by time, and that’s what you get. A weekend of frustration trying to get them to do the job via text chat resulted in going to the post office to pick up a package for someone else, that they had smashed up. A couple of days later they managed to deliver the right part.

Once I had the part it was reasonably easy to fit the impeller, using A2 stainless steel hardware to keep the damn thing where it’s meant to be. I haven’t chalked this one up as a definite win yet because the guts have been manhandled so although it’s run a few tens of cycles without the seal between the pump and the bell housing leaking it’s still up for grabs. Everybody seems to recommend washing up liquid to lubricate the big 15cm O ring to refit the motor to the bell housing but I had to use vaseline in the end, for some reason washing up liquid didn’t work for me. I am open to the idea this may be incompetence on my part 😉

Indeedably would not approve. It was a waste of my time, but more importantly nervous energy and aggravation. It was the shyster companies and the gig economy lowlife that were the problem. An increasing issue in the modern world – trying to get anything sorted in the welter of online obfuscation and cheap shit than you can’t avoid. Intentional living fail but I wasn’t to know that ahead of time. The problem here was not the work. It was that so much of it made me angry at wankers wasting my time and effort, this thing was in pieces for far longer than it needed to be if firms did what they were paid to do.

On the upside, I have saved some money and the feeling of being ripped off.

Of spending well

Having acknowledged that issue of hedonic adaptation that ZXSpectrum picked out as a hazard, I wondered if indeedably also has some wisdom to share. It is possible that passing through several years of being a frugalista reset something, and while I am getting more decadent maybe I should do more. The problem is that many things that people seem to highly value and spend money on I just don’t. In particular I lean towards things where I learn something or change something, though being changed is also good. They don’t have to be earth-shattering or world-changing, just interesting. But I carry echoes of my earlier past.

I should throw out all the scavenged chips in my component drawers. I am not the spotty teenager pulling junked TVs out of skips to scavenge parts any more because I had no money, I am rich enough to buy my parts from ISO9001 distributors. I recently built a Geiger counter power supply using a chip my first company had thrown out, they had a power supply that would only work with some 555 timer ICs because the design was marginal. This ratty item was duff and wasted my time, made me doubt my competence and delayed me getting this thing out in the field to do the job it was designed for, it’s a bit too cold to camp out and survey with it now. It was obviously the last one in the drawer because it looked recovered, a new part fixed the problem immediately.

In another example I replaced a wooden fence post recently. It’s a general pain in the arse and if I could find someone reliable to do the job I’d be happy to pay for someone to do the work. It’s hard to find services that are reliable or competent, however. The DPD example shows that paying more doesn’t necessarily mean getting better. Elizabeth Ruppel Shell clocked this problem in Cheap over ten years ago and the problem has only got worse since then as scale has increased, and the lifecycle of companies has shortened. There’s some advantage to buying from what the Americans call mom and pop small firms and paying more, but only if they have been around long enough to have a reputation, and capitalism is slowly crushing small fry out of the market. It’s tough enough qualifying quality in goods, trying to do that in services is even harder.

A service that I may need more of in future is the NHS. In my view the cause of the current version is lost, for a myriad of different reasons. Demographics and the culpable incompetence of the Tories are only two of them, but arguably the concept is misbegotten for an ageing world.

I would be perfectly happy with a European-style insurance model. I was unable to parse this Guardian article for useful information in part because I can’t qualify my requirements. I don’t have any health issues that I know about. I can afford a few grand for one off operations, which seems the way this is going, you don’t need insurance for that. The trouble is that the wreckage of the dream sits across the space. For instance, after the paddleboarding experience I had the worst gutrot I have ever had, though as it happened it passed after three days. It probably is true that you get less resilient to shit in the water as you get older, though I observe that if sort of thing poleaxed a 22-year old perhaps I don’t need to feel too bad. The trouble is you can’t get hold of a doctor, due to the stupid way they shed load by making people queue on the phone in the morning at 8am. If you feel that rotten you can’t face that sort of fun and games. The NHS seems to be bifurcating into emergency or nothing. I don’t have an answer to that.

There are non financial elements of health insurance. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize¹¹, don’t drink too much, avoid stress, particularly as you get older. I have walked a thousand miles so far this year and climbed some hills. There’s always some hard case that does HIIT and cycles up Ben Nevis, but it appears the bar isn’t that high on making a difference.

The gradually accumulating networth may tell me I am underspending, but on the other hand I have lived intentionally and given a reasonable amount away. It is more important to know what enough is like than to balance the streams exactly, and after all, we are still at the tail end of a long bull run post GFC. An accumulation may simply be the result of that, the tide will turn in its own time. One of the things I took away from TA’s article was that drawdown is likely to be tidal, it will have its ebb and flow. Just like life, really 😉

“If I must fall from high | may my fall be slow”

That is the art of prevailing against greater forces, to fall back, and fall back, play for time, and sometimes, often indeed, if you can do it well, the low-water mark comes, and then a reversal. The art of living is to go with those cyclical forces, rather than fight them, something that’s hard for a Western worldview with its teleological narrative of progress.

The reversal will come, ‘ere eight hours come to pass water will fill the foreground

Compared to the horrible troubles many are having, it’s a rather gentle sort of problem to have, and I am grateful for my good fortune.

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1. Hopefully Monevator will not have to kill me for letting the cat out of the paywalled bag with that quote ;) ↩
2. I don’t know of anyone personally who got to 100 ↩
3. Financial repression is not over, because the damage done by the GFC was never repaired, but it will probably take a different form than ZIRP for a while ↩
4. It’s hard to use valuation because the cycles of swelling and falling valuation are slow, they are independent of what you do and show supreme indifference to your aims/desires. There’s a degree of market-wide synchronisation so you can’t wait out inactivity getting your kicks in another sector of the market. It requires long stretches of extreme inaction, and the latency and feedback cycles are long. I find it hard to imagine something better designed to piss humans right off. ↩
5. Fuckwittery of that degree really does make you wonder about the quality of public schooling – Bozza went to Eton FFS, the creme de la creme. The Force is not strong in this one. There is some evidence that colder nasal passages reduces the efficiency of the immune response in the upper respiratory tract very rapidly with lower temperature, but Bozza’s brain fart is in the drinking bleach class of cod remedies. ↩
6. a reckoning that discards housing in net worth shows spending on houses as a destruction of capital, that was a consumer purchase in Quicken, like a car or a TV set, it doesn’t persist. I don’t trust the ‘asset class’ even if it be religion for everyone else. ↩
7. I can place a boundary condition on it by what it was worth when it did come onto my books converted into a SIPP. ↩
8. to replicate use this and  clear the extra added every year and set initial lump sum to £1000 and time 10 years, and the other case initial lump £425 and time 30 years. Why 30? Because the sort of people that retire early don’t usually start straight from school at 16, if you leave university at 21 then after 30 years you are 51, which is retiring early. Work for 40 years and you’re 61, which is past retirement age at The Firm. I sort of struggle to regard 61 as early retirement, though culture and practice may change this over time ↩
9. It had always puzzled me how coffee grounds got in the tank of the De Longhi machine, I put it down to a design fault spilling over from the filter. Now I know. I was the design fault, dozy berk that I am… ↩
10. obvs don’t do this at home 😉 I am amazed they are still allowed to sell this sort of thing, I thought they had gone out with cotton-covered plaited mains cords and the bayonet plugs you grandmother used to plug the iron into the ceiling lamp socket. ↩
11. From Michael Pollan, it’s an exhortation to avoid processed foods. It’s surprisingly hard to do in a city on indeed on the road generally. I’m not hard line about it, you’re a miserable bugger if you don’t ever eat ice cream or fish and chips, just try and make ’em decent ice-cream and fish and chips, and once every other month rather than every day ;) ↩