Patience you must have, my young padawan.

My son , FU#1, is following an apprentice pathway in his career, as we have detailed in previous posts.

He is now 20 and is coming towards the end of the apprenticeship he started in mid 2016. He has done his final exams/assessments, and is now just waiting for the results. Wow, has it been nearly 3 years already!

Once he has his results towards the end of February he is going to have a meeting with his employer about the next stages of employment, and hopefully a pay rise to reflect finishing his apprenticeship and gaining his qualifications.

I thought it might be useful to recap and review his plan for FI that we laid out when I started this blog journey 12 months ago. (Happy anniversary me!)

The basic plan was for him to ‘pay himself first’ by hiving off 50% of his net earnings into tax free savings wrappers and live off the remainder.

His current net pay is £11.5k per year so we were looking at saving around £5.5k in the first year.

The original aim of the plan was to allow FU#1 to FIRE by age 40, a period of 21 years to achieve this.

The plan in years 1-7 is to max out contributions into a LISA with the remainder of savings going into an ISA. The maximum contribution into a LISA is £4k per year which is then topped upped to £5k by the government. In 7 years the LISA should be worth approx. £43k which he will use as a deposit for his first property.

In years 8 -21 the original idea was to continue to invest 50% of net earnings into an ISA that can be immediately accessed when he decides to FIRE. This can be reviewed closer to the time as it may be useful to continue some contributions into a LISA if they are still around, or there may be better tax wrappers available.

FU#1 may think 21 years is a lifetime away, and it is longer than he has been on this earth up to now, but trust me it will be here in the blink of an eye.

So how has this first year turned out?

Fu#1 is on track to make the maximum contributions into his LISA this tax year. The broker the LISA is held with is Hargreaves Lansdown and the contributions he makes are split between 2 funds. These are Vanguard Lifestrategy 100% Equity and Vanguard US Equity Index.

I plan to do a full net worth post for FU#1 at tax year end in April and update his budget/plan when we know what his wage increase will be. Going forward I will update every quarter after that.

But, of course, it’s not all about the money.

FU#1 is really enjoying his job and is not focussing on the money. As he said in his recent guest post on this blog, he wants to continue learning and becoming more proficient at his job and is looking forward to an exciting future.

As I’ve said to all my children, you’ve got to enjoy what you are doing in life and try to work in something you have an interest in.

A couple of great posts i’ve read recently exploring this theme:

Araminta from financiallymint.com explores what an investment banker would do differently aged 20 here.

Zach from fourpillarfreedom.com discusses money and life advice he wishes he had received aged 18 here.

So my final advice to FU#1 is to keep enjoying your job, keep learning, keep investing, have patience, and before you know it you will be FI, with the choice then to do whatever you want in the remainder of your life.

Thanks for reading

All comments and thoughts greatly appreciated.