Part-Time Analyst

During my time as a worker bee I understood the value of structure, both in helping a company get the long list of tasks it needs to clear done, and in providing you as an employee with a sufficiently motivating and satisfactory existence. Ticking off a task we have planned to do releases dopamine as a reward - and in general I find that life goes on much better if you have a stream of tasks you are completing - resulting in a steady stream of satisfaction. Like a puppy in training, this then encourages you to want to do the tasks more - and over time you can create a structure and pattern of behavior that you desire. Indeed completing those tasks becomes in itself addictive. In my working days I used this power for evil - setting up structures where people would enjoy working through the tasks I wanted them to do - and making the workplace be somewhere they were generally happy enough to turn up to. I stole their soul and tied it down to the treadmill of productivity. But while doing ...

One of the early changes I made after stopping working - and more specifically after ending my routine of spending most of my hours from 9-5 on a weekday in an office - was to change my electricity provider. In some ways this may seem like an odd thing to do, but the goal here was to switch to an electricity tariff that charges based upon 'Time of Use'. And to explain why I did this, an explanation of  how electricity pricing works is probably the best place to start... (and apologies, because there are a few technicalities to overcome on the way) Electricity Pricing Explained Traditionally you go to an electricity supplier and they offer you a fixed price for any electricity or gas that you might consume over a fixed period of time.  This was quite an easy problem for electricity suppliers and the power market to solve historically, because if the cost of gas could be fixed in advance, the most variable part of the power price would have also been fixed by that same action. H...

Hello and welcome to this site. Here I will discuss general activity around my life as a thirty-something early retiree.  I have had an interesting career - I started out as an analyst, went on to build analytical software tools that were used to trade power and made good money as a result of stock options in the company I worked for. This along with the income I had earned over the years meant that it was possible for me to retire in my thirties. As we stand talking here now, it has been 18 months since I did an honest days work - and so far I am much the happier for all the changes, and have replaced the grind of the working week with a balance between enjoyment - via walks, cycles and trips out - and productive activities - such as investment analysis. At the moment, the money I invest funds my income and here I plan to share with you some of my unusual path through life. At times this is likely to be a very unstructured tale - but my plan is that once a week I will write an art...