My interest in finance started long before I had any money.
I loved numbers instinctively. Patterns made sense to me early. As a child, I followed football not for the spectacle, but for the results, the tables, the permutations. Who could still win. Who needed what. How outcomes shifted with small changes.
At the same time, gambling was normalised in my family — not recklessly, but professionally. Working in and around the industry exposed me early to odds, probability, and chance. It stripped away the romance and replaced it with something far more useful: an understanding that outcomes are never guaranteed, but they can be weighted.
That perspective stayed with me.
First Capital, First Lessons
When I began working, I couldn’t wait to start investing.
My very first stock was British Gas. I bought it not on a tip, but on observation. During my work placement year, I had seen the industry up close: vast physical assets, entrenched demand, and obvious inefficiencies. I understood — even then — that efficiency improvements alone would generate returns over time.
British Gas itself no longer exists in its original form, but if I still held the offshoots then from that initial investment, the value has risen roughly twenty-fold over time — and that’s before dividends.
That experience taught me an early, permanent lesson:
time smooths volatility far more effectively than intelligence ever will.
Questioning the Narrative
As my investing increased, I gravitated toward investment trusts. Discounts to underlying value were obvious and measurable. The market, I learned, frequently misprices patience.
Then came the crashes.
The dot-com collapse.
The aftermath in 2002.
Watching supposedly “long-term” investments implode forced me to confront something uncomfortable: the official narrative around markets — especially as presented by mainstream media — was incomplete at best.
That questioning led me to precious metals.
Not as speculation, but as inquiry.
What is money?
What isn’t it?
And why does modern money behave so differently from the money people trusted a century ago?
Perhaps it wasn’t accidental that I was born in 1971 — the year money quietly changed forever.
Once you see that money today is a poor imitation of what it once was, you can’t unsee it. And once you understand that, investing stops being about returns alone and becomes about preservation, honesty, and optionality.
Personal Finance, Quietly
Alongside investing, I learned personal finance the unglamorous way.
Mortgages. Credit cards. Interest rates. Structures.
Over the years, I became the quiet go-to person for family and friends:
Which mortgage actually makes sense?
How do you use credit cards without going into debt?
Where is risk real, and where is it just marketing?
I never chased complexity for its own sake. The aim was always the same: clarity without fragility.
Financial competence, to me, has never been about bravado. It’s about removing pressure from life.
Decline
Then came the period I rarely romanticise.
Being a square peg in a round hole — both in relationships and in location — slowly eroded my finances. Decisions that weren’t aligned compounded quietly. Stress crept in. Focus drifted.
By 2016, I was at a low point.
Not dramatic.
Just diminished.
That period taught me something essential: finance does not fail in isolation. When life is incongruent, money follows.
Renaissance
The recovery didn’t begin with markets.
It began with alignment.
As I re-engaged with investing, re-learned discipline, and simplified my life, opportunities appeared again. One of them was almost absurd in hindsight: securing a negative-rate mortgage in Denmark in 2021 during the COVID era.
People will laugh about that someday.
Borrowing money and being paid to do so will sound like folklore. But it happened — and it rewarded those who understood systems rather than narratives.
What I Know Now
True financial freedom doesn’t come from optimisation alone.
It comes from congruence.
Romance, location, investments, work, health — they are not separate silos. They knit together into a single fabric. When one is out of alignment, it pulls on all the others.
Sometimes freedom requires taking a hit.
Sometimes it means walking away.
Sometimes it means rebuilding slowly, on your own terms.
Markets respond to clarity the same way life does.
I no longer chase returns in isolation.
I build a life where money, time, and energy point in the same direction.
That, to me, is finance done properly.