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I thought I would manage to hit 4 books this month as we started off March with a little holiday at Center Parcs and took a pile of books with me.

But typically the first week back at work absorbed so much time that I ended up reading a lot less for the rest of the month.

As with previous posts, these were all books on my "to be read" list in my planner, and this time they were all new reads!

Starting my steps towards FIRE

In the past year I've started to read up more on FIRE. This personal finance programme, which appears to have started in the USA, has crept in to British personal finance circles over the years.

In my round up of books I read in December I mentioned one about financial independence and promised to post more about why I had picked this book up.

I will admit that I've had some doubts about putting this post out while my country is going through a cost of living crisis as it looks incredibly tone deaf. However, I've been sitting on this post, tweaking it and editing it and rewriting chunks of it, for the past 6 months. This is simply bad timing.

But the fact that I can still post this comes from a position of privilege. It is absolutely not right that people are having to choose between heating and eating. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the 21st century and the way things are right now is an absolute disgrace.

For me at least the current situation has made me more determined to save and be careful in the coming months and years. And it is balanced with donations to charities including my local food bank, which does excellent work under very difficult circumstances. It's also going to be a very slow process as I'm nowhere near being a higher-rate taxpayer and that seems to be what most FIRE people are.