And so the titular blog by I, Arty, is back!

There’s some snags to work out, somes paint needing to set - but after a two or so year hiatus, I’m back to writing about my journey with FIRE. And what a few years it has been! Lets get a few very brief questions out of the way:

Why trash the old blog?

The original blog was running on a self-hosted Wordpress, which without digging to deeply in to exactly what that means for those less tech savvy means I had to keep it updated on the regular in terms of the software version, in particular keeping an eye out for security updates. Additionally if I was using any plugins, I had to keep on top of those as well! For what was a blog that I returned to every so often and that never gets huge amounts of traffic, I don’t have an intrinsic desire to keep up with all of that.

This new setup however is a statically designed website hosted on Cloudflare. What that means is there’s just shiny HTML pages being output with nothing that can really be exploited; so it doesn’t matter if I go AWOL for a few months, everything will be fine.

It does mean though that I can’t just lift-and-shift a theme online and have it work - but that’s okay; it just means more time to experiment with the design and make it my own.

I could have saved the posts (and I do have the old database somewhere) but I think going in fresh with a recap is probably the best way to go.

So Arty, what have you been up to?

Effectively the rough outline goes as so:

The last few years have been a whirlwind in a number of senses, everything from personal to professional and all the bits in between. Relationships came and went, and in late 2023 I left my then-position, stepping away from the most senior role and highest salary I had ever earned to start my own business. It was a big and risky move, but one I felt was necessary to work towards my own ideal life.

As of now? I’m currently trying to shop for a house. The process hasn’t been great to say the least and I’m currently two houses down. If I’m being totally honest, the entire process at this point just fills me with dread as so far experience has shown me that the UK housing market is an absolute mess and just entirely painful.

The good news is that beyond that, financially I’m in the best place I’ve ever been. I suppose with buying a house that could be about to change, but more on that in the next few (eventual) posts.

Until next time!