Hurry Up and Wait
19 Jul, 2026
I've been feeling a little frustrated lately. I’ll keep it short.
I'm sitting in my living room with my laptop on my lap, gazing out at the snow-capped Old Man Range. It's a view I can now enjoy thanks to our energetic friend Shorty, who clambered up a ladder - and thankfully didn’t fall off - and helped me prune a few trees. What a legend.
I’m frustrated not because things are going badly - quite the opposite.
Jonny has just one more day of work before he finishes his graphic design job. Apart from picking and choosing freelance work, this is him done, for good. Our emergency fund is finally full (due to saving hard and selling off a few thousand when the share markets were high). Our KiwiSaver and ETF investments are gathering momentum and have crossed $800,000. Remarkably, by combining income from this blog, cash savings, and small sell-offs of our ETF, we should be able to generate all the income we need to enjoy life. I sure hope my maths is correct!
If you'd told me ten years ago that we'd be in this position, I would have thought we'd made it.
But here's the funny thing.
While it is a lot, it still isn't quite enough.
Now that we are CoastFI, we're tantalisingly close to financial independence, but not quite there YET. If we slashed our spending, we could be, but we're not doing that. And, although insanely grateful to have started down this path all those years ago, I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m sick of always waiting just that wee bit longer.
Waiting is frustratingly hard work.
This stage of the journey is tricky. There isn't much left to optimise, but the temptation is there to try. There aren't any dramatic changes to make (unless we change our mind about selling our house or slashing our spending). Our job now is simply to trust the plan and let compounding quietly get on with its work. And clearly we do trust the plan; otherwise Jonny and I wouldn’t have quit our perfectly good jobs!
Still, for someone who has spent the last decade fascinated by personal finance and is naturally busy, the waiting is surprisingly difficult.
I've noticed how impatient I am, and I see it in my inbox too.
I'm in contact with people all over the motu, and almost everyone is waiting for something:
A credit card to be paid off
House deposit to be big enough
Mortgage to be done
KiwiSaver to hit six figures
Property to sell
A milestone birthday
Investments to churn out that sweet sweet regular income
Instead of trusting our plans, we each ask ourselves, “Should we do something else to speed things up?” In some cases, yes, but in many cases, you’ve optimised for all you can. And now it's time to hurry up and wait. “Don’t just do something, stand there” is the quote that comes to mind.
I completely understand that urge to tweak. I really do. I know enough to avoid doing so - but the waiting is still hard. I’ve watched countless people tinker with every aspect of their money, meddle with the good thing they have going on, trying to make investing more interesting than it needs to be, and I watch and learn not to do the same.
Because once you've built a good financial plan, your job isn't to constantly improve it or have it entertain you. Yes, you should monitor it, but your job is to live your life while your perfectly good plan quietly works in the background.
So while I impatiently wait, instead of meddling in our perfectly good financial plans, I entertain myself in other ways. Over the years, I've developed what I call my Moments of Magnificence. The perfect day for me, and the ones I find the most satisfying, are when I get to the end of a busy day saying, “I lived the crap out of that day”. If I’d written myself a list and I crossed everything off it, even better! List writers will relate.
It's a simple little game I play with myself, and I’ve done it for a long time. Every single day I try to notice one thing (often more) that makes me stop and think, “Well, that was MAGNIFICIENT?”
Sometimes it is money-related. Watching our investments tick over another milestone certainly feels good.
But more often, it's something completely ordinary. I find enjoyment doing stuff, particularly with other people, not buying stuff. This week it was a run. I set my timer and ran for 17 minutes in one direction, taking a very haphazard route. When the timer pinged, I had to retrace my exact steps. Magnificent run! My weekly swim left me feeling pleasantly knackered - and I bumped into a friend for a chat at the end. Magnificent x 2!
But it might be a cuddle with a dog (we have just had a series of foster pups through our house). Viewing a local art exhibition, going for a parkrun, or catching up with my local book club. Earlier this month it was two full days with a good friend (my daughter said we were having an adult sleep-over), a laugh with Jonny, or simply just this nice view out my window today.
Every day there is something that I deem magnificent!
I've realised these moments of magnificence matter more than ever as we're in this final push to reach the point where working for money is no longer necessary. Not because money doesn't matter. It absolutely does. Money has already given us so many more choices, freedom over our time, security and the confidence that we're heading in the right direction.
But money, on its own, isn't magnificent. It’s just a tool to help me make better memories.
Life doesn't sit idling until you've reached your financial independence number. It marches on, and I’ve found the best way to slow it down is to spend my day doing cool stuff that I’ll remember. A never-ending list of positive stuff while I’m watching our investments compound.
So, I’m putting my frustrations aside and focusing on how far we have come, and more importantly, where we get to go next. I’m well beyond trying to make our financial life more optimised or more exciting; instead, I’m constantly reminding myself to put that same busy energy into making my life more exciting.
Money has always been a tool. Never the destination. And for now, with Jonny and I about to have so much autonomy over our own time, I’m itching to get out into the world and do the big fun expensive stuff, but have to remind myself that for now, and not for too much longer, I’ve got to keep myself busy, having fun, enjoying all the smaller less expensive, but still fun stuff.
Right now, our job isn't to squeeze another half-per cent from our investments or shave another year off our FI date. We are going to be fine financially. It's to make sure that while our money quietly compounds, we stick to our plans and enjoy our lives.
So I'll keep looking for my Moments of Magnificence because our investments don't need my attention and entertainment; I do!
