You can't outrun the storm — But you can keep more of your powder dry

Good day Mate, as the Aussies say.

Which is where I am now based six months of the year, currently drilling for gas as a contractor to one of Australia’s home-grown gas companies. Yes, homegrown oil and gas operators still exist. Out here they extract the fossil fuels and act quite pleased about it — and about their non-reliance on other countries for this essential product. The U.K.? Different mood. We’ve decided fossil fuels are something that happens to other people in other places, so we typically buy ours back off Norway — piped in from Nyhamna to Easington — and tell ourselves it’s cleaner for having spent time filtering through the Norwegian coffers. It would be funny if it wasn’t true. Anyway. That’s a rant for another Sunday.

Because the thing to discuss this week is what’s actually bleeding my personal wealth dry — and it isn’t 800 miles of subsea pipeline. It’s the standing orders and direct debits I’ve kept accumulating and never properly got back on top of since the end of 2022.

Over the past year it’s really hit home. Home finances. I’m paddling like crazy just to keep my head above water. I’m not a fan of many current politicians, but I do feel Badenoch made a potent stand at PMQs, reeling off how inflation’s the worst in the G7. You have to wonder how much can be drained from the same subset of taxpayers before something gives.

• Taxes up.

• Mortgage up (in November).

• Council tax up.

• Fuel up.

• Energy up.

• Food up.

  
  

• Wages down.

So I sat down this week and worked through it properly. Visualised the total burn rate — and the future burn rate — against the big milestone at the end of this year, when my mortgage rolls out of its five-year fix.

The headline bills above aren’t the main problem. They’re 6 of roughly 15 major bills, and after looking at them in detail I’d struggle to bring any of them down by more than 10%.

So — burn rate. You’ve got essentials and you’ve got discretionary spending. Add them up, every standing order and direct debit and tap-to-pay that leaves the account each month, and you get a single number. That number is your burn rate.

And here’s the thing I’ve learned: that’s the number you can actually control. A lot of investors and traders spend hours fantasising over their latest ticker or ETF but don’t pay a second thought to the additional taps on the wireless card reader. Tap-to-pay has stripped every bit of friction out of spending — and whether that’s by design or just convenience, the effect is the same: the money leaves before you’ve felt it go.

Mine averages out over the year at roughly 50% of income going out monthly, with another 35–40% heading to tax. The 10–15% I’ve got left is now being balanced, year by year, between investing and the special life events that come with a family — both is no longer an option. My aim with this review is to bring the outgoings down by about 10%, or find a way to lift the household income by 10%, to free up more for savings, investment contributions, and those experiences for the family.

My largest current concern is that come November it gets worse. The mortgage resets — mine off a 1.12% fix I’ll never see again — adding gas to a flame that hasn’t got any smaller in years. The interest alone is likely to push my household burn rate up by approx 5%, and that’s from a single line item.

I follow a few accounts from the investing community. I’m encouraged to see more young investors, excited and working their way up towards six-figure investments. I can tell by the way they spread themselves thin across many things at once that they’re yet to have their first painstaking losses. And as they discuss the next stock, the next ETF, their current positions, I wonder whether they’ve looked at what they can actually control — because when the market does turn, it’s a cruel mistress that punishes not only the figure you held pride of place in, but your mental state too.

If you’ve got an efficient burn rate, you can keep buying through the hard times — and that’s the real key to long-term profitability. The bad times matter more than the good times when it comes to buying positions.

Seventeen years in, I’ve been humbled countless times — usually just when you feel you’re finally king of your own decisions, or closing in on your next round-figure goal, that the market turns. But if you’ve got your discretionary spend under control through the lows and the lifts, and you can keep averaging in, your long-term gains compound at a far greater rate.

Personally, due to my current burn rate, I haven’t hit my ISA fill-up goals in years. The only consistent funds hitting accounts monthly are my children’s ISA automations. 2025/26 was the least I’ve put into my ISA in five years — and that’s what triggered me to review the reasons why.

On review I’d half-expected to find one big culprit. A bad habit. Something obvious I could point at and fix. There wasn’t one. It was creep. A subscription here, an upgrade there, a standing order I’d set up years ago for a thing I no longer use. When was the last time you checked your Apple subscriptions for an app that’s automatically leeching monthly — or the sneaky ones annually (I had 3).

And here’s the part that stung. The bills I could cut were the small ones — the discretionary stuff, the 10–15% with my name on it. The bills doing the real damage were the ones I couldn’t: mortgage, tax, council tax, energy. The big, fixed, non-negotiable lines. And every one of those is still going up.

I’d spent seventeen years obsessing over the investing side and barely a thought on the burn side. That’s the bit I’m fixing now — not by picking a better stock, but by finally getting a full view of every pound moving through the household.

So how do you get that full view?

First rule: don’t look at one month. One month is not a full picture. It’s either the month the car needed tyres and everything looks dreadful, or the month nothing happened and you kid yourself you’re fine. I pulled a full twelve months, averaged it out, and split it down the middle — essentials in one column, discretionary in the other. Then, and only then, did I have my number.

It wasn’t comfortable reading. But it was good to see it all laid out — far easier to have an honest conversation with yourself, and / or with your partner.

Once it’s in front of you, what levers can you pull?

Easy Mode — delete any subscriptions you can that aren’t essential or are unused. Boring, one-off afternoons of admin that pay you back every month for years.

Hard Mode — work through your discretionary spending line by line and bring it down. What can you live without in order to make room for investing more? That’s the main intent.

Because the aim was never just “spend less.” Spending less for the sake of it is misery, and misery doesn’t last. The aim is to get the burn low enough that when the market does its worst — and it will, it always does — I can keep buying through it. Calmly. On automation. Same as those children’s ISAs that never missed a month while I was busy losing sleep over a ticker.

A controlled burn rate isn't budgeting. It's dry powder. It's what lets us commit cash to investing when the opportunities arise — and when most others can't

So, the usual reminder before I head off. Please remember I’m not a financial advisor — but you can easily advise yourself on reducing things you don’t need leaving your bank account.

What I’d say is this. You can spend years, like I did, looking to perfect the investing side while the drain in the background quietly decides how much you’ve actually got to invest. Get the burn under control and the rest gets easier — not because the market gets kinder, but because you can finally meet it on your own terms with cash.

Next Sunday it’s the gas on the flames itself: the November reset. From a 1.12% fix to whatever the market hands me — and how I’m planning to handle it without letting it torch everything else.

Let’s talk soon,

Matt

TheCompoundCoach