Welcome

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I've been on the FIRE path a good 8+ years now, mostly lurking in the comments on reddit getting and sharing insights.

There is a lot of good content out there, with Barefoot Investor and Passive Investing Australia being two I use. My posts here will not attempt to repeat them, but instead delve into the areas I find interesting that are not covered as well there.

And the main area I enjoy is the maths and attempting to simplify the equations such that I can more easily see the best path forward. As Stan said:

The essence of math is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.
— Stan Gudder, American mathematician

By simplifying the options we can more easily see the path forward, at least that's the hope.

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Debt Recycling and the Offset Fallacy

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A common miss-conception that caught me out for longer than I want to admit is the difference in 'making money' and 'no longer spending money'. When you use your offset you are 'no longer spending money', however I mistakenly thought of it as 'making money'. This meant I often miss-calculated investing while I have a mortgage. Credit Card Think of your credit card. If you spend $1,000 you start paying interest. If you repay the $1,000 you stop paying interest. Now the question, are you saving 20% pa x $1,000 forever by paying off the credit card? How do we account for the interest we no longer pay because we paid the credit card off?  I ignore it, and this applies to my offset too. The Offset Fallacy The example that made me see offsets differently was to imagine my current situation, lets say I've got a $200K mortgage with $100K in the offset. Now imagine you are debt free, and go and borrow $200K, park $100K in the offset and spend $100K on a nice ...
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