Hi
From SE England, though living in another part of UK at the moment.
I suppose I've always been of the MMM mindset since as a child I normally wanted to save up my pocket money/earnings from little household jobs to pay into Post Office savings account rather than going out and spending it. Now 33 and have been working for ~10 years, always renting in that time (first in a couple of houseshares and now with girlfriend) and just had the mindset that I had my basic costs of rent, utilities, food, car and after that the default was to save the rest. I've never been very materialistic and with an analytical mindset tend to think of spending as an efficiency/utility calculation. Recently I have started putting a lot of my salary into my pension (salary sacrifice scheme so is even more tax efficient than normal DC), and still saving half of my take home pay in normal months, so my savings rate including pension is > 100% of take home. That is made possible by having reasonable earnings (but nowhere near 6 figures), sharing rent in reasonably priced areas, having no family to take care of.
So I am already in the position of having FU money and am FI in terms of being able to take 1 year off work/slowly change jobs etc. with no issues. In terms of FIRE targets, I think that a paid off house and £2k a month in income, so about £500k in investments assuming 25x/4% rule, would be basic FIRE for a UK family to live a reasonable zero-work life. What I would probably do in terms of side gigs (and when I think of a side gig I think of something that is not just continuing previous employment on a part time or freelance basis, so likely to be lower paid per hour than main employment), is then consider that I could be FIRE at house+500k without any big luxury spending (like really expensive holidays etc.), so would work side gigs to cover any luxury/discretionary spending wanted (I think the earnings buying an enjoyable luxury would seem more "worth it" to me than the earnings just being additional investments). I know I'm on the FIRE path but as I don't know where I'll be living in future and/or timing of starting family, I have no particular FIRE dates/targets in mind other than the broad house+500k as a next line in the sand.
I currently work full time in a permanent job in financial services IT. My likely plan in the next few years would be to switch to contracting jobs. Typically the earnings would be 2x as much (or a bit more when maximising pension tax relief, and 3x as much if I got the right contacts, and that's without any of the tax dodges) while working, though clearly without the guarantee of working all the time. I think that would suit me as I would ideally have a working model of a ~3 month summer break then working the rest of the time. I think I could be happy contracting for a good time, even beyond the point of needing the money. I think once I know the work is optional, and it is not full time/I can take a fair amount of holiday time, I could continue with that model for a lot longer. Another strand is that I would like to be able to give money to charity, so perhaps my combined ideal FIRE strategy would be to have house+500k to guarantee basic FIRE position, then work intermittently/with long holidays as a contractor, so being able to save up a bit more contingency money, have earned money for some luxuries (we're talking 2 week holidays and quality used bikes here, not Ferraris) and being able to give say a third or a half of income to charity (as most of the top slice of earnings would have been tax anyway). I don't know how realistic that all is in combination, but I should be able to get to something like that.
In terms of UK FIRE awareness, certainly there are plenty of financially clueless/won't help themselves people (e.g. former housemate who smoked a packet a day, had no money left at end of month and couldn't understand why...) but on the other hand amongst my friends and family awareness is much higher (e.g. realizing that eating out is a luxury that can be cut back, overpaying mortgage is a good idea, and having plans for life in 40s and 50s of part time work due to stable finances) even if they are not explicitly aware of MMM/FIRE or taking advantage of every tax allowance/savings option. Main plus point for me is that my girlfriend is broadly on board with the FIRE concept, in terms of having a future where work is optional and/or work is driven by the value it adds to society/enjoyment it brings, and having lots of leisure time. Her parents did retire earlier than normal (mid 50s).
@Stubblestache: another short-term investment option is peer-to-peer lending via e.g. Zopa. Zopa quote typical returns of about 6% (that is after allowing for bad debt). I have had money in there for several years and it's been good, and seems to be well-run (I haven't calculated my actual rate of return due to putting money in regularly, though when I last looked properly the bad debt was only about 20% of my earned interest, less than Zopa's projections). You can invest the money then have the interest payments returned to a holding account to withdraw, or sell loans for a 1% fee, so depending on your income and tax bill needs that might be an option to generate a steady return on relatively short term money.
