Owen

This is the single most useful thing in the thread. Write the criteria down now, while you're calm, and judge against those in March rather than against how you feel that week.

Mine did almost exactly this in year one, then two flat-ish years, then the fourth year did more than the first three combined. The returns don't arrive evenly and there's no version of this where they do.

Going forward, two things fixed this permanently for me. First, the quote lists what's included AND a short 'not included' list. Second, every request that arrives by message gets answered with 'happy to add that, it's about £X and pushes delivery to the Nth — want me to?' Every single time, immediately, no exceptions. It feels petty for the first month and then clients just stop asking for free work.

Annual on a fixed date plus bands is what I do. Birthday, every year, plus an override if anything hits 5 points off in between. Two decisions a year maximum.

Evenings matter here more than the maths does. Unpredictable small clients wanting 'just a quick thing' on a Tuesday night is what burns people out of side work. A single client with a predictable weekly rhythm is far easier to sustain for a year, and sustaining it for a year is worth more than an extra £3 an hour.

It's not soft at all. Reducing your required monthly outgoings raises the floor under every other decision you make for the next four years.

The framework I'd use is: what does the debt do to your flexibility, not just to your arithmetic.

A £300/month payment is a fixed claim on your income for four years. If you lose your job, the investment portfolio is optional and the loan isn't. Paying it off is buying certainty and reduced monthly obligations, which is a real product even though it doesn't show up in a spreadsheet return.

That said, 4.1% is genuinely low. If it were 9% this wouldn't be a question. At 4.1% with a full emergency fund, this is close enough to a coin flip that I'd let the tiebreaker be how much you dislike the payment — and you've already said you hate it. That's a legitimate input.

Then the broader one is arguably doing something the other isn't, even if the returns track closely. Their behaviour diverges most in exactly the periods you'd care about.

Worth checking they're genuinely near-identical rather than just having the same top ten. Two funds can share their largest holdings and still differ meaningfully in the tail — one might include mid caps, or exclude a whole region. Compare the number of holdings and the regional breakdown, not just the top ten table.

Go where the problem is already being described out loud. For bookkeeping cleanups that's accountants — specifically small practices who take on a new client, open the books, find a mess, and don't want to spend chargeable hours untangling it. Ring five local practices, say exactly that in one sentence, offer to do one at a reduced rate so they can see the work.

One accountant who trusts you is worth about thirty local Facebook posts. And the referral is warm in a way that a group post never is, because it comes with implied vetting.

They're the opposite. Most small practices actively don't want the low-margin tidying work, they want a clean set of books to file from. You're removing their least profitable hours.

One accountant, one hour, cheaper than you fear. Say exactly what you said here. They deal with this weekly.