theFIREstarter

It’s Marathon month again! (Watching this year rather than running)

Howdi my fellow FIREstarters! How was your month that we like to call “April”?

Ours was a fine one, we did pretty well on spending and income, and I had the first of many of my 2 weeks off work periods which are now spewed all over my summer calendar like some kind of regurgitated Ice Cream Sunday loveliness. With that really weird simile out of the way, apologies ¹, and let’s move on to how the finances did and what we got up to.

expenses

As usual you can check out my Awesome FI Tracking Spreadsheet for a full breakdown of Income/Expense tracking and Net Worth tracking, as well as updated some of the summary sheets as well. Remember you can copy this to use/update as you please using Google Sheets “File -> Make a copy” menu command!

The figures below as usual represent: £Current Month (£2018 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)

• Total £3156 (£3493 / £3205) – Just under the desired average. The actually monthly average is still trending down towards it after our crazy spend month in January so moving in the right direction here.
• Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848) 
• Household £634 (£598 / £602) – Slightly over here but for once Groceries weren’t actually that bad (£346), but we could do with a month coming in at under £300 to really balance the books here.
• Holiday £0 (£648 / £333) – Zero even though we did technically go away for the weekend, we just stick all that kind of spending under just “Going out” and the accommodation was paid for in previous months. The averages should hopefully catch up with each other over the next few months until our next “big” holiday in October.
• Going out £469 (£426 / £467) – A pretty average month on going out. Although we are due a big one in May (weddings, holiday… etc) so watch this space :p
• Transport £111 (£179 / £192) – Pretty much all of this was petrol. We did a lot of driving in April I guess! I thought we were going to have another car repair bill as the breaks having been squeaking for a while, but the garage had a look and said they look fine. They didn’t even charge us for the time looking at it. I guess I know now for sure that this guy is a proper honest John, and so will be using them for all foreseeable repairs!
• Personal Care £112 (£95 / £92) – Mrs T gave herself a bit of a well deserved pampering so slightly higher than usual here.
• Home/Garden £338 (£104 / £100) – Yowsers! We used the small window of good weather to get in the garden and spruce it up properly this year, so we can really enjoy it finally. Money well spent in my opinion. I was a bit extravagant though and said to Mrs T “I want to buy a tree”.  We came back with this little lovely olive tree which cost a whopping £87!!!:

• Lifestyle £226 (£155 / £141) – This was pretty much all clothes, but a large chunk of it was actually mine *shock*! In my defence, you should know that we are attending a family wedding soon, and I was unashamedly bullied by certain family members into buying myself a new suit 🙂 . I will admit though that my old one was getting a bit tight around the waist (finally time to admit I’m not 21 anymore! 🙁 ), and I’m pretty happy with the outcome. It is a decent looking whistle and flute, and I can use it for years to come – as long as I keep the running up at least!
• Gifts/Charity £235 (£266 / £187) – Like last month, I’m allocating an extra chunk for Charity which will be actually paid in May. (£150 extra, the actual “new” charity spend was £20). Please see last month’s rather long winded explanation for more on this. If matched betting profits keep up like they are we will end up massively going over budget on this section (£468 over budget for the last two months!!!), but I’m cool with that, as it means our total income will be much higher than expected, so everyone’s a winner. Expect for the bookies of course, and I don’t think there are even any tiny violins playing for them in this situation.
• Hobbies/Sport £100 (£71 / £149) – Actually played a bit of golf this month but kept the green fees low, so all good! Mrs T is hitting the gym classes a bit more which is great to see and money well spent. My squash club at work has been decimated due to people losing interest or leaving, there are now basically only 2 of us left. A bit of a shame but I will probably cancel my monthly membership at the end of this month and go back to doing “pay as you play” (£7 a match, hard to stomach!!!)
• Admin £0 (£33 / £20) – Quite a boring one to hit a zero spend on, but a zero spend nonetheless!
• Financial £5 (£4 / £15) – yawn!
• Children £76 (£65 / £60) – A few clothes, a few toys. She is quite a simple creature to keep entertained is our little one. Why do adults make things so complicated!? Bonus feature – “TFS Jr’s catchphrase of the month” – So she was outside with Mrs T, and started saying “Cheessuuus!!!” a lot (i.e. “Jesus!), while the neighbours were around. Mrs T said “Don’t say that, where did you hear that?”. The reply was of course “Daddy!” and the neighbours proceeded to wet themselves laughing. I guess I really need to start watching what I say 🙂

income

Figures in the same format as expenses…

• Total £4747 +£395 Pension (£4775 / £4422) – Still well above target. Can’t say anything but I’m well happy with that.
• TFS Income £2437 +£395 Pension (£2517 / £2500) – Nice average month here.
• Mrs T Income £194 (£510 / £600) – A bit of pay left from Mrs T’s old job plus she did a day of temping as well. Good news is she already has a new job but seeing as it’s for a local council they are predictably taking ages to get all of the admin done so won’t see any income until at least next month. Sounds like they need her to go in and kick some butt! In any case, it was nice to have a full two weeks off together, so their tardiness worked in our favour.
• Solar Panels £164 (£41 / £45) – Thank you Mr Sun!
• Child benefit £82 (£82 / £82)

Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £1841 (£1531 / £750) – Well here’s where it gets interesting! The rough breakdown in profit was as follows:

• No Lay Accas: £308
• Each way snipes: £1100 ²
• Gambling: £433 – Got the winner of the National, Tiger Roll at 60/1 (It was an antepost bet placed a few months before the race hence the better odds, thank you to my friend E who tipped that one up before Cheltenham!) and then won/lost a bit on the golf as usual.

So another great month but with plenty of ups and downs. This probably deserves a whole post in itself, but I’ll try to give you a brief rundown instead. If you aren’t that interested in the details click here to skip to the next section!:

matched betting income / gambling winnings

While Aintree was on, I did a couple of crazy permutation bets, where the idea is you pick out a few horses in each race where you have good EV on the each way matcher, and then either do a permed Trixie, Patent or Yankee. The thing with these is that if you have positive EV on two single bets, then combine them, the EV’s multiply together. So if you have 110% and 108% EV on the single then the double would be 118.8% (1.1 x 1.08). The more selections you combine the greater the EV! Now the downside is still obviously that the odds start to shoot through the roof, so hitting a win treble is still just very, very unlikely, but hitting a few place trebles and the corresponding doubles, is certainly not out of the question. It’s a risky bet for sure, and the number of lines involved make it hard not to stake a large amount, but it can provide ridiculously big wins if you get a couple of winners or a few places. Anyway… My two bets were roughly:

Have a litte Patents

First of all I tried a permed patent, with 210 lines. I did 50p each way to the total stake was £210 and it returned about £800 as I got 4 places (2 in one race). This shows you how crazy the returns can be and I dare say if I just had one more place in the last race, the returns would have been exponentially greater, like in the thousands. (Of course on the other hand I also got extremely lucky to even get 4 placed horses!!!)

Yankee doodle

On Grand National day I did a very suspect Permed Yankee which consisted of 11 selections and 814 lines, I did 33p each way so total stake was around £500!!! I wasn’t really thinking straight here, I mean apart from the ridiculous high total stake, because I had only 1 selection in 2 of the races ³ and I stupidly included 2 selections from the Grand National itself. Yes that is 2 selections from a 38 horse race!!!! So the chances of me hitting the places with any of them were obviously quite small.

TFS Jr getting involved with both the watching and riding

Anyway, I admittedly came out of it very lucky and hit 2 winners, but no other places. I quickly calculated what the win double returned and it was a measly £76 from my line stake of 33p, so at first I was a little disheartened and thought I’d lost about £400. However it quickly dawned on me that the whole point of the permutations was that there is not just one line including that double. A Yankee is only 11 lines, and there were 814 lines in my bet, so that means there were 74 Yankees in my bet. Surely at least 5 contained that double and I’d return around the £500 initial stake!? The bet was taking ages to settle so I continued trying to work it out myself. I figured that there should be at least 14 Yankees with my two selections in them, which returns just over a grand. It turned out I was in the ballpark and it returned just over £1100!!!!

As I like playing the “what if?” game for fun to torment myself, I also did a rough calculation of two other outcomes, bearing in mind here that the last leg of the bet was the Grand National and I’d already hit 2 winners by that point:

• What if I’d bet Tiger Roll, the eventual winner at around 12/1 as one of my last leg bets? I did a quick calculation and it would have resulted in 5 lines of a win treble, at odds of  21 x 11 x 13 = 3003. So at a 33p stake that is about £5K just on that. Throw in all the other doubles lines (plus all the each way parts of the best) and it would have paid between £8K and £10K!!! Hah!
• I had a 100/1 shot as one of my two selections in the GN (again. stupid). so even if this placed the place odds would have been a decent 25/1. The number of lines here I’m not 100% sure of but it would again have been in the realms of 1000’s rather than 100’s. Ah if only! It was actually right there until 2 fences out then pulled up or fell as well… so close! I don’t even want to think about the returns if that horse had won but it must have been over £100K.

Apologies if I lost anyone during that, I explained it as best I could without being too wordy!

Also although I’ve included the above for information/educational/entertainment purposes only, I would thoroughly recommend people do not do this kind of bet!!! The reasons are as follows:

• The total stakes become massive even for very small bets per line
• There is every chance you could draw a blank and lose your whole stake
• Bookies don’t really like these bets and I found myself gubbed very quickly after doing them!
• I have since done one more of these for slightly lower stakes and didn’t hit any wins or places, so lost my whole stake. It’s a really big hit to take to the bank so I will not be doing anything like this for the foreseeable future until my bank is a lot bigger.

So there you have it, a lucky and crazy foray into permutation bets for me, but I will be sticking to mainly singles from now on. The theory still holds with multiples “multiplying” the value though, so the occasional double or trixie is still a valid strategy and pretty safe as you can keep your stakes low (e.g. £1 each way double = £2, £0.5 each way trixie = £4) with a potentially big upside.

savings rate and net worth

Another average spend and awesome income month and we’re looking at an in month savings rate of 38% and averaging at 32% which is above the target of 30% I set here but below the stretch target of 35%. Looking good for the rest of the year so far but need to watch out for the dreaded C word at all times: Complacency! 😉

Net worth did this:

Excluding house equity: £163,570 / £6,555 / 4.17%

Including house equity: £246,771 / £6,907 / 2.88%

Liquid Freedom: £75,062 / £2,156/ 2.96%

Looks like a great month for investments combined with a half decent savings rate has pushed this up nicely again. I really ought to get around to putting a bit of our spare cash into the stock market as have not done so for a while now (barring normal pension contributions!). We didn’t use up any of our ISA allowance last year which is a shambles really, but you know about my Crypto experiment by now so that is kind of where the money went instead. I need to get back to the fundamentals, that’s for sure! This post from FI Money UK about LISA’s also peaked my interest, so may look into opening one of those. Also we really want to set up something for TFS Jr as well like a child ISA or whatever, so also need to sort that out! Lot’s to do here!

Mini crypto update – I’ve finally stuck most of my purchases into some online crypto tracking software (It’s called Cryptagon if you are interested) and I will provide you finally with a very rough figure of the current status, which is… drumroll please: £12,000 (I put £14,727 into it in total) so around 19% down. It’s a very rough figure because I checked a few days ago and things change very quickly, and there are a couple of holdings that I can’t add into it as they are not available in the software for some reason so I guessed at their rough value. Overall though the software is pretty good and it pulls all of your transactions from all the big exchanges automatically ⁴, so I would recommend it so far as it saved me entering a lot of tedious data into a spreadsheet!

Reading and other updates

This has been mammoth already so will keep this brief:

• Had two birthday BBQ’s for both father and father-in-law, both of which were great fun and pretty easy on the wallet.
• Went away for a weekend to Kent with friends, also great fun!
• Had a health MOT at work which was interesting. I scored very well on all accounts apart from the amount of alcohol I drink. Not very surprising but at least all the main metrics they checked were “in the green”!
• Yes I went to watch the Marathon and it was a great day out, felt for the runners though in that heat! 🙁

Here are two random links that I found interesting this month:

Bill Benter – The man who cracked the horse racing code – A rivetting true life story of a professional gambler who reportedly has won over a billion dollars in his lifetime.

Capitalism needs a purpose – I found the following line particularly striking:

The question of what things are being bought and sold, what is their value to society and what problems are technology and the economy solving for people, is secondary at best.

But this breaks down as soon as insights from behavioural economics, environmental economics and complex systems are used to show that the aggregation of individual choices based on imperfect information rarely, if ever, lead to the best outcomes for society as a whole.

That’s your lot! Ciao for now and enjoy the sun while it lasts, amigos! 🙂