April Showers... drip drip drip goes all our money :)

 

Ah April, the month of showers and fools. We’ve been somewhat foolish with our money this month yet again and let it drip, drip, drip down the slimy sink of the consumer drain 🙁

Two bad months in a row is inexcusable and drastic action will be taken – and no, unfortunately this isn’t an extremely tardy and bad April fool’s gag! To put an end to the negative chat and try to wrench a small win out of the jaws of defeat, we managed to hit nearly a 40% savings rate which is still just about acceptable in my book, and as always I am sure well above the average in the UK or anywhere else for that matter. Let’s have a look at how it all went down:

 

april income

Categories April Notes
Total £3,945.28
TFS £2,697.80  1
Mrs TFS £1,061.85  1
Interest TSB 1 TFS £6.44
Interest TSB 2 Mrs TFS £6.23
Interest Santander £10.12
Cashback Santander £3.58
Cashback CCs £1.77
Solar Panels £95.99  2
Gifts £0.00
Sold stuff £0.00
Refunds £9.00
Other £52.50  3
SIPP Tax back £0.00
  1. Mrs TFS still has £250 automatically taken out for her sharesave scheme so this is amount after that deduction, whereas now I am getting booted out in 5-6 months of mine and am in a transitionary stage of the share save scheme, mine is taken out after this income amount. Confused yet?!
  2. Nice to see the solar panels kicking in now that the sun is starting to shine 🙂
  3. Won some bets this month on The Masters golf and the Grand National… boom! That will be my short foray back into sports gambling over with for a while though.

 

april expenses

Total expenses: £3,044,68

To keep this post at a readable length I will summarise the main categories of spending here, but if you want to see a more detail break down just see the full spreadsheet here 1.

  • Groceries £352.08– After thinking we’d reduce the grocery bill this month it has somehow actually gone up. Arggghhh! Really annoyed about this one!!! Again we’ve still got loads of food in the freezer and we’re away for about half the month so in theory the next months bill should be about £80, but we are hosting a couple of BBQ’s so it might be slightly higher than that. Either way I will be watching it like a hawk in May 🙂
  • Phones £16.99 / £40.18 – I’ve actually finally transferred to a cheaper landline using Direct Save which I found on the MSE page about landlines but it will kick in for next month. One to tick of the TODO list! Mrs TFS phone bill was slightly higher than expected due to a few charity text donations which I am all for 🙂
  • Clothes £221.02 – Hmmm. No comment. Emergency finance meeting has been held and Mrs TFS has decided to take drastic action and delete all clothing apps off her phone and close down online accounts etc… I told her to just start car booting if she loves the clothes so much but she thinks it is better to have a 2-3 month amnesty on buying anything. It’s going to be a challenge and you know I like a challenge, so will see how she gets on! Maybe I’ll get her to write a post about this one day 🙂
  • Golf £26.90 – Actually played 3 times but one of those was paid for from last months budget and the other only cost £7.50 as got a cheap deal on it. So that was pretty good! Next month will be a lot higher as we have a lads golf day so glad this month was well under budget.
  • Dining & Drinking £311.18 – Not as bad as last months £500+ figure but still pretty meaty by many peoples standards. Mrs TFS had a Hen do which was pretty expensive. Next month we have a wedding but other than that not really many other nights out so hoping this will be nearer the £200 mark which I think is more than acceptable.
  • Garden – £396.68 – As I have mentioned a few times we’ve been beavering away in the garden! This comprised of lot’s of fence paint, tools (acquired through Friday Ad), and a few plants and flowers, but the bulk of the cost was £150 for some new wooden sleepers, which we are going to use to build some raised beds. It seemed like a bit of a splurge but we’ve now finished spending on the garden barring any small bits n bobs and have kept just within our budget of £500 (already spent £100 on table and chairs).
  • Overall £3,044,68 – Whilst not as over the top as last month it was an expensive month! This brings up the monthly average in 2015 to £3,000.47, which is well above the £2,666 I laid out here in our yearly budget. Call me a moronic optimist but I still think that May and June, and hopefully the rest of the summer months to be a lot less expensive for us (barring any kitchen and bathroom renovations!) and we can get that back down to £2,666 or below by say the end of August. A further point worth mentioning as that seeing as from September 1st I will be on a 66% of current working time and therefore money contract than I am now (see here if you missed the news on that one) this months expenditure would have meant that we would have saved practically nowt. With the new arrangement our total post tax and train ticket income would be £3,271 2 which does not leave much wiggle room at all! Ideally I’d like to be able to save over £1,000/month once things have settled back down so we clearly need to get this average trending back down well under the £2,666.

 

april net worth

I’m going to break down the Net Worth properly from now on which at the risk of making these reports even longer, I think will give people a better idea of where all our money is stashed away. Don’t say I never treat you guys! 🙂

Total Net Worth £146,563.00 Notes
Excluding House £78,605.00  1
Assets April
Total £78,605.00
CoFunds ISA £5,303.00
YouInvest ISA £4,495.00
CSD ISA £2,142.00
Mrs TFS Sharesave £2,250.00
TFS Sharesave £4,000.00
SIPP (invested) £12,949.00
SIPP (cash) £1,840.00
Cash Accs
TSB 1 £499.00
TSB 2 £1,117.00
Santander £4,235.00
Barclaycard -£563.00
American Express -£277.00
Pensions
TFS £37,615.00
Mrs TFS £3,000.00  2
Property
House Value £253,000.00
House Mortgage £185,042.00
House Equity £67,958.00
  1. This is actually far more accurate than in previous months due to me actually sorting out all my retirement and other accounts however…
  2. We still haven’t received a password to gain access to Mrs TFS’s retirement accounts online at will. However we got a yearly statement and there was about £2200 in there. She has a retirement account from a previous employer which probably had about £1000 in so I will leave the estimate at £3000 for now until we get that all sorted.

 

april totals and savings rate

Total 2015 April Notes
Net Worth 73189.8 73189.8
Years to FI 17.85 20.40  1
SAVING PERCENTAGE 44.51% 39.42%  2
Categories Total April
Total 9627.81 1981.33  3
Income vs Spend £5,554.89 £900.60
Share Save 1 (Andy) £750.00 £250.00
Share Save 2 (Lou) £1,000.00 £250.00
Pension 1 (Andy) £1,814.76 £453.69
Pension 2 (Lou) £508.16 £127.04

1,2,3 – Are all linked together really! 17.85 Years to FI puts me at 51 which doesn’t sound too bad but I will be having a drop in income later in the year so we really need to start locking down a decent budget. We need to be pulling in more than £1,400 of our post tax income (£900 from income v spend plus the £500 from the share save schemes) IMO especially while my salary is still this high. Maybe it is time I accept defeat and try out something like YNAB!? I’ll give it a couple of months and see where we are at, again, optimistic or naive, I guess we’ll find out!

 

How did you get on in April!? Were you a fool or a frugal super hero showering in the glory of an 80% savings rate?!

 

Notes:

  1. Remember you are free to copy this to your own google drive and edit to put your own figures in there! Let me know if you do so and make any decent additions and I can graft them onto my own one? Or any suggested additions, again just let me know.
  2. This is assuming I don’t make any extra income from any other business ventures, which is probably a safe assumption for at least the first 6 months of me attempting anything!