theFIREstarter

Hi all. How was your August? Good I hope!

Ours was a bit of an odd one. We spent a lot of time in hospitals (god bless the NHS, hence the pic above!), so didn’t really get up to all much else, but still spent a fair whack due to deciding to buy a new car. We also attempted to get a break away from all of that, to the faithful old IOW, and we were all ill the whole long weekend. So yea… in general the conclusion of August has been most welcome here at TFS towers, and we’re hoping September is a better one. It wasn’t all doom and gloom though with the EW betting income being really rather good again which you can read about in more detail in a bit. As usual, onto the expenses first though… gulp… here we go 🙂

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 £8369 (£4276 / £3205) – Yowsers. Although without new car related expenses and extra charity donations, this was actually only £3195, so regular expenses were actually pretty low (which makes sense as we didn’t really do all that much)
• Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848) 
• Household £766 (£662 / £602) – Slighty over here due to a large water bit, larger than average Gas/Lecky bill, and going slightly over on Groceries of (£354 – £354 / £325). Actually pretty happy with groceries here as we were in a lot and so ate a lot of meals all together.
• Holiday £189 (£447 / £333) – Just our ill ¹ fated trip to the IOW. With just 4 months of the year to go, only £425 left of the budget left, and a trip to Menorca next month, it looks like I’ve under-budgeted slightly here, but hopefully it won’t be by too much.
• Going out £296 (£496 / £467) – Averaging back to the mean here which is nice although in reality this could have been £200 lower if I’d been a bit stingier on the couple of times I did go out. I had a couple of leaving do’s with some work colleagues who’ve been long friends and some I owed a lot to. So was a bit “loose” with the buying of rounds on both nights. This quickly turns into £100 nights out when you are in the big smoke! If you can’t buy a few rounds without expecting them back on these sorts of occasions though, when can you?!
• Transport £4419 (£712 / £192) – Well that’s blown this area of the budget for the year then! Having considered the EV option, we decided to go with a Nissan Qashqai, and I have to say I am loving it so far. It’s a far more comfortable ride than our old car, the only downside is we can’t play music via bluetooth ², but apart from that literally everything is better and it has loads of “new” mod cons such as cruise control (Will that help with hyper-miling? Thoughts people?), a panoramic sunroof, heated seats, and so on. It was one of the top spec versions when new, which I think is a great way of getting “more car for you money” when buying cars in the lower price ranges – as mentioned we got it for £3700. It has done around 80k miles which is fine for a diesel and it is generally a very tidy motor for the year. Also worth noting, since we received it, the MPG has shot up from 44.3 to 49.4 and is hovering nicely there. I have no idea how the lady we bought it from drove it, but it obviously was not in a very efficient manner as I don’t feel when I’ve been driving it that well so far, as still getting used to it. Either way, very happy with that. The old Pug only ever maxed out at around 44, so that is over 10% better fuel efficiency aka 10% off of our diesel bill every year (should be well over £100/year worth of savings with that). Also worth noting is that we haven’t sold our old car yet, so hopefully that will show up on the income side of the equation for next month. Anyway without further ado, meet the TFS Mobile Mk3:

• Personal Care £49 (£105 / £92) – Not much to say here.
• Home/Garden £39 (£160 / £100) – Not much to say here, although looks like we’ll end up over budget. We already spent £326 more on the garden this year than budgeted so going to be impossible to get that back.
• Hobbies/Sport £71 (£97 / £149) – Still not much golf going on this year so at least one thing has come under budget! I signed up for another run – the Run The River 10k – which looks like a really cool route so looking forward to it (just a shame it’s 2 days after the Half Marathon I’m doing on the 16th! Hah!)
• Admin £0 (£18 / £20)
• Financial £5 (£8 / £15)
• Children £125 (£87 / £60) – Woah… steady on there TFS Jr! She is growing and so new clothes were needed, plus we are taking her to a little singing/dancing class which she really enjoys and the subs got paid this month (it’s only £30 for 6 weeks but when paid in a lump I suppose it bumps up her category for that given month!)
• Gifts/Charity £1218 (£434 / £187) – Well this is getting rather silly now, as this is blowing up our budget and making me feel bad/stupid even though it’s a good thing because it means A) I am making great money on the side hustle and B) Money is going to good causes. In case anyone has forgotten, I pledged to donate 10% of my betting/matched betting profits as per my post here. I think I need to strip the charity portion out of the budget because it’s something “I can’t control” – unless I reneg on the 10% thing! Which I am not going to do, until the end of this year, at least, at which point I may well review it. So for next months update, I’ll rejig the spreadsheet and just have a separate line for the charity and it won’t be tracked against any of our targets for spending. One other thing to point out is we haven’t actually donated the £1000ish yet but I’ve made a note of the exact amount we “owe” to charity. I have a list of good charities from that original post but if anyone else has any good recommendations please let me know? It’s a large amount so want it to go to a good home! (We’ll probably spread it around to various charities in all honesty!)

Also I am thinking of taking out the car purchase as well because that is also going to blow out the planned budget. It wasn’t a planned expense and was only bought due to the big windfall of cash we got last month. But keeping it in makes tracking against the budget pointless because everything will just be in the red by a large amount, which isn’t going to help us try to keep a lid on things for the final 4 months of the year. It’s either that or I “Re-forecast” all the figures, but I think it would be easier to just take that one big line item out and keep everything else the same.

Anyway enough rambling on with all that, I will sort it out properly for next months update and re-explain a bit better if needed!

income

Figures in the same format as expenses…

• Total £13,414 +£395 Pension (£8784 / £4422) – What the ****?!? Yes we’ve only gone and done it again. 2 months in a row with 5 figure income 🙂
• TFS Income £2276 +£395 Pension (£2772 / £2500) – Pretty standard!
• Mrs T Income £329 (£422 / £600) – Bit less than expected due to Mrs T’s time off after her operation. Still pretty good that they actually paid her some sick pay, as she hasn’t been there long (not through probationary period yet).
• Ratesetter £56 (£31 / £5) – Ratesetter have bought their old, better offer back again! You now only have to invest £1000 for 1 year to receive a £100 bonus! But it runs out soon, so click this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link! ³) to get started.
• Child benefit £82 (£93 / £82) – Nice as usual to receive this.
• £32 from our The House Crowd investments and £23 from our Barclays Cashback Credit card (it’s only 0.5% but it all adds up to something at least worth having over the year)
• Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £10580 (£2149 / £750) – Erm… what can I say. I was a Very. Lucky. Boy this month!  This consisted of £10898 profit from the each way sniping and I guess I lost about £400 on some other random bets (I still do a bit of random golf betting and other stuff that comes up that isn’t strictly each way stuff). The break down of the each way was basically just over £11K profit from one each way multiple I did one Saturday, and 3 relatively high priced horses came in. The final leg was 18/1 and luckily we were home so could watch the race. Although I couldn’t even watch the race! I was just watching it on Betfair and when I saw my horse go to 1.01 I looked up and saw it cross the line, and let out an almighty roar of celebration! As you can tell the rest of the month was pretty much break even, but I did go a little wild after that win and do a few larger multiples which I probably shouldn’t have done (they obviously lost big time… haha). A quick bump back down to Earth and I’m back on track plugging away with my normal stakes and discipline once more. If anyone is interested, the multiple bet consisted of 7 horses over 5 races, and I did doubles, trebles, 4-folds and 5-folds across the lot for a total stake of just over £300. The result was that one of them placed and 3 of them won, which made the cross doubles make up a few lines which returned about £2800, however the treble was the big one and that one line (a £2.50 each way bet) returned a whopping £6700! The rest of the winnings were just the other smaller win lines paying out a few hundred each. Anyway I though with time in this game and doing this sort of thing regularly, I would hit a big win eventually, but I didn’t think it would be after just 5 months of doing it. Just goes to show those multiples could be the ticket to get your ROI% right up there, but you will have to stomach the variance as usual. As usual, the horses for this crazy bet/win were simply picked from the Each Way Matcher tool I use on the Oddsmonkey website (<– affiliate link). It costs me £150/year to use the software, and as you can see that is well worth the money (to me at least!). I’m currently sitting on £25K profits for the year, which is mainly from doing the each way sniping. Having said all of that… I think it’s well worth me adding an extra bold note at this stage: please see my disclaimer below – despite me doing very well this month (being lucky!), if you think this is easy money you are very much mistaken and real money is at a very real risk of being lost if you follow me in on this!!!

If you are still interested in each way sniping and haven’t gotten going with it yet, I have written a couple of guides but before giving you the links, just one more time:

It’s NOT easy money, you can lose, especially over the short term, there are many ups and downs, and it’s not for the faint of heart. Having said that, if you wanted to know exactly what Each Way Sniping is and missed my guides I just wrote on the subject, check our part 1 here, and part 2 here.

Obviously if you want to make any money doing matched betting or each way sniping you should be using OddsMonkey… so here is my usual spiel about that:

If anyone is interested I have been using Odds Monkey matched betting software (<–affiliate link) for this, which having tried a few different ones out there, I found to be a far superior product in pretty much every way to everything else I tried. Check it out if you are new to matched betting, there are loads of great tutorials to get you going and you can try it for free. One of the best things about it is the Forum/Community aspect as you can learn loads of new and interesting ways to profit from gambling that aren’t just your standard “Do offer, lay off, get free bet, lay off, win £3.50” type of, let’s face, quite boring, time consuming and laborious matched betting methods. Some of these methods are what helped me to have a bumper Cheltenham 2017 and are currently bringing me in over £1000 per month betting on each way sniping! Now, back to the update!

savings rate, net worth and all of that nincompoopery

Another high spending, high income month gets us to a pretty respectable savings rate of 39.39% and brings our average for the year to 53.42%. The fact we bought the car and are still above 50% is actually blowing my mind, although I’m not sure how long it will be there because we’ve also decided to get some new windows for the house. If we can get through the next month (or whenever we have to pay for those) with a 0% or even slightly positive savings rate, I’ll be very happy and there is a chance we may yet break the 50% at the end of the year, but it will rely on good ew sniping returns and also a definite cut in expenses… or just not buying ridiculously expensive stuff… I think we’re done after the windows on this front though… Promise!

Anyway net worth did this:

Excluding house equity: £200,364 / +£5,953 / +3.06%

Including house equity: £284,973 / +£6,305 / +2.26%

Liquid Freedom: £105,400 / +£5,632/ +5.65%

Celebration times all round with 2 milestones broken through here. £200K for our total NW excluding house equity and £100K in our Liquid Freedom “pot”. I really need to stick some of the LF pot into an ISA or two now, it’s getting way too much in cash. I’ll look at this over the next few weeks

other updates

Blog – Looking back at my old blog posts when I was writing the 5 year financial update, one thing i realised I haven’t done for ages is one of my TFS Challenges, and I also came across this post from Raptitude – 7 years & 21 experiments. This inspired me to do another, and one of them really stood out to me that I’d like to try, so I’m going to give it a go. I won’t reveal what it is just yet, but here is what I plan to get out over the next month of so in terms of posts:

• Experiment reveal / Challenge throwdown
• 5 Year update part II – random thoughts on 5 years of FI life and blogging
• Each Way Betting final post (FAQ, bit more figures analysis, and tying up any other loose ends)

Other – Not much else to report really. We did a car boot sale after clearing out a load of stuff but didn’t make that much due to it being one of the rainier weekends so not a great turn out. Still… always good to declutter!

Links – Random links you may not have come across before:

• Fully Charged – I’m currently addicted to this amazing YouTube channel, which is about new clean tech, EV’s, and is presented by none other than Robert Llewellyn aka Kryten from Red Dwarf 🙂 !!! Here are a couple of interesting recent links: Electric Bikes – Mixergy Hot Water Tank – Sunamp Heat Battery – Total cost of EV ownership – Range Anxiety – Skeleton Ultra Capacitors – Battery vs Petrol – Lawnmower Test. And don’t miss him “Kryten it up” with some technical talk in this episode – hilarious! 🙂
• Electric Truck – I’ve always wondered how EV tech would get on in heavy duty industrial situations. Turns out it’s very good! This set up actually hauls tonnes of rock down from the top of a mountain and generates surplus energy on the way down and feeds it back into the grid – amazing! (Link found via Fully Charged, obvs)
• Thermoelectrics – I’d never heard of this, but there is a thing called “solid state refrigerators” which use semiconductors to suck the heat out of solids/air. What blew my mind is that by running the process in reverse (i.e. applying heat to one side of the set up) you can actually generate electricity! The process has been known about for a very long time, but it has been so inefficient up until recently it wasn’t commercially exploitable. With recent advances in materials science that has changed, and companies are already up and running producing rigs that can produce energy from waste heat. I found all of this very cool!
• Free £170 Bose Headphones with First Direct account switch – Thanks to Savings Ninja for pointing this one out, my account is now open and am awaiting my headphones! (If you don’t want headphones there are other gifts on offer)
• Ms ZiYou had a couple of great posts that got me thinking: Yes – I am rich now. And wealthy for that matter. And why labels matter. and F*ck – 20 years ago I was starting uni – Same as me Ms ZiYou! Feeling old after that one… thanks for that 🙂
• North Korea always fascinates me and blogger “Burning Desire For Fire” has been there. Read her interesting insights on Advertising North Korean Style Part 1 and Part 2.