august update – income & expenses report – the late edition
We made it to the beach! (Lancing if you were wondering where). 2 hours later it was p!ssing it down! 🙂
Another month done! Another high expense month! Waaah (etc)!
Of course those who paid any attention recently will know that this is mainly because we spent ~£1200 on our garden project. I’m starting to wonder how many one of expenses I can actually come up with before I just admit our budget should be about £2000 higher than predicted every year though even though this year I already baked in a lot of breathing room.
Anyway let’s get on with it, and apologies for the lateness of this update… been very busy, blah blah the usual excuses… 🙂
expenses
Remember the figures below are in the format: £Current Month (£2017 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)
- Total £4448 (£3727 / £3210) – Game over on hitting the average budget here. I guess I could take out what we spent on the garden and aim to hit budget then but even then I doubt we’d do it (as I already know what we’ve spent in September and it doesn’t look good – *insert grimacing emoji*!).
- Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848)
- Household £786 (£681 / £599) – Groceries the main culprit again here.
- Going out/Holiday £560 (£1057 / £750) – Mrs T had a hen do (weekend) to go on which was the main expense here, but all in all not a bad month for us, in month spend was under average target by £190.
- Transport £199 (£172 / £172) – Hah! We are now bang on target for the year. We spent a lot on Petrol this month, I guess we ended up having one of those months where you fill up right at the start and right at the end, and we also had a short break to the IOW towards the end of the month which sups up the old dinosaur juice a fair bit. I got the train and the catamaran down a bit later as was still doing the garden which was great fun, and cost under £30. Considering if I get a daily ticket train to work and that costs £24 that seems like great VFM 🙂
Couldn’t get a snap of the catamaran itself but here is a nice view of leaving Portsmouth harbour
You dock into the end of the Pier and then catch an old London Underground tube train on the actual pier to continue your journey! Cool! 🙂
- Personal Care £64 (£85 / £90) – Slightly under budget here. I am guessing Mrs T needs a new hairdo pretty soon though?!? 😉
- Home/Garden £1152 (£213 / £85) – Actually very happy with this. Despite the “unforeseen” expense of the garden we’re still only £128 over the monthly target for the year. Also the garden did end up costing us a lot less than I originally thought when we actually decided to do it (guessed it would be around £2K)
- Lifestyle £318 (£214 / £165) – Trended back down last month, trended back up again this month 🙂 – Clothes the main culprit here, as well as Mrs T smashed her phone screen and I didn’t have time to DIY the repair so got ripped off at a high street fixer-upper instead.
- Gifts/Charity £346 (£156 / £215) – Finally catching up with our charitable giving! Sadly my Auntie passed away in June and she had two nominated charities if people wanted to contribute in her memory, Ellenor Hospices and Cancer Research UK, so we gave a fair chunk to both of them. We currently still have £235 left to give at this point in time (further matched betting profits notwithstanding).
- Hobbies/Sport £126 (£160 / £150) – Played a bit of golf this month but not much else to report here. The season is all but over (I’ve turned into a bit of a fair weather golfer in recent years) so I can see this easily coming back to under budget by the time the year is out.
- Admin £4 (£2 / £10)
- Financial £5 (£67 / £57) – The average is now very close to target!
- Children £39 (£73 / £70) – Yet another great month for TFS Jr. She continues to need very little even in her second year of existence. Not that I’m complaining about the budget in any way here but I still feel we probably overspend on her. The current favourite toys are a stick and a puddle to stamp in, last time I checked the Argos catalogue these can be had for exactly diddly squat 🙂
income
Figures in the same format as expenses…
- Total £3430 +£395 Pension (£4419 / £3907) – Not a great month here mainly due to not having much time for Matched Betting (see below) I’ve started to add in the +£395 Pension on this figure so people can actually see the savings rate below makes sense, as I kept getting questions about that.
- TFS Income £2514 +£395 Pension (£2561 / £2390) – Slightly bigger than usual because of the tax rebalancing after the big July bonus cheque, plus no commuting to work as I was off for most of the month 🙂 – I take my travel straight off of my pay cheque and don’t count it as an expense just in case anyone was wondering (because that is an expense I know I won’t have if I quit my job so it’s silly to include it as a budgeted cost, for purposes of early retirement at least).
- Mrs T Income £667 (£700 / £600) – Looks like I’ve underestimated Mrs T’s annual income, which is nice.
- The House Crowd £4 (£30 / NA) – I’ve written a bit about The House Crowd a fair bit so check out some of the articles in that link if you don’t know what it’s about.
- Ratesetter £108 (£25 / £0) – Wow, has it really been a year since I wrote about this?! I logged in this month to find an extra £100 sitting there from the offer. Unfortunately they’ve dropped the offer to just £50 now but if you want to avail of this “free money” then click on this link here(<– obviously it’s a referral link!) or again read my post on it for more info.
- Child benefit £82 (£82 / £82)
- Quidco/Topcashback £13 (£19 / £10) – I decided to open a Quidco account which is similar to Topcashback in that they give you cash back when you buy things through their links. There was an offer for an easy £13 so I went for it. It’s not going to put TFS Jr through University, but every little helps and all that. I can’t see me using this account too much going forward as I’m sure the retailers/services are much the same as on Topcashback and that is where I’ve gotten used to doing my online purchases through, but if that changes at all I will let you know!
Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £0 (£913 / £750) – Reverting dangerously to the mean here as I keep being too busy with other things to get up a real head of steam with this. In truth, I have continued my golf system and have got a few winners (and many losers) via that so I am probably a bit “up” but not worth tallying it up for the month, I will do this at the end of September and see where I’m at though. I know I keep saying this but I am definitely keen on getting back into this big time to top up the income side of the equation!
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! Now, back to the update!
savings rate, net worth and all of that poppycock
Hmmm…
Now to the part of the updates I’ve not enjoyed as much this year as others 🙂
Yes it’s another negative savings rate 1 month and we clocked in at -16.26%, which takes our average back down to 22.57% for the year. We’re aiming for 30% so still some work needed!
Not surprising the liquid freedom (which includes cash in the bank) went down this month fairly considerably which was less than ideal…
Excluding house equity: £146,650 / –£273 / -0.19%
Including house equity: £227,307 / +£187 / +0.08%
Liquid Freedom: £67,145 / -£1,890 / -2.74%
There is a slight rainbow on the horizon for next month although I won’t spoil that too much as it’s only a few days away.
I honestly haven’t been up to that much else other than what’s already been discussed so will just leave it at that!
Hope everyone had a nice summer and is ready for the Autumn now the nights are drawing in! 🙂
Notes:
- That’s 3 out of the last 4 months now ↩
A real spendy month there TFS. Do you see yourself getting back on the rails in the run into Christmas?
Excluding home equity you now have £146,650 both in and outside of pension wrappers. At a 4% WR (which you know I think is too bullish but is an often touted %) that’s annual spending of £5,866 which would pay for only 1.6 months of your current spending ex mortgage (assume that will be paid off before FIRE)! By that calculation you are a long way from FIRE where FIRE is defined as work is optional.
With that in mind how do you see your FIRE journey playing out from here? Do you see yourself working part time and continuing as you are for a long time yet or do you think you’ll batten down the spending hatches and increase the earnings to accelerate FI at some point going forwards.
Hi RIT,
Thanks for the interesting question(s).
Can’t see us getting back on the rails before Christmas no as we’ve got a few more things on: a Holiday in October, big family wedding in November and then obviously Christmas. Although we don’t tend to go crazy on presents with each other all the other family stuff tends to add up, plus the extra food etc that is generally bought at that time of year as well.
You are right that I am a looooong way from FIRE where it’s defined as work is optional. I can see me working part time for as long as possible where I am for now as I’m really enjoying the set up and it just seems like such a good deal from my point of view I don’t really want to give it up.
If I leave my current job for whatever reason I am guessing I could follow two paths
1) Go freelance and do something similar to liberate.life
2) Get a full time job, batten down the hatches and go for a proper sprint to FIRE
I’d like to think I’d go for 1) but can’t say for certain until it actually happens.
Lot’s of different possibilities, and definitely some unforeseen ones as well no doubt, but for now I’m very happy to maintain the status quo!
In terms of spending, of course I would prefer it if we were spending a little less than we currently are (or at least hitting the budget I laid out at the start of the year would be a good start!) but on the other hand this is not going to keep me up at night due to the factors mentioned above.
FIRE just does not seem so urgent now than it did when I was working full time and so admittedly frugality has gone out of the window somewhat – although I’m not really sure we were ever that frugal in the first place! I would say we are mildly frugal in our general spending (plus bought a moderately sized house and always run an old beater of a car) but other than that do very much live our lives like typical consumers. We are certainly no MMM’s or RIT’s as I’m sure you have easily worked out by now 🙂
One other thing I would say is that my original plan when I started this blog was to get to £250,000 Networth (not including house equity) in 5 years (There is about 9 months left to go!) and then go part time work or something like that, so I’m not actually *that* far off of that figure anyway and of course I’m already working part time so I’ve knocked that part of the goal off already.
I guess the final thing to note is maybe I’m a bit of a fraud for calling my blog theFIREstarter if I’m not particularly assed about actually getting to what you would call true FIRE. I hope people don’t think this but it is something that has crossed my mind before and your questions have made me think of it again. I hope that I can write about the principals of FI and optimising your life and finances and also the multitude of other topics that are tangential but slightly related to what “FI type of people” are interested in, without having to do exactly as MMM or others do in terms of execution.
Maybe I should have called myself “the Downshifter” or something like that instead though 🙂
Cheers!
“FIRE just does not seem so urgent now than it did when I was working full time…” I think this is probably the most important point in your reply. It’s great to hear you’ve found a place that works for you and your family. For me it’s work is optional but we’re all different. Wishing you much success and happiness going forwards.
Cheers RIT, you too mate!
I’m late to the party here, but August (and September) were rough on us, too.
I also seem to go just a bit over our annual budget, no matter what I set it to. I must be comfortable cheating the goal, but only so much. I suspect I’m likely to go over any goal I set for myself, so my trend should be to undershoot my real figure, and maybe push for a declining goal over time…
Yea I’m thinking the same!
I deliberately increased the target this year to see if we could hit and we’re still gonna go over. So there is not much point in doing that it seems, haha!
Next year I’ll go under again and see where we end up 🙂
Funnily enough I’ve been the opposite to you this year – the first six months of the year were very expensive for me, moving house and renovating the new house, and going on holidays, whereas the last few months I’ve had really good savings rates and everything seems to be going swimmingly. When we get to the end of the year I think I’m going to do a yearly review – so far this year my savings rate stands about 60%, I’m hoping I can get that up to 70% by year end. Having said that, I work out my savings rates a little differently to you so I’m not sure how comparable it is.
I’d love to know what the rainbow on the horizon for you is! I’ll look forward to your next monthly review.
It’s funny how expensive stuff seems to happen in bunches, life is not linear I guess is the moral of the story!
I remember when we moved house, we had booked a holiday that we got back from like literally two days before the move date or something ridiculous like that. The thing is you generally book a holiday in advance but house moves can and will happen on a very ad hoc and quick basis as you have to work to a date that suits everyone in the chain and be as flexible as possible, so you can’t really legislate for things like that.
You could think “well we’re buying a new house so maybe cut out the holiday this year” but that would be a bit boring 🙂
60% is great and I’m sure however you are calculating it you are firmly whipping my butt there, congrats 😉
Cheers, it will be posted v. soon as we’re already into October so not long to find out!
Great update TFS – a spendy month but imagine what you would have ended up spending had you not put in all that effort and sweat into your garden!
It was interesting to read your reply to RIT’s questions. As you posted on my blog, neither of us are the ultra-frugal types a la MMM although with my full-time job and no kids, it’s probably easier for me to not spend as much as you do.
And no, you’re not a fraud! I have no doubt that you will reach some semblance of FIRE. Already, you are in a great place working part-time hours, which many aiming for FIRE would love to do. You just need to kick-start the side hustle cash to get the savings and investments back on track – it looks like not doing your MB is making a difference to your savings rate – once you feel like doing that again, the cash will come rolling in!
Keep on keeping on, as they say! 🙂
Hi weenie,
thanks very much for the kind words. I know you’ve always got my back! 🙂
Yea if I’d carried on with MB with vigour throughout the year I would have been smashing it by all accounts I think. Still… I’ve enjoyed the time off as it’s allowed me to concentrate more fully on other projects and not having my head buried into a laptop 18 hours a day 🙂
Saying that, now definitely quite keen to get back on it. Done a few offers this month (It’s October now so very much a late reply and with “getting back on it” haha)
Cheers!
Do you not earn too much for child benefit? Not that I care if you do. We only just cancelled ours after a year procrastinating.
As far as I’m aware the threshold where you start getting it docked is £50K so now I’m working part time I’m fairly comfortably below that.
Another awesome reason not to work FT 🙂
Obviously super late catching up, but I had to say I loved your answer to RIT. We are the same. I still think we’re legit, though, because we have the intention to reach FI… at least, eventually. Also, I believe that we are more relatable to people just starting, rather than diving into the deep end of MMM and 70% Savings Rates. Maybe we should start the “Half-assed FIRE Club”!
Haha, I love it!
A lot of things I end up doing tend to be half-assed* so it’s not that surprising that my FIRE efforts have turned out the same.
*This fact used to really bother me for years, being a perfectionist at heart but not in execution, until I discovered the amazing Pareto Principle (80/20 rule i.e. 80% of results come from 20% of the effort, or in layman’s terms “as long as something is good enough then that’s all fine!”) and now I’m pretty chill about the whole thing.
One final interesting thing to note is that I doubt I would have ever heard of Pareto unless I got into the FIRE thing in the first place, so there you go 🙂