TFS Jr playing pilot 🙂
As mentioned in a few of the previous posts, I have gone a bit radio silence on the blog for the last few months, especially with regards to the monthly updates.
The truth is I haven’t updated my FI spreadsheet since the December update in January!
I know I should really get around to update this before it gets too much to catch up on, but in truth I feel the boat has already sailed on this one already. We’re off on holiday on Sunday for over 2 weeks and I am pretty sure I am not going to do it before then, and by the time we get back that’s nearly 6 months of the year that has gone.
The ironic thing is that I feel we’ve been doing pretty good on the spending front, and also completely smashing it on income, so the savings rates should be sky high. As in record high (for us) maybe even >60% for the year so far.
Alas, I cannot report an accurate figure because of the above laziness.
Or is it laziness? Maybe just more that we are now cruising on auto-pilot, and tracking so closely has started to seem a little pointless?
Probably a bit of both!
I’ve certainly not been putting my feet up though, with the Each way betting side hustle going better than ever, putting in the hours at work and the rest of the time trying to be the best parent and husband I can be, and OK I’ll admit, also actually having a fair bit of fun as well 🙂 , we’ve definitely been keeping ourselves busy. It’s just the enthusiasm for this tracking malarkey seems to have faded, which has coincided weirdly just at the point where you’d have thought it would have been the most fun to keep track of. Go figure!
In any case, I am thinking of trying to get an easier way of tracking our expenses where I can maybe just provide a quarterly update on expenses/income/net worth instead of monthly, which has started to seem like a chore.
Does anyone else do this?
I am thinking maybe I repurpose Moneydashboard to just really broadly track our ins and outs, and not categorise stuff so militantly.
I know some people just subtract the balances from the start and end of their bank accounts at each month beginning/end but I wouldn’t trust the figure to be accurate enough.
The alternative is to just take what Moneydashboard tags as automatic and take that as gospel, but then there is the issue of us owing people money, and vice versa, which Moneydashboard really helps with.
So here’s what I’m thinking for a newer, more streamlined tracking system:
- Trust Moneydashboard’s auto tagging of the broad categories but run a quick 5 minute check over this at the end of each month 1
- Only re-tag things if they are blatantly wrong and/or it’s something where we owe or somebody owes us money and therefore a split transaction is needed
- Redo my FI spreadsheet so the broad categories can be used from the Moneydashboard pie chart for spending.
- Income could also be simplified e.g. I have separate rows for interest for every account plus cashback, this should really just all be on one row “interest/cashback”
- Net Worth tracking – I am tempted to only bother checking in on this every 3 months rather than every month now
- Matched Betting income – This is still going to be the biggest chore and I really should do it every month still. But I will just have to deal with that. With all the different accounts I am running it takes me around an hour to check them all and update my spreadsheet, which isn’t the worst thing in the world if the rest of the tracking takes a lot less time.
- Report a shorter financial update on the blog every 3 months instead of one, that is shorter and easier to write and probably easier to comprehend as well.
I think the key thing here is to maximise time input vs value we’re getting out of the tracking and figures, and I don’t think we’re getting any extra value out of the granularity of our current tracking system now, to justify the extra time and effort we are putting into it.
What do you think? And as I say does anyone else run a much leaner tracking system than (what seems like) most FIRE wannabes, and what do you do and how do you make it work?
Oh one final thing as a funny/interesting aside, it turned out I had a slight error in my FI spreadsheet in the “Years to FI” calculation – it wasn’t taking into account our current Net Worth and was always just using the same NW as we had when I first set up the spreadsheet for that year (And I think it took that from 2017 when I copied the 2018 and 2019 tabs over in fact, so it looked even worse)!
So the little square here:
Was overestimating my Age at FI by as much as 5 years in certain instances!
The above screen shot is now the correct figure for the end of the 2018 figures, but the current January 2019 figure actually dropped this right down to 47! That is based on slightly outsized income in January so I wouldn’t expect it to stay there, but still it’s a huge move in the right direction by all accounts, so finding this glitch in my calculations made me very, very happy 🙂
Notes:
- We do something similar now but are very anal about the details and get every single thing tagged correctly, this can take 1-2 hours and is always unnecessarily stressful as we try to remember that 3.99 we spent 27 days ago ↩
Discussion (29) ¬
Hey TFS, good to hear things have been ticking along and that you’re doing well! Where are you going on holiday?
I run a pretty simple tracking system. I don’t budget (shock, horror!), but I keep track of my overall expenses (easy to do now cos I use card for everything) and just note that against my income to get a savings rate. I don’t really care whether I spent loads in one category vs another.
I’m not familiar with Money Dashboard, but I guess experiment with what works right for you, and what’s most important to know?
Hey Mindy, good to hear from you!
We are off to the South of France, should get some sun at this time of year, fingers crossed!
Your tracking system sounds very similar to what I am proposing, the only complexity with ours is that we have 2 people with multiple accounts/credit cards. This is where Moneydashboard comes in as it pulls all your accounts into one place. If you ever get another account or credit card and get stuck with your tracking you should check it out!
Cheers 🙂
My suggestion: figure out what your desired outcomes from the record keeping are, and how (if?) you actually use those numbers to make well informed decisions. Budgeting? Cash flow forecasting? Tax returns? Bragging rights?
Retrospective tracking means you don’t budget (I don’t either, once you reliably earn more than “enough” to cover the essentials the need for this greatly diminishes).
Question is whether you plan, and if so whether this information feeds into that planning?
If not, then apart from feeding the voyeuristic proclivities of your loyal readers, the endeavour may fail the “so what?” test.
For what it is worth, my monthly tracking takes about 15 minutes. It takes about the same again to update the charts on my blog. I do it so that I periodically cast my eye over the numbers, mainly to spot if anything looks wacky or if I haven’t receive a bill/dividend/rent payment I was expecting.
indeedably, great advice as always.
The only out come I really care about is tracking my Savings rate (just out of interest) and therefore my years to FI calculation in my spreadsheet. So I don’t need to break down the expenses so granularly now, I just want the quickest way of getting money out vs money in.
“once you reliably earn more than “enough” to cover the essentials the need for this greatly diminishes)” – Totally agree with this, although our expenses could definitely be cut if really needed, I don’t feel like we need to right now and are in a pretty good place with our expenses vs income.
We don’t really plan, we do a loose spending budget at the start of the year but it’s only “for fun” really and we don’t ever stick to it, it’s more just an exercise to check we aren’t accidentally planning 3 really expensive holidays and some really expensive house renovations all in the same year (for example, stupid one and obviously would be really hard to accidentally do that of course haha!)
Monthly tracking taking 15 minutes sounds exactly where I want to be with it. The first update post holiday will be painful as I will have about 4 months to catch up on, and will need to edit my spreadsheet to accept the more simplified formats, but from there on hopefully I will be saving us at least 2 hours/month going forward.
Cheers
Enjoy your holiday TFS!
Have you thought about just tracking your investments? I don’t actually track my expenses. I just create a budget at the beginning of the year for my desired spending and try to stick to it. I automate as much as I can into my investment accounts (with a little leeway) and top up whichever accounts at the end of the year.
Extra hustles like matched betting etc. generally means that I can cover most unexpected expenses without having to halt my monthly deposits.
I’m working on a mobile app to help me track my luxury expenses such as going out or occasionally going out to grab something to eat, but this will work off the assumption that you’ve given yourself a certain budget for these luxury spending items, like £200 per month on food. I’ll then use the app to subtract fivers here and there when I grab lunch out, anything not spent will roll over.
This method of setting a yearly budget and sticking with it would probably be much harder with a kid though I imagine 😛
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Hi Ninja,
It’s not a bad idea but I’m a bit of a looser investor than most in this scene. I really should set up some monthly investments though, that is for sure, our liquid pot is definitely big enough now (probably should take some out of my MB/EWB pot for some extra wiggle room!).
However I still want to get an exact SR rate if I can. Your expenses are so low it doesn’t matter too much whether you are saving 78% or 82%, you are on the fast track to FI whatever the figure, plus you are younger so have more time on your hands in case there are an extra few years. But if assume we invest say 2K/month but actually our savings were in fact 5K in that month (say to unexpected profits from EWB) then that makes a bloody big difference, but I couldn’t up the auto investments to 5K/month due to not knowing about that income in advance… hopefully that makes sense?
Budgeting so granularly is going the opposite way of what I want, you not only have to track it using the app you have to set up the budgets in the first place, so although it’s a great sounding app for people that want to do that, I don’t think I would ever use an app like that (sorry) 🙂
Cheers
I’ve used a modified version of your FI spreadsheet to track my own net worth for the past few years. With that in mind, could you elaborate on what exactly the mistake was in the “years to FI” calculations, please?
I fixed it about 3 months ago on mine so memory is a bit hazy, but I think it was down to cell C155 which is labelled as “Current value of investments” – This was hard coded to be something like 100K or whatever, so it never went up as my Net Worth increased. I fixed it so now it takes the latest NW value from the previous month end.
If you copied my sheet from years ago, there is a chance this “bug” wasn’t even on there way back then as I think I may have introduced it some time along the way.
Cheers!
Thanks for that clarification – the version of the tracking spreadsheet I use is indeed correct.
I’d certainly be tempted to go down the route of sanity-checking MoneyDashboard’s tagging at the end of the month, and then just copying down the figures from the broader categories. In terms of interest/cashback from each account, it’s only worth going down that route if MoneyDashboard already tots them up. If you’re typing them in one at a time you might as well hang on to the individual rows.
Cool! MD doesn’t have a pie chart for income (I don’t think!?) but it does now add up your totals if you filter categories again, so it will be very easy to get a total interest/cashback amount now. So will definitely combine those rows.
Cheers
Eyy nice work TFS!
I track the usual type of expenses like Mortgage / Electricity / Oil etc and not the one-off costs that randomly come in and out. If anything, I just have a ‘sundry’ based budget, which is roughly the same each month.
It’s good old Excel for me this end! I’ve been wanting to move it across to Google Sheets, but just haven’t had the time to do so yet. I know the graphs / functionality of Google Sheets is slightly more advanced than Excel.
PS – Good work on the EWB side of things! Absolutely killing it dude!
Jase recently posted…April 2019 – Financial Update
Hi Jase,
That’s interesting about only tracking the things that are constant. What exactly do you gain by that? Are you only looking to cover your “needs” instead of “wants” from your FI stash or something like that?
Having moved to Google sheets ages ago I cannot stand using Excel anymore, Google is just so much easier to use.
Cheers
Loving your honesty TFS! Makes me feel better about my lack of focus also. I am still tracking our spending but don’t use it to inform our spending at the moment. I could tell you how much we spent on food last month if I looked but it’s not conscious spending.
Tracking your matched betting activity probably is a worthwhile activity given it’s ups and downs and the impact it can have on your finances. Am sure you’ll find the right thing to work for you.
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Hi Tuppenny,
I bet a lot of folks once they have most of the principles down let up on the tracking side of things. Do you really think MMM still tracks his spending down to the last penny, I highly doubt it!? 🙂
Yea doing the MB is crucial, I need to know how much profit/income (or in a few unlucky months, losses!) I’m making from that otherwise what’s the point in doing it.
Cheers for commenting 🙂
Ah the old accidental hard coding of a cell, huh? Reminds me of why I’m so glad I don’t build financial models any more! Glad that when you fixed it things went in the right direction.
I’m with indeedably on this as I don’t really bother to track in detail. I’ve paid off my mortgage and I’m comfortable with my pension level. My outgoings are also pretty constant – or at least I don’t care about the minor variations month to month.
What I DO care about though are my ‘liquid’ assets i.e. ISA (excluding LISA), Premium bonds, cash etc. That’s what I need to know to work out if I can bridge the gap to when i can draw down my pension. That’s quite easy to work out.
Don’t know if that helps you at all!
Caveman recently posted…April 2019 update: The one that’s all over the frickin’ place
Hi Caveman,
Your last point is very useful actually yea. I need to rework my financial spreadsheet so it focuses more on the liquid assets (and pension(s) for that matter) and do some kind of ISA/Investments to Pension bridging simulation. That sounds more complicated to set up initially but once I’ve done it, I should probably be able to just focus on getting those numbers up and not worry about the spending side of it *too* much.
Great to see you back posting. I’ve just started tracking my incomee and expenses and I can clearly see how it can be seen as a chore (even when its going up nicely!).
Hah, at least it’s going in the right direction for both of us Rado 🙂
Hey man,
I cannot access your post about EW betting (any chance of the password).
If I started with £100 would you spread this over 2-3 bookies or do you just start with one and build from there. To get to your level of £10k month surely you must be placing these bets on the same day on a few bookies?
Thank you for you time.
🙂
Congratulions on your progress, auto-pilot isn’t so bad! Remember, commercial planes only engage the auto-pilot after the tricky take-off has already happened — so you’re at cruising altitude! 🙂 At some point you may need to re-engage (turbulence or when you move to de-accumulation) but for now I’d say sit back and enjoy the flight. 🙂
I think what you’re feeling is pretty normal. My co-blogger has written about it, if I may be permitted a link, in case you missed it:
https://monevator.com/financial-goals-help/
Yea good point TI and excellent continuation of the analogy there 🙂
Of course it’s fine to post a link, thanks!
Hey TFS
Belated response, thought I’d posted a comment a while back.
I’m not surprised you’re considering a more streamlined approach for tracking your expenses – all the detail is very interesting for us readers but must be a right pain to log, so if it doesn’t really help or provide any benefit to you, cutting back seems the way to go.
The bits I’m logging at the moment is probably just right, doesn’t take me too long to do or to keep on top of and provides motivation for me in terms of benefit.
Anyway, fantastic news that your age at FI has dropped right down to 47! If your MB profits continue, surely this number will continue to go down.
Hope you had a great holiday.
Hi weenie,
Your reports are very streamlined and must take under half the time mine do… That’s where I’d like to get to I think (but still not bother with monthly updates I don’t think).
If MB profits continue I will likely just quit my job soon anyway and refocus my efforts elsewhere, so my “true FI” date will likely go back up again, which is kind of ironic. As I wrote about a while ago in “should I stay or go” post.
Cheers
Hi, sorry to post this on the comments thread but I’ve just gone for a re-read of the EW posts and it’s password protected, also couldn’t find a contact us section to enquire via the usual routes, any ideas? Thanks
It’s good to hear you’re doing well on the savings rate front, and good catch on the FI calculation!
Maybe I need to go on autopilot a bit. (The last time we did that in 2018 though, our spending ballooned by over 20% so maybe this is one of those good ideas for you, bad idea for me, things.)
I hope the vacation was great, friend. Good to hear from you!
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Hi DbF,
Well it remains to be seen whether it’s a good idea or not as I still haven’t updated our expenses since January. I have a feeling our expenses may well balloon by a certain amount, but that’s kind of been happening even when I’ve been tracking things closely anyway, so I am not really sure if there is too much we can do about it, barring something more radical.
Cheers
Hey TFS!
Glad to hear the EW Betting is still going well! I did it myself a few months ago but almost all my accounts got stake restricted pretty quickly. Have you lost many more accounts recently? And what do you think is the best way to prevent EW stake restrictions?