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:

  1. 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