away in august expenses report and market crash net worth update!

Sep04
by TFS on September 4, 2015 at 4:00 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Investing, TFS Updates

August Expenses Report

 

With a total spend of £3056 it’s probably clear we had a fun packed August, what more can I really say!? 🙂

You know the drill by now so will get straight on with the expenses and other bits…:

 

expenses breakdown

In no particular order here is how our expenses looked in August:

August Expenses Report

  • Holiday was paying for some accommodation in York and elsewhere
  • Dining and drinking was so large due to the weekends away! Hopefully the frugal people’s meetups#LINK become a little more frugal in future 😉

August Expenses Report

  • Nothing to see here, move along folks….

August Expenses Report

  • Groceries were pretty low compared to normal but that is probably because we were away for so much of the month (and yes our freezer is still packed full of food and yes we are still trying to eat our way through it before spending too much more!). We are now averaging £256/month on Groceries which ain’t bad but could definitely be improved, especially now BBQ season is practically over 🙂
  • Nothing else out of the ordinary really!

August Expenses Report

 

  • Mrs T has averaged £50/month on clothes for 3 months running now. Those following for a while will realise this is a big turnaround and I have my cap well and truly doffed to her. Well done Mrs T! 🙂
  • I managed to keep the gambling down to £13.50 this month (after a whopping £150+ last month. Oops!) and that should be zero from here on in.
  • “Gifts – other” – We buy people a lot of random gifts it seems. I’m fairly OK with that 🙂
  • The bloomin’ extra car insurance premium I talked about here came out in August so that is the £129.68

August Expenses Report

  • Petrol is obviously so high due to road trips to York and Worcester!

August Expenses Report

  • Club Membership is where I store my golf expenditures – This is very high due to, well… I played a lot of golf this month. It is probably worth noting that I put everything I spend when I’m at golf in here, it is not just green fees. So any lunch bought or beers after the game go here as well. The reason being I want to know what I would save if I gave up golf at any point – that is assuming I don’t do something else with that money instead of course,  so I’m assuming that if I didn’t play golf then I would not have bought lunch or had beers afterwards, etc…
  • Golf could have actually been even higher as we had a golf day with “the lads” and it was going to be £74 for two rounds at a top course but when we went to pay they did it for £45 which is a freakin’ bargain. Thank you Tandridge golf club! The good news is that the average is now only just over the £100/month budget at £106.95, and with the peak playing (and pricing) season now well and truly over (Oh it’s September… hello autumn!!!) this should easily drop back under budget by the end of the year.
  • Gym membership is for Mrs T plus some extra classes she pays for and is pretty standard at this cost
  • Sports club membership is where I store my squash expenditures and is also pretty standard around the £20-£25 mark

This brings our average spending up £2989 which is well over the £2666 I laid out earlier in the year here. As always I am optimistic that we can bring that down before the year is up, but to get it back down below the £2666 our spending will need to average £2020 which being perfectly honest, I’m not so optimistic about. Our lowest spending month so far was February where we spent £2127. Still, something to aim for!

 

income report

Yet again we were somewhat saved by a slightly higher income than usual this month with a total of £4981.

This was supplemented hugely by some tax being given back to me after last months over-taxing. This always happens during bonus month and then the next month because they tax you in the first month as if you are earning 10 grand a month so you get taxed at the wrong rate, then the following month it corrects itself. The only other income boost was £10 from TopCashback* 1 and Mrs T won £25 on the lottery. Rather than count that as income I’ve offset it against the expenses side of actually paying for the lottery – and don’t forget we are going to stop playing it altogether in October when the new rules come into effect!

Remember if you want to see a full breakdown of all spending, income, net worth, and all that palava just have a look at…

My Expenses, Income, Savings Rate, Investments and Net Worth Tracker Spreadsheet Here

 

savings rate

Despite the larger than average expenses we still managed to save: 47.4%

This is very pleasing! 🙂

 

net worth update and that stock market wtf!

More bad news on this front but it is obviously just down to the turmoil in the markets. Damn you China! 😉

I didn’t bother checking what it went down to on the Monday it all kicked off big time but as things stand despite putting £2754 worth of extra cash/savings into our Net Worth this month, the total still dropped by £913 or 1.03%!

In terms of investing, I missed the boat by a fairly large margin with the really low valuations but did stick a bit of money into some Vanguard lifestrategy 100 (VGL100I:LN) the other day as things haven’t really recovered massively. This order still hasn’t executed yet – one of the perils of buying funds, it can take days to bloody execute so you don’t know the price you are really buying at! – and so hasn’t shown up in the Investments section of the Net worth tracker yet. I also bought a bit of the Vanguard FTSE All-World ETF (VWRL:LN) which executed immediately but then I realised I got charged £10 for ETF purchases with Charles Stanley Direct. On a £1000 purchase this works out at a 1% fee which is much higher than I’d usually like. D’oh! If anyone has any tips on buying ETFs on the fly with minimal charges please let me know? 🙂

If this proves anything it’s that I am doing the right thing by not really dishing out any direct investing advice on this blog (apart from maybe how not to go about things!) 🙂

Anyway, if you’d told me I would be buying things at 10-15% off their values from around 1-2 months ago back then I would have been happy buying at those prices, so it seems silly not to go in even though things had slightly recovered before I got round to. I still have some cash coming in soon by way of tax return and selling off some share save scheme bits in September so if things get worse I can go in again at even better prices, so feel like I’ve put in a sensible amount while still having some ammo left if even more bargains turn up.

 

wrap up

Well that’s it for August! After a big spending July we kind of just followed it straight up with another big one in August. Even though we didn’t technically have any massive holidays this year we’ve done lot’s of little bits instead which has been a lot of fun and I think it’s been money well spent. Things should definitely quieten down for the remaining 4 months of the year now though and we should see a reduction in expenditure (barring the bathroom refurb. It looks like the kitchen is being pushed back into next year at this rate!).

The big thing is going to be the drop in my salary which is happening… this month!!!

So now there is no excuses, we do really need to tighten the purse strings. How will we get on!? We’ll find out soon enough won’t we 🙂

 

How did you get on in August!? Let me know in the comments section!

Notes:

  1. This page contains affiliate links, each one is brought to your attention with the ‘*’ denotation. What is an affiliate link you ask?! OK well it’s fairly basic… If you click on, sign up through or buy anything via these links I may receive a small fee, which will help to support theFIREstarter blog. The key thing is that it will not cost you anything extra to use these links, although don’t go clicking on them willy nilly just because it may help me! If you think you will find the product/service useful and do click through, then a sincere “thank you” for your support. ↩
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