theFIREstarter

Happy Christmas everyone! Oh, am I a bit late for that?

OK swiftly moving on then… 🙂

December was a good month all round for us, but it must be said that the savings rate limped over the line drawn at the end of the year the wise among us called 2018. So let’s find out what happened shall we?

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 £3753 (£4507 / £3205) – Not actually that bad in all fairness!
• Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848) 
• Household/Bills £847 (£693 / £602) –  Includes “Groceries” which came in at £521 (£384 / £325) which is pretty bad considering we got a £100 free shop from Asda (an administrative error on their part… up yours technology!). But hey ho, we ate and drank like Kings and now we are back on rice and beans (well more like salad and attempted low carb diets but you get the picture).
• Going out £775 (£517 / £467) – A not unexpected high spending month on going out. Average for the year not actually too far over though.
• Transport £130 (£517 / £192) – *Insert usual spiel about buying a car which wasn’t planned at the start of the year here*
• Personal Care £207 (£118 / £92) – Haircuts ‘n’ shit… they’re important. Right?
• Home/Garden/what shit have we blown our money on this month £143 (£639 / £100) – Oooooh… quite a low one this month. But we still decided to buy a new ¹ hand blender (for me Huel, like) and a neat looking seat/toy storage solution, which has massively improved the look of the “Atomic bomb full of children’s toys has just exploded” chic look of our lounge.
• Lifestyle/Clothes £224 (£201 / £141) – Included a fair amount of Take-aways this month. Turns out hungover people have got low will power to resist getting fast food, who knew?
• Hobbies/Sport £13 (£87 / £149) – Yet again a quiet month on this front.
• Admin £15 (£14 / £20)
• Financial £5 (£18 / £15)
• Children £92 (£83 / £60) – Over budget for the year, if it happens again she will be given her marching orders make no mistake.
• Gifts/Charity £452 (£390 / £187) – In case anyone has forgotten, I pledged to donate 10% of my betting/matched betting profits as per my post here. This has subsequently blown this budget category out of the water as I’ve made far more on this side hustle than I ever imagined I would at the start of the year. However, both of those things are good news (high side hustle profits, and more giving to charity!). This month we topped up what we “owed” the charities from previous months and even went a little over the top (£3,189 total donations compared to £30,240 profits so just over 10% in the end). This offset us slightly under-giving from last year, so I feel we are definitely all square with the charities ² going into 2019.

income

Figures in the same format as expenses…

• Total £4036 +£395 Pension (£7644 / £4422)
• TFS Income £2497 +£395 Pension (£2870 / £2500) – Slightly higher than usual, but I’m not really sure why. Keeping schtum though obvs.
• Mrs T Income £565 (£466 / £600) – Pretty standard month here
• Ratesetter £56 (£56 / £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! If you want to avail yourself of this offer click this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link! ² – Thanks to the 1 person who signed up last month, you are awesome!) to get started.
• Child benefit £82 (£91 / £82) – The social welfare gift that keeps on giving.
• Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £798 (£2520 / £750) – Another damp squib to the end of the year… In actual fact though, December was a cracking month with a profit of around £2500 on the Each Way sniping, but this was mainly cancelling out last months losses. There was also then a bad patch over the Xmas ³ period that you can start to see in the graph below, which continued long into the start of January. Being extremely lazy I didn’t take figures until Jan 14th so this is why we are only at £798 – Just to be clear this figure is all profits from November to mid January… so a lot of huffing and puffing for not all that much reward. However, I will continue to use this method because when the good times roll, they really do roll, and it makes up for the bad times and then some. Looking at the bigger picture I’ve made over £25K this year on EW sniping alone, and with other Matched Betting activity that makes it up to just over £30K in profits for the year. If you’d offered my that at the start of the year I would have bitten your bloody hand off!

In any case, here is a nice graph of my December EW sniping profits:

Note: This year I will try to be more regimented in taking my profit figures at the end of each month so my monthly profit figures match up better with the graphs and it’s less confusing!

If you are interested in each way sniping I have written a couple of guides, but before giving you the links, please read and really think about the following disclaimer:

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.

And 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 jingle bells

We managed a damp squib of a  15.3% to finish the year off with, but finished the year off with a more than respectable 43.93%! That is our highest by a very high margin since I started working part time. Whether we can emulate this success next year is another matter entirely but I’ll save that analysis for my 2019 goals post, which will be out shortly after the end of year wrap up, which is next! First goal is to get both of those posts out before January is over 🙂

Anyway, apparently the markets continued to fart, so Net Worth did this:

Excluding house equity: £189,055 / +£406 / +0.22%

Including house equity: £275,072 / +£758 / +0.28%

Liquid Freedom: £94,737 / +£3,127 / +3.41%

It’s worth pointing out that last my I accidentally just cut and pasted in Octobers figures and then forgot to update them… which shows how much readers out there are really paying attention (hah!). So in actual reality November was far more of a car crash than the figures I posted and should have read like this:

Excluding house equity: £188,649 / –£11,947 / -5.96%

Including house equity: £274,314 / -£11,595 / -4.06%

Liquid Freedom: £91,610 / -£12,325 / -11.86%

EEEEK! Good job I wasn’t really paying much attention to any of it… haha. Anyway hopefully with another few months of saving we can break through the £200K NW Ex. House and £100K Liquid Freedom barrier yet again!

In terms of investing, there were no new investments in December. With the markets still down relative to say 6 months ago, it seems like a good idea to put a bit more money into my SIPP and/or ISAs, so will be looking at doing that this week. Will update with what next month!

other updates

Won’t bore you with any personal junk from December, it was the usual eating, drinking and being merry, so all good! Here are some other bullet points though:

• Amazon Merch T-Shirt side hustle – I have spent absolutely zero time on this. Deciding to start up a side hustle in December is not a good idea. I am going to try to take a day off every other week from work to see if I can work on it though, as I think I need to spend some chunks of time to at least get going with it, and once I’m in the groove I will hopefully be able to start knocking out designs and doing admin for it during the spare few hours I (occasionally) get in the evenings.
• Running – Didn’t run much in December but keen to get back on it. The Brighton half marathon is but 6 weeks away, and I still have a sneaky feeling I might be able to train enough in that time to break my HM PB! Let’s do this!
• Reading – I got Straight outta Crawley (<– affiliate link) the Memoirs of a Distinctly Average Human Being, i.e. Romesh Ranganathan, for Christmas, and whizzed through it in about 10 days. If you like his humour it’s a really easy and funny read, something a bit lighter than my usual fair so made a nice change. He is from my home town so many of the stories had that extra interest as I knew exactly where he was talking about and could picture the scenes very well, which probably made it even funnier! 🙂
• Blog – I still owe everyone part III of the each way betting guide. I nearly have a years worth of data now so I’m sure there will be some interesting stats that come out of my analysis.. I will endeavour to get it out some time in Feb so it’s well in time before this years Cheltenham, when the racing season really kicks off.

Ciao for now people, and hope you all had a merry Christmas and a joyous new year!