disastrous(?!) december update – income / expenses and other updates

Jan08
by TFS on January 8, 2016 at 8:06 pm
Posted In: Budgets, TFS Updates

 

Yay Christmas! It's over for another year... get over it :op. This is the tallest Christmas tree in the UK, in case you were wondering. (Wakehurst place, Sussex)

Yay Christmas! It’s over for another year… get over it :op. This is the tallest Christmas tree in the UK, in case you were wondering. (Wakehurst place, Sussex)

 

Why a disastrous December? Well it was only on the spending front but fully to be expected. Apart from that December was another cracking month for us, I got *most* of a bathroom teardown and rebuild finished, and we had lot’s of fun over the Christmas break. We also found out that Mrs T will now NOT be made redundant. See here for the initial story on that if you missed it, but now they’ve done a complete U-Turn and decided to have the office stay open and everyone can keep their jobs. So it turns out that, yes, those management people really were just incompetent buffoons! Go figure!

Anyway, back to the financial stuff… let’s find out how it all went down!

income

Here are some interesting points of our income this month:

  • My salary £1864 – WTF! Down again from last month, in fact the last three months read: £2244, £2015, £1864. I hope it doesn’t keep going down as I’ll end up paying my company to work time next year! On a serious note, the tax man is clearly throwing a bit of a wobbly at the moment. I can’t really be bothered to sort it out and as April will be here before I know it and I don’t really need any money right now, I think I will just leave it until tax year end and claim anything back I need to then.
  • Gifts £350 – My parents kindly offered to buy us a pram/travel system type thing for the baby. Yet again, we are blessed to have such kind parents/in-laws! You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth though and all that. We did a lot of research and settled on a £350 pram (it’s this one here if there are any budding parents to be out there who might be interested!). They said they’d pay up to £500 but this one seemed more than enough and ticked all the boxes, so that is the one we went for. You can go pretty wild buying these travel system type things, £800 was an average model according to some people we spoke to (gulp!) so although £350 is a lot of money I still feel like we’ve been mildly frugal in this area, while still getting good bang for the buck.
  • Sold items £22 – Sold Mrs T’s broken old iPhone for £22 after charges, nay bad… aye?!
  • TopCashback £39 – Yea! I love me some cashback! 🙂
  • Gambling £261 – This is probably the final month of any decent returns but I still have some funds ticking over. It’s been fun while it’s lasted and who knows I might find some new unsuspecting bookies to pounce upon in the future! (Fun fact: I had my Boylesport and Bet365 accounts pretty much shut down last month! Oops! 🙂 )

Total income: £3640

Another great month for income! I should have gone part time sooner, it’s well easy this not working lark (jokes!)

As usual if you want the full break down just have a look at the google sheets spreadsheet here.

 

expenses

We spent a whopping £3316 this month, but again like last month, by taking off the DIY bathroom stuff, that comes down to £2756. Which doesn’t seem so bad considering Christmas and all that jazz! Anyway here are the rest of the “highlights”!

  • Home & Garden £576 – Includes the aforementioned £560 for bathroom stuff and £17 worth of “soft furnishings” whatever they are when they are at home (which they are, cos it’s in the home & garden section!)
  • Gifts & Charity £532 – Obviously a large majority of this was on Christmas presents but we also have a few close family birthdays in December. All part of the fun but we could have been a tad more frugal here I think if I’m truly honest!
  • Golf £55 – Although the weather’s actually been pretty good I just haven’t had the time to play, too busy doing other productive activities, so all good!
  • Groceries £325 – Nice to go out of 2015 on a high on this one I suppose! Hah! Seriously though, we’ll get this down to £200/month average in 2016 if it kills me (not that unlikely if we start dumpster diving to achieve it!)
  • Going out £274 – This seems quite low for December but Mrs T isn’t drinking so I’ll put it down to that. The hidden benefits of being preggo! 😉
  • Clothes £89 – Trending back down to “normal” levels (for us) so fairly happy with this :)
  • Children £350 – As stated above we bought a pram/travel system type thingy.

 

savings rate

Scraped in at a lowly 23% but to even save anything during December would be a miracle bigger than the virgin birth for most consumers, so we’ll have to take it and move on to 2016. This brings the total savings rate for 2015 to 48.86% which, although is annoyingly close to a nice round figure of 50%, I’m still well chuffed with!

 

net worth and investments

No new investments again this month, just haven’t had time to look at it. Our cash accounts are looking pretty decent now though and markets have dropped again so might look to chuck some money in an ISA or SIPP over the next week.

Net worth still rose very, very slightly:

Excluding house equity: £98,147 / +£159 / +0.16%

Including house equity: £169,161 / +£541 / +0.32%

I’m going to do a full yearly financial review very soon which will detail all of the figures for the whole year so watch out for that!

 

other updates

  • I managed to get out on a few short runs and am pacing nicely under 7 mins/mile, which is a great base to start from. However to hit my goals laid out here I need to get comfortable running at down to 6:15 mins/mile, and not for just 3 miles but 13 miles. Gulp! I’ve got 7 weeks until the first half marathon so it’s a big ask but I’ll give it my best shot. I believe if I push myself hard enough I can do it so just got to get on and do it now. I’m really looking forward to a healthier January and getting my body back into good shape!
  • As mentioned above, Mrs T is now not being made redundant, so that is one thing less to worry about, although it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway. There is still a lot of turbulence in her office though so it doesn’t make a great atmosphere for a 6 months pregnant lady!
  • Alcohol… This is the one you all are waiting for isn’t it?! 🙂 – I came in at 36.36 units/week, which, although well over the recommended weekly limit of 20/week would not have been so bad if it hadn’t pretty much all came during the one week between Christmas day and NYE. 🙂 Oops! My liver is slowly recovering and I’m giving it pretty much the whole of January off if not February and March, as it’s been such a good boy.

 

That’s it for monthly updates from 2015! As I mentioned I will do a financial yearly review along with some other yearly reviews, I’ll try to crank them out ASAP otherwise we’ll be in June and I’ll still be writing about 2015. Over the next week or so you can look forward to:

  • TFS vs Mrs T 2015 Spending Challenge results! – Oh the excitement! We’ve been running a monthly spending challenge to see who could spend the least over the whole year. Who won!? Stay tuned to find out!
  • 2015 financial review – Where I tot up our average spending and income and all that malarky and I might even compare it to previous years just for shits n giggles.
  • 2015 goals review – Did I hit all of my 2015 goals!?! (Spoiler Alert: no of course not, dufus! Did you not see the bloody list?! Who do you think I am, Super-Bat-Iron-Man!? Anyway… it’s still worth looking at how well I did and what can be improved upon this year, etc…)
  • 2016 goals – This might be a slightly shorter document this year than last, as I’ll take a leaf out of both Mr Zombie and weenie’s book of goals and KISS.
  • The bathroom rebuild is very nearly done! Just got to put a new radiator in and a bit of finishing touches with woodwork and painting and we’re there. Phew! Then I’m straight onto the Kitchen slap up at the end of January! No rest and all that… 😉

 

Hope you all had a fantastic end to 2015, let me know what you got up to if you so wish to do so. Soooooo….!?

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