december update – levels you devils
Happy 2017 folks! Can you guess what exciting present TFS got for Christmas in the picture above? Yes it’s those lovely electric blue shelving units. I love them as they’ve totally cleared up our “junk/man room”. Hopefully you were equally as happy with your xmas haul.
Right back onto less conspicuous consumption related topics… how did we do in December on the ole budget front? Well the stars aligned and we spend almost exactly what we earnt, which is quite funny but a rather damp squib to end the year on especially combined with last months negative savings rate. The income and expense figures ended up within 18 pence of each other… hah!
I also have some pension update news (finally) which was good, read on to find out all the juicy details…
expenses
We spent a total of £3648.20 in December which brings our final average to £3136/month and the final total to £37,634. This means that despite a brilliant start to the year, we somehow spent more in 2016 than we did in 2015! I’ll do a full analysis of the figures in another post with graphs and all that, so that’s something for you to look forward to. We had a £520 Charity “bill” this month though so without that, this month doesn’t really seem all that bad for a December.
A non-exhaustive list of December expenses:
- Mortgage £848 – This will be the figure going forward. Finally a bit of stability on this one!
- Groceries £521 – Yikes! Christmas entertaining really hits home this month and kind of sums up the year in general which was ridiculously high grocery bills almost throughout. New year and new slate on this one but this is definitely somewhere I’ll be focusing on next year.
- Clothes £73 – Going in the right direction here.
- Going out £354 – Not actually that bad for a December I didn’t think, as we were out and about quite a lot.
- Charity £520 – I stuck £400 into the pot for my Marathon fund plus paid a £100 registration fee (which I think is fair enough to count as “Charity”) so £500 in total for that, plus £20 other donations.
- DIY £94 – Few bits to finish off the hallway and those lovely blue stacking shelves were only a part present, and I had to pay the rest.
- Christmas & Other gifts £427 – Finish off the Christmas stuff. We spent a total of £634 this year which does seem quite excessive, but I guess we had one extra to buy for this year! I think we’ll try to stick to £500 next year, there was no budget done at all this year and I guess that was reflected in the the overspend.
- Golf £0 – No golf in December! 🙁
- Children £37 – Just a couple of bits and bobs bought but this obviously doesn’t include her Xmas pressies.
- Car maintenance £160 – A couple of really annoying things here. 1) The battery went flat, so I got a jump start off one of the neighbours. Just to be sure we took it to Halfords who give you a free battery check up, and lo and behold “It’s on it’s arse mate, you need a new battery”. What’s that old phrase again? Never ask a battery salesman if you need a new battery? Something like that 🙂 – I guess there was a 50/50 chance it was actually needed and the car is starting better now so maybe it actually was. Anyway number 2) was my fault, I smashed off the rear view mirror when transporting some MDF home from Homebase. I mean clean right off, it took a chunk of the windscreen out (see pic below). After trying to fix this on the cheap with multiple window repair and rearview mirror adhesive kits and getting nowhere, we stumped up the £75 to get the windscreen replaced which not only fixed 1 the bullet hole in the window but came with a new rear view mount so I could just slide the old mirror back on it. Probably for the best as the windscreen would have been weakened by the bullet hole anyway but still quite annoying.
income
Another below average month for income which came in at £3252.96. In case anyone is wondering how we managed a 0% savings rate it is because I don’t count pension contributions in this figure although I do count them towards our savings rate!
A non-exhaustive list of Decembers income:
- TFS salary £2371 – Slightly more than usual due to train strikes, which although are shit, means I worked from home more and spent less on train tickets. Every cloud etc! (If you’re wondering, I just take the train ticket cost straight off of my salary each month because I know that if/when I ever quit work this is not an expense I need to account for, and therefore should not be tracked in our ongoing expenses and therefore savings rate)
- Mrs T maternity pay £136 – Inexplicably another maternity payment. Surely this is the last of it now! 🙂
- Matched betting / Secret Side Hustle £543 – An average month here, but I am waiting for a few bets to settled which I know have won but not hit my accounts yet. So I know January should already be a really good month and I have hardly done anything for it yet – If anyone is interested I use 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.
- Ratesetter £55 – This included £5 worth of interest and £50 referral fees from this post I wrote. Cheers to Niall D who let me know he’d signed up through my link, much appreciated! If you want to sign up and take advantage of the £100 sign up bonus which is still ongoing, use this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link!) or read my post on it for more info.
- Top Cashback £40 – Another nice payment from Topcashback. If you haven’t signed up yet do so here (<– affiliate link) and start earning cashback on your online purchases you would have made anyway.
Remember if you want to look at the full figures or copy my spreadsheet to use/modify yourself just have a look at it here: my awesome spreadsheet. Note: You can use this yourself, just copy it and then edit your own copy by going to File -> Make a copy OR File -> Add to my drive OR File -> Download As (then select a format to download as).
savings rate, net worth, etc
As mentioned earlier our savings rate for the month was 0.00% which brings our average down to 34.87% for the year. A shame to duck under the 40% mark on the last two months of the year, but they are generally always more expensive. I think next year to hit 40% we need to be on 45% going into Nov/Dec.
The good news here is on Net Worth, the pension transfer from my old work pension into my SIPP finally completed. Although I can see the actual transfer figure was almost bang on what I estimated, I then realised I haven’t been including my new work pension in my figures since around the time my company started the new scheme, which was around February. I found the online portal and was pleased to see £3,819 already sitting there, so there was a nice bump to Net Worth this month. I’ll track it all properly from now on (Just need to finally sort Mrs T’s pension! We’ll put hers into a SIPP as well I think as it makes it easier to all store in one place if possible).
The pension money was all in cash when I sampled the figures but I’ve already employed it into a few different Vanguard ETFs and funds, which I should really update you on in January’s update since that is when it happened. No spoilers here… I’m remaining tight lipped! 🙂
Net Worth this month:
Excluding house equity: £132,954 / +£5,116 / +4.00%
Including house equity: £209,931 / +£5,576 / +2.73%
Liquid Freedom: £60,330 / £905 / +1.52%
Liquid Freedom is cash I could get my hands on relatively easily (i.e. not tied up in pensions or house equity) and has pleasingly gone up from £40,673 since the start of the year. Another increase like that next year and I think I’ll finally be ready to take the plunge into full self employment, but I guess we’ll have to see about that when the time comes. Maybe I’ll be susceptible to OMYS 2
Here are the full tables of Net Worth stats over the year, which in case you hadn’t seen it hidden in the menus above 3 I keep here as well:
A £40K total NW increase is pleasingly surprising! I know a lot of this increase has come because of the £ devaluing and therefore boosting our globally diversified portfolio, but it still looks good on paper doesn’t it? 🙂
I would have bitten your arm off at the start of the year if you’d offered me that.
Quickly going back the whole exchange rate fiasco though here is some further sobering evidence, not that it’s really needed. I just checked in on Rockstar Finances list of blogger Net Worths page and saw this:
I checked when that was from and it was May 2015. Comparing these figures to our current Net Worth:
Sterling: £148,019 –> £209,931 –> +£61,912 🙂
Dollars: £213,578 –> $256,045 –> +$41,467 🙁
Hmmm….
other updates
My alcohol intake in December was: 31.53/week. High but always is going to be at this time of year. I’m looking forward to cutting back barring a few social obligations over the next month or so and getting some serious marathon training in!
Which while we’re on the subject, I asked last month if anyone would mind me posting the sponsor link on here and the reception to this idea was generally positive! So here is the link:
Sponsor me for the London Marathon 2017 – Running for Young Epilepsy
If anyone has found what I’ve written on here over the last 3 years helpful at all and would like to give me a “tip” in some way then I’d very much appreciate you shooting me across a donation, every little helps so it doesn’t have to be a big one of course! Thank you so much in advance.
I’ll work through some end of year updates and post them out next so won’t witter on here too much further, maybe with a short 2017 goals post and looking to the year ahead as well.
I’ve decided already I’m calling 2017 the year of the big chill though, I feel like I’ve burnt the candle at about 18 different ends over the last few years and want to enjoy some of the time off I’ve worked into my schedule to just slow down and enjoy life. This is another way of saying not as many DIY projects 🙂 but obviously I’ve got a marathon to train for (and a now mobile baby to run around after!) so I won’t be parking myself on the sofa that’s for sure.
Hope you all saw in the new year in style and are looking forward to the new year as much as I am 🙂
TFS.x
Be good to see your year end spend totals by category. My own were way too high, looking to squeeze these down in 2017…
I guess they’re always too high unless they’re zero… right?! 🙂
Yea will definitely do a yearly roundup but if you are inpatient just take a look at the spreadsheet linked in the above article.
Cheers
Looking forward to seeing your year end update with the pretty graphs 😉
Also your blog roll seems to have stopped working properly (is it just me?). It no longer shows the most recently published posts.
Keep up the good work and here’s to a good 2017!
Hi Alister,
No you are right! I recently updated wordpress version and the blogroll plugin I use seems to have stopped working properly. I’ll get round to looking at it when I can but for now I guess you’ll just have to click through to see whether they’ve written anything new (sorry!)
Cheers and you too! 🙂
Hi TFS,
Ah a zero sum game in December – that isn’t too bad given the fun and games that is Christmas – but really, no golf? Can’t you play with an orange ball so you don’t lose it in the snow? 😉
Congrats on the Net Worth figures as well, that is a great achievement, and fascinating to see the list on the Rockstar Finance side as well.
Sensible to keep the liquid fund, I assume this is all in your ISA allowances?
Cheers,
FiL
Hah well the no golf was more down to being too busy with other stuff really, and when its a choice between a day in with the kid or braving the cold to chase a small white ball around a field, I am increasingly finding the former wins out easily!
Thanks but I’m guessing most people with any kind of global portfolio has experienced the same kind of thing this year haven’t they? The list on RSF is very cool though and it’s good to see you slowly working your way up there!
I haven’t put anything into ISA’s for a while actually, most of the increase has been going into Matched Betting accounts 😉 which suits me as it’s “cash” but is also making some decent returns (albeit not passively)
Cheers
Hi TFS,
Well I can see that it would be a difficult choice between the two..! 🙂
I think it depends to a degree on how they are diversified across the board, so with the strengthening dollar can be a boon for some, a bane for others! Yes, I look at it where I fit and want to keep charging higher and higher, but it is truly staggering the amount some people have managed to build up, and so early in life!
Heh – well the matched betting is as you say cash so easily accessible as long as you are getting returns, however I do like the ISA “stash and forget” so I dont have to do anything – it will make it easier when I am older 🙂
FiL
Ultimately when matched betting gets boring or I run out of offers that money will be earmarked in the main (minus a good amount to provide a cash buffer if/when I do actually quit paid employment) for ISAs I think, but until that day it can sit in the MB accounts doing it’s thang (with a little help from yours truly!)
Yeah, come on TFS, get your clubs and get out there, fresh air and exercise 😉 I’ve never calculated my net worth, and I think the measure of “What cash could I put my hands on by the end of the week?” is a more exciting and inspiring measure (as long as the answer isn’t 53p). You and Guy make me think I really should get back into the Matched Betting, even although the big boys gubbed me after Cheltenham last year. But, to be honest, Cheltenham was almost too stressful and I’m almost glad I’ll be a less involved punter this time ’round!
Haha see my above comment to FiL on the golf Jim!
Yes that is also far more interesting to me (and unfortunately much much lower!) but it’s gone north to the tune of around £20K this year which I will bloody well take, big time.
Oh yea… Cheltenham was mega stressful! I was at work that week and I can tell you not that much real work got done, so it was stressful just trying to get all the bets on and hide the fact I was skiving half the day… haha!
Try some of the casino offers to ease you back in maybe. The low time consuming ones (unless you hit a decent win and have to complete wagering requirements, in which case you don’t really mind taking the time to do so) are a pretty good place to start, if you have run out of the bookie offers and fed up with crappy £5 reloads.
Are you still using money dashboard for tracking expenses? I’d like granular tracking of expense items so would like to know your approach.
Hi Stew,
I am! They’ve improved it a lot now and you can create your own custom tag names. So you can be as granular as you freakin’ well like my man! 🙂
Check it out again if you haven’t used it for a while.
Cheers!
great! I’d tried the software about 18-24 months ago and wasn’t that impressed as you couldn’t change any of the categories. One last thing, do you import a statement at the end of the money or do you this every couple of days, weekly or whatever?
I just check it around once a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) and it normally has updated automatically so you don’t need to import any statements. It also tags a lot of the stuff with the correct tags as well so you don’t have to manually tag everything (although you can if you want full granular control).
So I guess it’s up to you, you can just check in whenever you want to. I find anything more than two weeks and we forget too much of what we spent money on so once is a week is optimal from that point of view.
Cheers and let me know how you get on if you give it a whirl!
Nice work, TFS (not that I suppose it’ll really be the £40k net worth increase that really sticks in your mind as the main event of 2016!). I hope 2017 will be just as successful for you!
Cheers buddy!
Haha yea I guess I should have mentioned that… maybe save that line for the proper yearly update.
Right back at ya! 🙂
Nice shelves!
I’m in the market for something similar so tell me more about them (please)! I@m currently stuck in over analysis/research mode. Sturdy? Good value? Which brand? Would you recommend them?
Hi UTMT,
I got them from https://www.rackingsolutions.co.uk (no affiliate link… that would just be weird haha).
I’m very pleased with them so far, they seem very sturdy. The shelves are only chipboard but seem strong enough for most applications. Much better than the £20 jobbies you can get from homebase but I guess that is why they were around £50 each (inc delivery). They were really easy to put up as well, I did both in about 1.5 hours on my own, you could probably half that time if there were two of you to hold the bits in place while the other slotted it in. My only tip is that you have to be quite forceful to get the horizontal struts to slot into the slots on the vertical bits, i.e. use a hammer to get them in good and proper (the metal is sturdy enough to take a good whacking with the hammer so all good).
I guess I would recommend them but they are the only racking solution I’ve ever bought and owned so I’ve not got much to go on, but maybe you are over analysing it a tad on this one 😉
Cheers and good luck choosing!
A great overall savings rate considering your expenses, unlucky that you didn’t get 40% but a few months with decent MB income will sort that out for you in 2017.
I love that you include a ‘Liquid Freedom’ figure, I think I need to do something like that. At the moment, I have no idea how much cash I could get my hands on quickly if necessary, aside from what’s in my premium bonds, emergency cash and cash ISA. I’ve been investing more in my shares ISA than my SIPP these past 12 months but haven’t worked out the ratio yet.
Enjoy your break and good luck with the marathon training (just sponsored you!)
Hi weenie,
We’ve missed you around these parts! Welcome home again.
I’m hoping to keep the MB profits up around the 1K/month mark if I can but I do feel like I’m burning out a bit on it if I’m honest. It’s still the easiest money I’ve ever made though so I’m sure I’ll keep it up to “earn” at least a bit of money each month.
I don’t think we’ll get 40% in 2017 year as I know we’ve got a lot planned, but more on that in the upcoming posts. That’s not being pessimistic just optimistic. Having said that, I am technically earning a bit more this year as my hours increased and Mrs T is going back to work part time, so you never know!
I’ll do the budget with expected expenditure and see how it works out I guess!
Yea I like the liquid freedom more than anything else right now, I mean now I know I’m not shooting for full FI in 5 or so years, the money I can get a hold of “right now” is far more important than my pension or SIPP. I need to increase liquidity and potential cashflow over the next year or so, that is my main aim. If I can get around 80-100K in liquid freedom I would be pretty happy with quitting my day job, I think, and seeing where the universe takes me 🙂
Thanks ever so much for the sponsor. It means a lot to me and obviously for the charity and my close family as well. You legend! 🙂
Hi TFS,
Another very thorough update from you, thanks! I’d never seen that Rockstar Finances list before, what a great way to track your progress alongside others doing the same – pretty motivational I’d say.
I love what you do with your blog, it’s always very informative and fun to read. I think I’m on the same wavelength as you in terms of not necessarily shooting for full FIRE, but getting enough saved to be able to “semi retire” and pursue money making ventures of more interest to me to supplement my income.
I’ve just sponsored you for the marathon, a very worthy cause I must say, all the very best of luck for it.
Good luck with your savings rate and net worth tracking for 2017 too. I look forward to following along!
OR
Thanks for the kind words about the blog OR!
It does sound like were on the same page there. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to fully focus on full FIRE within 5-10 years but just getting some sort of freedom fund on the go is enough to taste some of the F word for me. It’s a more risky strategy in some ways but I am backing myself to be able to earn a decent wage even when the robots are coming for me in 10-20 years time 🙂
I saw your sponsor and message, many many thanks for that! Very generous of you, I’m humbled that “internet people” that don’t even really know me are sponsoring me, so thank you again.
Cheers and have a cracking 2017 yourself 🙂