theFIREstarter

A lovely view over the hills of Spain!

Hola amigos!!!!

We got back from our second holiday in Espana last week but it’s taken me a while to shake off the holiday mode and get back into normal life and find some time to blog. Apologies for anyone who’s been wondering where I’ve been! 🙂

As mentioned above with two holidays it was always going to be a tough month but I’m pretty happy that we kept both trips on the fairly frugal side and on the second week long trip with my family we actually came home with €200!!

Let’s have a look at how the rest of the month went down…

may income

1. Mrs TFS still has £250 automatically taken out for her sharesave scheme so this is amount after that deduction (which I then add back on in another part of the spreadsheet). I am getting booted out in 4 months of mine and am in a transitionary stage of the share save scheme, so mine is taken out after this income amount. Any questions on that please ask 😉
2. I sold a golf club I had laying about for around £60 and a special back saving shovel I bought previously for £18 for £45. The £88 is after eBay and postage fees so net “profit”.
3. Mrs TFS took back some clothes. Whoop! 🙂
4. Looks like I miscalculated how much tax I would get back in March and for once it went in my favour! So there was an extra £460 in my SIPP account when I checked. Bonus! I love SIPPs! 🙂

may expenses

Total expenses: £2,728.99

To keep this post at a readable length I will summarise the main categories of spending here, but if you want to see a more detail break down just see the full spreadsheet here ¹. I’ve added two new tabs regarding Net Worth on here and also updated the formatting slightly to make it a bit easier to read and work with but as always let me know if any of it is as incomprehensible as a sangria soaked hombre.

• Groceries £250.89 – It could well have been cheaper due to the holidays but we also hosted a slap up BBQ for 13, another meal/gathering for 11 ² and another smaller dinner party for 6 so with all of that included, I think we’ve done pretty well this month. We have just the one BBQ in June (for my birthday!) and obviously no holidays so hopefully be around the same or less next (well this, as I write) month!
• Phones £16.99 / £25.45 – Mrs TFS’s mobile bill finally kicks in and has dropped considerably which is good, and she informed me last night that they dropped the line rental again by another £5 for some reason which is even better. I finally went through the rigmarole of switching to a cheaper landline to skim off an extra few pounds only to find that we are locked into a year contract with BT and they would charge me £80 or something like that switch early! So I obviously cancelled that and will have to wait until October to switch without penalty. This is the last time you will therefore have to read about phone bills on this report unless something crazy happens (until October!). Lucky you! 🙂
• Clothes £61.92 – Well it’s not £0 but it’s a vast improvement. There were also a few returns (see income section above) with some more to come so the actual amount spent was probably under the £20 mark when you take that into consideration so all good 🙂
• Golf £150.65 – My turn to splurge on my hobby this month but I always knew it was coming as we had an expensive golf day booked. The good news is that I won! So it was definitely money well spent for me. This figure includes a £30 round of drinks at the end of the golf day which the winner is obliged to pay for, the only downside of winning I guess!
• Dining & Drinking £136.21 – This seems very reasonable considering we had a wedding to attend – hence the larg-ish £73.60 spend in the  “gifts – other” category this month. Happy with that, no more to say!
• Garden – £20.97 – Whilst work is ongoing we are pretty much done with expenses on the garden now so this is probably the last time I will mention it on here. I can’t even remember what we bought if I’m honest, maybe a plant or two and a few seed packets?!
• Holiday – £519.55 – This includes some spending at the airport (as in bottles of water and a paper, don’t worry we weren’t mooching around the luxury money pit sections!), food on the plane, some petrol for the car and some extra Euros we got changed up. Oh and we booked up a groupon deal and 1 night in a premier inn down near Bath for our wedding anniversary in September as well which came to around £100. As mentioned previously we were pretty happy with this spend. Luckily my family are relatively frugal as well and we had a lovely big villa so we had plenty of meals in. The area we stayed in, near Calpe, was so naturally beautiful and had free entertainment (beach, walking, etc) we weren’t even tempted to go and blow any unnecessary money on the usual tourist traps such as waterparks and so on. Actually that is a half truth. We played crazy golf once which was about €3 each and we went to a touristy market where I bought a massive paella dish for €4.50 which seemed like the bargain of the century to me!!! It’s pretty solid and didn’t feel cheaply made so couldn’t really understand the price on that one, we’ll see whether it falls apart after one usage very shortly though! 🙂
• Sponsor £0 & Donations £0 – We’ve been a bit stingy on this recently and after reading Mr Zombie’s post on Deki it reminded me that I have actually got an account, so I’ve set a reminder on my calendar to donate £10 every month (I couldn’t find an automatic regular donation section on there, if anyone else knows how to do that let me know?!)
• Photos – £14.96 – We got a photo square thing I made printed up on a 40 x 40cm Canvas for under £15 including delivery! For the price the quality of the print is good, being picky the canvas could be stretched a bit tighter but I don’t really think I care all that much about that, it looks good from a metre or so away. The company is called Picanova if anyone is interested in that sort of thing, sign up to their newsletter and they will send you through ridiculous offers such as %60 off canvas plus second one free. (I have no affiliation with Picanova just for the record).
• Takeaway – £65 – Woah! Where did that come from!? 🙂 . I don’t really like takeaways so will be looking to scrub this expense straight off the list next month.
• Overall £2728.99 – As mentioned I am pretty happy with this figure, as it is only marginally over the £2,666 average I laid out here in our yearly budget, and was still an expensive month where we had a lot of stuff going on. Our average total spend also came down a bit to £2946.17 (the “Average” column is a new addition to the spreadsheet by the way and so calculates average spend across all categories now, which I think is quite handy!) so with a few quieter months ahead I am sure we can get that down to target soon.

may net worth

1. This is a bit weird because even though we saved £2446.78 net worth not including home equity has only gone up by£1,074. The markets may have spluttered slightly but that is still a big discrepancy! I am almost certain this is down to me taking our cash balance at a slightly different time compared to last month (i.e. last month was before our mortgage came out and this month was after). This accounts for £843 so is the lions share of the discrepancy there. Going forward I will always take our cash balances just after the mortgage has gone out (comes out on the 1st of the month) to keep it a fair comparison. Note: I also updated the Net Worth Tracker page with a bit more info such as percentage increases, and made the backdated figures a bit more accurate.
2. I have now invested that in the Vanguard FTSE All-World ETF as mentioned on Monevator here, but it was effectively still cash when I took this snapshot.
3. We still haven’t received a password to gain access to Mrs TFS’s retirement accounts online at will. However we got a yearly statement and there was about £2200 in there. She has a retirement account from a previous employer which probably had about £1000 in so I will leave the estimate at £3000 for now until we get that all sorted. This is also skewing the amount saved compared to net worth increase by £127 because I know that is the total contribution each month, but I don’t know the absolute value of her pension so am just keeping it static at £3000 until we know. Hopefully there may be a jump when we finally find that out.
4. I finally decided to bite the bullet and stick a bit of cash into The House Crowd. I’ve been thinking about it for over a year and 2 good investments came up. I will write up a more detailed post of my thinking into this soon!

may savings rate

1. Years to FI trending downwards finally. Yay!
2. 47% on an expensive month pretty good! The SIPP tax back did help out here but nonetheless… still not bad

Well that’s it for the figures post. I will do another post shortly on goals progress and generally spam you with loads of holiday pics! 🙂

How did you get on in May!? Let us know in the comments below!

 Hasta Luego!