February Income / Expenses Report – Keep on runnin’
Ah… the short and cold month of old February. It should hopefully allow most people to get up to a good rate of savings shouldn’t it? Well for once it might surprise you to let you know we actually did pretty well with a savings rate of 55%! Whoo! Let’s see how it broke down (remember these expenses are for two people!):
February Income
| Categories | February | Notes |
| Total | £3,900.17 | 1 |
| TFS | £2,431.95 | |
| Mrs TFS | £1,050.77 | |
| Interest TSB 1 TFS | £6.65 | |
| Interest TSB 2 Mrs TFS | £6.65 | |
| Interest Santander | £13.22 | |
| Cashback Santander | £3.33 | |
| Cashback CCs | £321.55 | 2 |
| Solar Panels | £0.00 | |
| Gifts | £0.00 | |
| Sold stuff | £66.05 | 3 |
| Refunds | £0.00 | |
| Other | £0.00 | |
| SIPP Tax back | £0.00 |
- Overall a good month for income! Although massively helped by…
- I cashed in the cashback from our Barclaycard cashback card. This goes onto the card as credit but as we use it for groceries and other bits that works out fine anyway. This was built up over around 1 year and included a big chunk when manufactured a spend of £5000 on our house moving bill, which added a nice chunk to the cashback total!
- I have a separate bank account for selling our stuff on eBay which I don’t track in MoneyDashboard. I pay the eBay fee’s from here as well (if need be) so it’s nice and separate, and then transfer a chunk of money over into the main account when there is a half decent amount in there. This way I know it’s all pure “profit” after eBay expenses etc. In fact that brings up a good point in that I should pay postage costs via this account as well, I will start to do that in future!
February Expenses
Total expenses: £2,127.04
To keep this post at a readable length I will summarise the main category spending here, but if you want to see a more detail break down just see the full spreadsheet here 1.
- Groceries £191.87– Another sub £200 month and we still have plenty left in the freezer so I am thinking March will be the same.
- Phones £16.99 / £40.86 – Right I am finally going to sort out a cheaper landline deal for next month! Mrs TFS also finally got her Bill Monitor report and they recommended she ring up her provider (EE) despite being around 6 months away from the end of her contract. They agreed to practically cut her bill in half for some strange reason… try it if you haven’t done so yet!
- Clothes £50.50 – Not quite zero but it’s trending in the right direction, so a good effort on Mrs TFS’s part again here. 🙂
- Dining & Drinking £253.35 – Massively up from last month but still fairly happy with that! We had a few pub lunches after the 2 half marathons I did, a curry night out, and a friends 30th night out which was fairly expensive.
- Car service/mechanics £0 – The TFS Mobile is 1 month and counting without any repairs needed. I am happy with this outcome!
- Golf £35.30 – Just the one round this month, as had running events been generally busy so no time for much golf! Boo!
- Birthdays presents £51 – We’ve planned ahead and have bought my Sister and Bro-in-law their presents already, so we won’t have to spend out on it later in the year!
- Overall £2,127.04 – Much better than last month. £933.88 better to be precise! That already brings our average monthly spend to £2,593.98, which is inside the £2,666.08 I laid out here in our yearly budget, which is great. If we can keep it at this level or below throughout the year I’d be happy 2
February Totals & Savings Rate
| February | Notes | |
| Net Worth | £65,543.00 | 1, 2 |
| Years to FI | 12.16 | |
| SAVING PERCENTAGE | 57.13% | |
| February | ||
| Total | £2,834.73 | |
| Income vs Spend | £1,773.13 | |
| Share Save 1 (TFS) | £250.00 | |
| Share Save 2 (Mrs TFS) | £250.00 | |
| Pension 1 (TFS) | £453.69 | 3 |
| Pension 2 (Mrs TFS) | £107.91 | 3 |
- Astute readers will notice that this is a rather huge jump from last month. It turned out that I was estimating my work pension pot and was out by a fair amount (about £8K) so that accounts for most of the jump! I still need to dig out Mrs TFS’s pension details and so there is still an amount of uncertainty on this figure, but I think it will be near enough to +/-£1000 accuracy now! I won’t bother doing a %age change analysis this month as it seems a bit pointless seeing as last months figure was so inaccurate. Good job I didn’t overestimate eh 🙂
- Consists of 3 different ISAs, a SIPP, mine and Mrs TFS’s work pension fund, cash savings, and the total saved in both of our sharesave schemes.
- Last month when Cerridwen pointed out in the comments that the pension savings categories looked a little off, I realised I wasn’t counting Mrs TFS’s employer match, and so I’ve updated that on the spreadsheet.. It turned out that her employer match is pretty generous, she puts in 2% and they top with another 5%. I also double checked my contributions and was off by about £150 (not sure how I worked that out!?), so another little positive there as well! I have updated the spreadsheet retrospectively but have left last months post unchanged. As you can see it changed our savings rate up to 37.58% (from 34.98%) so definitely a welcome boost!
Final Thoughts
If we can maintain this kind of savings rate my spreadsheet tells me we are FI in “just” 12.84 years which would be pretty fantastic, however whether my income will remain this high when I fully quit my job later this year will remain to be seen (or maybe I’ll score some freelancing work and it will even go up!?). There is a long way to go on all accounts and in the words of my blogging buddy Huw – It’s too early to tell yet 😉
Personal Goals and Updates
Other personal updates, I did two half marathons and they couldn’t have been more different. The first one at Tunbridge Wells I ran a PB 3 of 1:32:08 which I was naturally very happy with, especially considering it wasn’t an easy course by any stretch, with a very big hill half way through it. The second one, just a week later, not only were my legs still tired from the first one, but I also had my friends 30th the day/night before so I had about 6 pints of ale. Rude not too! To compound things the course turned out to be even harder with an even bigger bloody hill right at the start, and 30MPH winds gusting along the Eastbourne coast in the aftermath of the storms we had that weekend. Anyway I took this one less seriously and trotted along with my Bro-in-law who was also worse for wear from a wedding the day before… 🙂 so we both came in at just under 2 hours. Overall good fun was had on both occasions, and I can’t wait to find another event to do mid-June.
Booze Watch
Although I haven’t written my 2015 Goals down on here yet… (slacker, I know!) I have decided one of them is to track the amount of alcohol I drink and report it as part of my monthly report each month. I’ll try to do the same with any other goals I have, in one nicely packaged monthly update, so as not to distract too much from the other shit hot content I am producing for y’all (</sarcasm>).
By tracking my alcohol intake, I am certain this will make me drink more sensibly! I know you can have just as much fun on nights out/in if you are just a little bit drunk and not stone cold on the floor plastered (in fact that’s no fun at all!), so that is why I am setting this goal. I am aiming for more of the fun, and less of the pain the next day! Anyway drum roll please… This month I drunk:
52.3 Units!!!
I think my goal willl be to stay under the weekly recommended rate of 21 per week, so I have beaten that quite easily and don’t really feel like I tried that hard, so maybe this one will end up being a breeze!
I’ll get my other goals out in the public domain ASAP. Goal 1: Set some goals and write a blog about it!!! 🙂
How was your February!? Anyone score highly with the savings, personal goals or anything else like that? Shoot me some comments people! Tell me what you’ve been up to! Cheers!
Notes:
- Remember you are free to copy this to your own google drive and edit to put your own figures in there! Let me know if you do so and make any decent additions and I can graft them onto my own one? Or any suggested additions, again just let me know. ↩
- I have said that too many times already in this post, I’ll get the thesaurus out next time I’m about to write it! ↩
- Personal Best ↩
Discussion (18) ¬
Great work – I like that you’re tracking your total net worth as well as the monthly incoming/outgoings. I might have to incorporate this into my tracking too. Also I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me, but separating out drinking & dining from groceries makes a lot of sense, for some reason I’ve been lumping them together (maybe because it’s all things we ingest?!) but of course it makes it a lot less transparent.
Finally well done on the half marathons and alcohol intake. Tracking definitely increases awareness so good luck with keeping on top of it 🙂
Yea should have been tracking that every month but have only really got round to it now. As I have mentioned before I’m a procrastinator!
Yes I definitely think it makes sense to separate those out, for me they are two totally separate things, groceries are a need to a certain extent, but dining and drinking are most definitely a want!
Cheers for the kind words!
Nice time on the 1/2 marathon!
One thing I found worked well when I decided to cut down my alcohol intake was to reduce the quantity and increase the quality. I’m not a big wine snob but I now prefer a nice bottle of something every now and then to always having an open bottle of plonk in the house calling my name.
Same with beer. I no longer buy big packs of mass produced lager. Instead I favour a small selection of craft beers, pale ales or locally produced bitters to enjoy now and then.
Oh and no drinking at home on a school night was my first step to cutting down!
UTMT – I’m with you 100% on the quality not quantity on the wine front, but my problem is that stocking the nice stuff means that I’m even more tempted to have a glass after a hard day’s work or with dinner, school night or not. The only way I managed to stop myself having an open bottle is by not having in the house at all, because the fact that the nice stuff costs more doesn’t quite deter me in the way it should.
(That makes me sound like some kind of alcoholic, but I’m exactly the same with crisps and other snacks!)
Cheers UTMT!
On the booze front, I am going down the same path myself, just getting into the ales big time and loving it! There is so much more choice it just seems more interesting if anything. It seems to have taken me a while to aquire the taste though!
Haha… I’ve never really been one for drinking at home in the week, I’m one of the binge nation generation (which is clearly worse for you!) so my main aim is to drink less units per session when I am out “on one” or when we are hosting/visiting friends.
Nice win on the pensions it’s good to get an effort free NW turbo charge! I challenge you to beat my grocery bill (2 adults) it dropped to approx £25 a week when I started planning a menu and writing a non negotiable shopping list, going to Lidl helped too.
P.S. Enjoying reading a preFIRE UK blog.
Hi T123, thanks for commenting and well done on the groceries budget!
That sounds like a challenge to me 😉
I’ll see what I can rustle up, I will need Mrs TFS’s endorsement of the idea but maybe we can attempt this feat as well.
First things first though, we need to eat all the food in our freezer as there is probably 2 weeks worth of meals in there anyway! So I think doing a £25/week challenge would be a bit of a cheat if we started with reserves in stock.
Cheers again and glad you are enjoying the blog!
“If we can maintain this kind of savings rate my spreadsheet tells me we are FI in “just” 12.84 years which would be pretty fantastic.” I can nearly speak from experience here. I’m 7.5 years in to my journey and over that time have continually saved 55 to 60% of GROSS earnings. That combined with some low expense tax efficient mechanical investing and I now have about 83% of the wealth I need for FI. I should therefore be “done” in a total of about 9 years.
The secret? There is no secret as your statement alludes to. In my experience it is simply about setting a plan and then maintaining it through the ups and downs. Importantly most of my wealth gain has actually come from my high savings rate and not from investment return.
Thanks for the comment RIT!
You are right, the “secret” is simply saving a high amount and sticking with it through the ups and downs!
Cheers!
I reckon that if you cut down on the alcohol, you’ll not only save a ton of money, but your PB will get even better!
GO FOR IT
Cheers M!
A very good point, running after alcohol is much much harder, even if it’s a couple of days later!
Hi TFS
You made some changes and already, you can see the difference and the benefits – well done! FI in less than 13 years is not to be sniffed at – keep at it! Very impressed with the half-marathon!
Cutting down on alcohol, especially when you have a social life is hard and I think it’s harder for blokes than for women and I speak from experience – when I’ve told my friends on occasion that I’m cutting back or not drinking, I just don’t hear the end of it!
52.3 units is a lot but probably not for a young guy like yourself! I think in Feb, I probably had over 30 units, most of that was on two big outings. Not healthy I know and at some point, I’ll probably grow out of it, but I don’t overindulge week in week out.
Brewing my own has meant that it’s been a while since I bought any alcohol to drink at home, thus some savings there too.
Cheers weenie!
Eeech… and I thought I was doing well with the 52 units haha. Maybe I need to reassess that one! I am looking to smash past that this month already… oops!
Home brewing very much interests me. My friend brewed a very tasty ale so might give that a go this year if I get time.
Hi there,
Enjoying the site very much. Regarding brewing your own beer (with a FI/frugal slant), this is something I am, and will be, covering extensively at southcoastdad.com. My last 40-pint batch of American pale ale was far superior to most of the fancy bottled ales I used to drink, and a tiny fraction of the cost. I have a batch of stout and an amber ale on the go at the moment. I’ll look forward to hearing how you get on, when you get started.
SCD.
Thanks SCD!
I’ll be watching your brewing posts closely, I might wait it out and ask for a kit for my birthday (June) but having just put in my first order of ale at Tesco’s for about £20 for what seemed like not many bottles… maybe I will change my mind and get brewing sooner.
Cheers again!
Ha. That’s how I got started – I got a kit for Christmas. Fermentation bucket, pressure barrel, 40 pints worth of ingredients, and some connectors and whatnot. It was £70 all in, but ongoing £20 will get you a very nice 40 pint kit, or you can do it properly with the grain. Some fancier equipment required to do that on a 40 pint scale however.