february update – dubai debauchery and happy birthday baby TFS!
The little one turned one in February, don’t they grow up fast!?
Don’t worry, we haven’t gone crazy and given her tonnes of money for her birthday present (she would just eat it if left alone for more than about 30 seconds!), I’ll explain why we’re flush with notes a bit later.
Before we get into the update a quick roll call of those who’ve sponsored me for the marathon in the last month:
Thank you ever so much! 🙂
If you’d like to join the ranks of the virtuous then here is the link to my page (again!), and if you leave a comment, please keep mentions of the blog to #tfs or cheeky nudge nudge wink wink say no more references to “fire” etc… as the others have done… cheers 🙂
Onto the financiaaaaaaaaals!!!!
expenses
OK so I’m going to add in an extra figure now as I think comparing any given monthly expense to an average yearly target seems a bit silly. So we’ll add in the 2017 monthly average figure and have it in the following format:
£Current Month (£2017 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)
- Total £3474 (£3555 / £3120) – Not too bad considering very high holiday expenses this month. Should drop considerably over the next 2 months!
- Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848)
- Household £494 (£582 / £599) – No council tax in Feb… saviour! It looks like the huge increase in lettuce prices has wreaked havoc on our groceries budget 🙂 as we’re slightly over again on that again, although we also hosted a birthday party and a few other things at ours.
- Going out/Holiday £1474 (£1162 / £750) – Woah! Dubai is freaking expensive. That is all I am saying!
- Transport £52 (£54 / £172)
- Personal Care £91 (£125 / £69) – Haircuts and stuff like for that for the wedding/holiday (not for me, obvs!)
- Home/Garden £22 (£19 / £85)
- Lifestyle £187 (£194 / £165) – Clothes were expensive again this month as Mrs T “had to” 😉 re-cloth herself for going back to work apparently. I am expecting a big drop next month as surely you can’t need that many clothes to do 2 days a week. (I really hope she isn’t reading this… haha)
- Gifts/Charity £97 (£150 / £215) – A few moving in gifts for friends and more baby’s birthdays. Jeez, these babies do well for themselves don’t they!?
- Hobbies/Sport £130 (£125 / £150) – An expensive one for golf for me as I played 9 holes in Dubai which cost me £75. Yes you read that right, that is seventy five British Pounds Sterling. That is approximately £8 per hole. Looking back I am not sure it was worth it but I doubt we’ll be going back any time soon, it gave me something to do whilst being horrendously hungover after the wedding, and, well, you know, YOLO.
- Admin £0 (£0 / £10)
- Financial £5 (£239 / £57)
- Children £73 (£57 / £70) – Mainly bits for the holiday so quite an expensive month for the little one.
A continued tough start to the year but with a few relatively clear months coming up I’m hoping we can start to beat these averages soon.
income
I’ll do the same here with monthly averages as we did for expenses…
- Total £3805 (£3644 / £3663) – Slightly behind on the projected average but should be well ahead after next month. I think maybe I’ve set the “target” a bit low as we’ve nearly hit it after what should be our two lowest income months on the year… I may well revise this to keep us striving for more!
- TFS Income £2351 (£2232 / £2140) – Slightly higher due to low commuting costs this month, and so ahead of projections, which is nice.
- Mrs T Income £0 (£0 / £600) – No holiday pay appeared this month! The good news is next month will be a double pay day for Mrs T – pay from the old job and her first pay check from the new job, which should hopefully produce a really decent savings rate next month (and boy do we need it after getting pummelled for 4 months straight!!!)
- Solar Panels £ (£39 / £45)
- Refunds £18 (£16 / £0)
- Gambling hustles £1340 (£1228 / £750) – Another great month for my gambling side hustles. I got lucky with winning a few actual bets this month which boosted the coffers somewhat, but also did some grinding out of some usual matched betting stuff and did a few casino offers – 888 casino have a really good reload offer on (something about lucky Irish promotion – check their site for it and full T&Cs!) which you can reload on every day until 17th March. If you don’t have an account yet I highly recommend you sign up and follow my advice here on how to make the most of it – it is really, really, easy money. I also started getting involved in a few bingo offers… who’d ever have thought it eh!? –> 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.
- Child benefit £82 (£82)
Overall a good month for income, mainly helped by the matched betting/gambling stuff.
savings rate, net worth and all that palaver
An increase from the previous 3 months (not particularly hard) but with a high expense month I’m pretty happy we hit a 17.28% savings rate.
Net worth received a nice bump due to some sort of market uprising (I presume at least, as I haven’t checked it all month… That’s PIP for you – Passive Investor Power!!!!), as many of our investment accounts seem to have risen by about 5%:
Excluding house equity: £137,036 / +£3,958 / +2.97%
Including house equity: £214,933 / +£4,418 / +2.10%
Liquid Freedom: £61,692 / £680 / +1.11%
Onwards and upwards which is all good!
other updates
Our month was dominated by two events, one of which was the spendy wedding towards the end of the month (great fun, but expensive) and the other was the running of a race night to help raise money for the charity (Young Epilepsy) I am running the London Marathon for. I am pleased to report it was a great success and we raised a total of…. drum roll peerrrrllleasse…..
£2003.55!!!!
This absolutely blew everyone’s socks off including my charity contact who was over the moon. People had lots of fun on the night and were very generous as well so it seemed like a win-win. If anyone is ever doing some fund raising and has a similar target I would thoroughly recommend a race night (if you don’t know what a race night is read here for more info) as it was a great way to get people putting their hands in their pockets.
And that clears up why Baby T got to play with a fistful of notes – for about 15 seconds. Actually the new five pound notes are unsurprisingly very baby friendly, although worth washing first as not sure where they been!
Alcohol – It was never going to be great what with staying in an all-inclusive hotel for 5 days, but I came in at a somewhat respectable 25.36 units/week.
Dubai – What can I say? It is a very weird place. If you haven’t been there I would literally just describe it as a huge mountain of concrete in the middle of the desert, and everything is BIG. It was great for the wedding as we all stayed in the same hotel, which made things very relaxed… perfect! But there didn’t seem to be much else there apart from buildings and shopping malls, so I don’t think we’ll be going back there any time soon. It’s a wealthy persons playground, and I mean super wealthy, not someone shooting for a modest 6 figure FI nest egg wealthy. It is an exceptional feat of human engineering that so many people live there and don’t starve/dehydrate to death, and the buildings, especially the ole Burj Khalifa, are very impressive though, I have to admit:
Erm… is that a cloud on your head Mr Burj!?
win a finance book!
Finally as a reward for reading this far…
Publishers Wiley have been kind enough to send me a copy of The Millionaire Teacher, written by Andrew Hallam! I will have to admit though that I have had zero time to read even one page of this book which is a shame as it does sound pretty good! I can’t see my time situation changing any time soon 1, so rather than horde it and pretend to myself I’ll review it properly one day I have decided to give it away to one lucky reader. OK brain how are we going to do this?
*Need to come with some shallow mechanic to give book away*
*Something about getting more twitter followers… I love twitter followers, feed me twitter followers!!!*
OK so basically if you tweet/retweet this post (using the twitter share button at the foot of the page) and follow me within the next week I will add you to the hat and pick out a random winner this Sunday evening. Let’s add a funny and relevant hashtag in for a laugh… let’s say…
#tfslovesthemillionaireteacher
If you tweet without the hashtag and/or don’t follow me 2 your entry will NOT be counted, sorry but dems da roolz 😉
Good luck people and Happy March (Especially the Matched Bettors out there… Cheltenham time!)
Finally some more pics from Dubai
Ridiculously sized Dubai Mall!
Which had a ridiculously sized aquarium in it!
The only thing I saw that I wanted to buy in there 😉
More big buildings! We stayed in the one on the left – 60 stories high, it was probably about half the size of the Burj!
Ah… that’s better! 🙂
Discussion (18) ¬
TFS, first off, congrats on the marathon!Looking at your half times, I am guessing you could have finished your race in half the time it took me to run my *one* and only marathon ever!:) Secondly, nice job on the spending. Our own spending was ridiculously high this month, and we didn’t go to Dubai!! Looked like a fantastic trip. Finally, congrats on the little one’s first birthday! Quite a milestone! 🙂 Great to read the update!!
Ah thank you Laurie… still gotta run it yet though!
I’m a little slower this year than I was last year unfortunately, and as always could have started training earlier/done more and am picking up little niggly injuries because of that. So I’m not mega confident on getting the time I want to get, but hey you never know it might all fall into place over the coming 6 weeks. Anyway enough rambling/moaning about that!
Thank you, I will pass on the message to baby T 🙂
Great experience month… With a nice price tag. Still a positive SR.
And yes, they do grow up very very fast!
Hehe, like the term, “Experience month” – I’ll use that in future 🙂
Well done. Mind you the people who paid for the Burj really should have got that kink a third of the way up sorted, makes a fellow queasy!
Haha, it made me queasy just looking at the damn thing! No way you are getting me anywhere near the top of that.
I was wondering what the lifts are like 😉 Presumably they are staged, like the ones in the Empire State Building where if you want to go to the top you first go into one that clears the first 80 levels.
Nope – from their website (number 138) it looks like one single half kilometre lift-shaft! Looks like it only takes a minute!
Wow, that must be some ride! As I said it is an amazing feat of engineering isn’t it?
According to these guys it is a staged system for the rest fo the Burj, but with a single stage express to the top of 22mph. I’d love a ride on that. Awesome tech!
Happy birthday to Baby T! When I opened your post, my initial thought was that she was playing with ill-gotten gains from some other super-secret initiative you hadn’t shared with us yet, not that I think anything you did would lead to something ‘ill-gotten’! 😉
I’ve attended a few ‘race nights’ in my time and you are right, they are a great and fun way to get people to put their hands in their pockets.
Wow, those are epic photos of Dubai – never been before and would love to visit at some point. Can’t quite justify the cost though.
As regards to winning the book, what happens if I retweet your post with the hashtag but I already follow you? Does that count? 😉
Anyway, great work on the income front to offset a spendy month, leading to a good positive savings rate.
Thank you weenie.
Haha do I really come across as that much of a dodgy geezer on these pages? Hopefully not 🙂
Of course if you’re already following then the entry still counts. Good luck and thanks again 😉
Oh Financial Education at 1 years old: Sorting out the £10 notes from the £5 notes. Interesting concepts, Race Nights. You need to get people to attend tho. That’s the difficult bit. Good luck on your marathon. I didn’t realise you had to ballot for London Marathon. Would have loved to try the Marathon sometime at least once in my lifetime.
Any Positive Savings Rate is a good sign I think. We FIREers sometimes forget we are operating at the more extreme ends of savings and life has commitments and choices you have to make, as you have shown in your expenses. Well done.
-FIREplanter
Hmm yea it wasn’t so much sorting as a taste test. Yuk, where have those notes been who knows?!
With a good enough cause and a modest social network it seemed pretty easy to fill the venue we got, although agree that is the making or breaking of the night. I wouldn’t let fear of an empty Hall put anyone off of doing it though.
You can either get in via the ballot or a charity place, I failed in the ballot and so got a charity place instead hence the large fundraising target.
You made your comment sound in the past tense as in there is no chance you will ever do it now? Is that what you meant or have I read into that incorrectly?
Not sure how old you are but there are 80 year olds running the marathon so age certainly shouldn’t put you off (if it’s for some other reason you’d rather not disclose then no worries and apologies for prying).
Thanks, it is hard to remember this in the tough months with so many other blogs with really high rates but on balance I know we’re doing very well compared to the average Joe.
At least the beach seems really nice. Dubai does seem like the anti-FI environment in some way…though maybe it’s denizens are truly financially independent in way, too. They must be, right?
Some of them probably are but a lot of the ex pats that go over there just get caught up in the spendy lifestyle and are still living paycheck to paycheck. We met with a friend who moved there with a goal of saving a house deposit because of the higher wages and lower taxes but has saved nothing in 2 years. Higher living costs and temptations to live the high life put the kaibosh on his plans and I suspect his situation is not that rare out there.
Hey TFS, big fan of your work and have been reading your updates for a couple of years. Just wondering what your overall targets are? Do you have an amount at which you would consider yourself FI or where you would RE?
Hi,
Thanks! Glad you’ve enjoyed the blog and for so long as well. That’s great to hear 🙂
Do you know what I was thinking about that the other day? I’m admittedly kinda just drifting along at the moment.
My original plan was to quit work within 5 years with £250K in the investment bank but that was before I started working part time so there is no way I will hit that with only roughly 1.25 years left to go (yes the blog has been running nearly 4 years would you believe it?! No I can’t either!)
Maybe I need to redefine my final goals on here yet again because things keep changing (I believe they call that “life” 🙂 ) and so my goals and plans also have to keep changing accordingly. I’ve written updates about what’s changed with my work and personal life situations fairly extensively but not really said how that has changed my overall goals I don’t think.
I’ll mention something in the next monthly update and maybe put a proper “Big Goals” page link at the top somewhere shortly after that, once I actually work out what they are 🙂
Thanks for the kick up the arse! 🙂
Also in answer to your question:
Do you have an amount at which you would consider yourself FI or where you would RE?
The answer is of course 25x spending so that would mean we need near enough 1 million “in the bank” as we spent near enough 40K last year and are on course to do the same this year. Of course 10K of that is the mortgage so once that is paid off the figure drops to “only” 750K. As you can see we are no where near that but my main plan is and has always been to save up “some” FU money (250K original target), then work part time and freelance on fun projects to keep the stash topped up.
Seeing as I’m already working part time and enjoying the arrangement after some initial teething troubles I documented on here 😀 the target seems not really so important and I am happy just bumbling along hopefully saving 20%+ of our income and hopefully hit full FI around 55 or so, which ain’t that early but is still much earlier than most and I would have had 20 years of part time and (hopefully) fun work to look back on… this sounds like the definition of a good life to me and so if I can pull that off then I reckon I will be one happy TFS. Of course my mindset may change and I may decide to go back to work FT and shoot for full FI earlier, or it may not. I’m not one to make a rigid plan and stick to it as you may well have noticed, but I do like writing really long comment replies that probably could have been a post in their own right… hah 🙂
Cheers again!