july income/expenses report – bearing fruit!
Hi! The sun is still shining, and after a brief bit of rain our tomatoes have finally decided to go slightly red, which was nice of them. Yes, they are finally bearing some fruit, and the finances have been following suit! 🙂
expenses
As usual you can check out my Awesome FI Tracking Spreadsheet for a full breakdown of Income/Expense tracking and Net Worth tracking, as well as updated some of the summary sheets as well. Remember you can copy this to use/update as you please using Google Sheets “File -> Make a copy” menu command!
The figures below as usual represent: £Current Month (£2018 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)
- Total £4443 (£3691 / £3205) – OK so let’s not beat about the bush, this is a pretty eye watering figure here. July is traditionally our most expensive month with lots of car and other yearly bills being paid anyway, but we also went a bit crazy with the “going out” budget this month as well. It’s hot and beer was made to be drunk what can I say 🙂 – Also there is £260 worth of charity in here as explained in previous months.
- Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848)
- Household £677 (£648 / £602) – Actually pretty happy with this. This includes Groceries of (£296 – £379 / £325), our first Grocery bill under £300 of the year. I guess it’s just because we went out so much we didn’t end up spending much eating in, but still, I’ll take it. The above also included 2 lots of Gas/Electricity payments as we switched to Bulb, because it is a 100% renewables tariff and was cheaper than the OVO 100% renewables tariff we were on. Bit of a no brainer! If you like renewable electricity and want to support it for, from I’ve found, are the cheapest prices out there 1, then you can sign up here. If you do we’ll both get £50 as well, can’t really argue with that! Thanks to The Escape Artist for originally pointing this great deal out to me.
- Holiday £448 (£484 / £333) – Was the tail end of our Peppa pig world trip as that straddled June/July, plus £200 towards our family holiday to Menorca in October.
- Going out £897 (£525 / £467) – Eeeeeeeehhhhhhh. Aahahhaahahahahhahhh… Ooohohohohh. Lot’s of noises could be used to describe this one, mainly emanating from my poor liver! I went to see The Cure in Hyde park which was awesome, then we both went again the following weekend to see Bruno Mars, which was also great fun! You can probably do these sort of things on the cheap but I don’t really see the point and just write them off as “total blow outs”. Also had a couple of work dos and other meet ups, and Mrs T went to the IOW (again!) on a girly weekend, so it was hectic all round for both of us! The good news for the budget is that we’ve totally used up all the baby sitting favours for pretty much the rest of the year so will be living like hermits until January 🙂 . On a serious note, we have got a pretty chilled out August planned so we can rest and recuperate and more importantly have some proper family time together, which should see us back on target by the end of the month I’d have thought.
- Transport £291 (£183 / £192) – Car tax paid this month hence being over the average budget by a fair margin.
- Personal Care £171 (£113 / £92) – We had a nice family trip to the dentist! Nothing really much needed doing but it still cost nearly £100.
- Home/Garden £265 (£177 / £100) – After last months dishwasher purchase we decided to update our hoover which is also 10+ years old and sounds like a jet engine taking off. It makes it really hard to clean when TFS Jr is around as she basically shits her pants whenever you turn it on. Also, it starts to get really hard to rationalise not upgrading your 10 year old shit when you are pulling in nearly £3K/month with your each way betting side hustles. I know what you are earning shouldn’t really affect spending decisions but the truth of the matter is that it kind of actually does – see my reply to Tombo’s excellent question here for more thoughts on that. Anyway… I did some research and found that the Dyson V7 is supposedly the quietest hoover around so we tried it out and liked it. Oh by the way it was like £250 NBD. On a serious note (I keep on saying that don’t I?) I didn’t really mind spending the extra say £100 or whatever to get a “premium” product in this case because if it lasts us another 10 years like the last hoover did, then it will be worth it. Fingers crossed the Dyson will live up to their brand name!
- Lifestyle £154 (£180 / £141) – Actually not that bad for this category.
- Hobbies/Sport £231 (£100 / £149) – Our yearly National Trust membership bumps this up, as not really sure what category to put that in so it goes under “Hobbies”. At £114 for a family membership for a year, it is incredible value if you make sure you visit at least one venue per month which we easily do. Also I booked into doing the Reigate half marathon in mid September.
- Admin £12 (£24 / £20)
- Financial £30 (£8 / £15) – A £25 charge for the Amex card we use but considering it gave us back £160 in cashback, seems like a good deal.
- Children £80 (£68 / £60) – Another solid month the little one! Continues to amuse us constantly. Great ROI on this investment
- Gifts/Charity £293 (£322 / £187) – Another solid month for charity, as I am giving away 10% of my betting/matched betting profits as per my post here. It’s bumping up our spending but as it’s all from profits, and it’s for charity, it can only be a good thing!
income
Figures in the same format as expenses…
- Total £25,561 +£395 Pension (£8122 / £4422) – It was a record breaking month for income, and by quite a large margin to say the least!
- TFS Income £5389 +£395 Pension (£2843 / £2500) – Got my bonus this month! Looks like I’ve estimated the bonus fairly well here as the average is tracking slightly higher now and will revert back to the target over the coming months until December.
- Mrs T Income £533 (£435 / £600) – Another standard month here.
- Ratesetter £2 (£27 / £5) – Ratesetter have bought their old, better offer back again! You now only have to invest £1000 for 1 year to receive a £100 bonus! But it runs out soon, so click this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link! 2) to get started.
- Child benefit £166 (£95 / £82) – The stars really did align on the income this month as we even got our double bubble on the child benefit! Kerching!
- Solar Panels £243 (£58 / £45) – The stars (or star) literally did align on this one, and they are hot! Well done Mr Sun.
- Investment Income £16,824 (£2421 / £400) – Rather exciting! This is the 6x return I had a little whine about a few posts ago (please read the whole post before judging me on that seemingly ridiculous statement first though!). In fact it turned out to be a little more than that! Very happy of course. Please note I run the final amount through a CGT 3 calculator and this was the amount after tax so I won’t have to count the tax as an expense if/when I pay it in January. I say if because I will probably stick some of this in my SIPP to get some tax back so it might end up being a wash or even that they owe me.
- Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £2317 (£2149 / £750) – A seemingly good month on the Each Way Sniping but unfortunately this is because I carried most of my profits over from last month. This is because I didn’t do my “accounting” properly at the end of June. In any case, I’m kinda glad I did that as July turned out to be a mare and I “only” won about £500 on the each way sniping. On two occasions I was over £2K+ in profit and at the low point I was hovering around -£700 for at least a week which was worrying 4 and goes to show you how big the swings can be when playing this game! Don’t say I never warned you if you give it a go! Judging from these figures it looks like I basically didn’t make any money on my World cup matched betting endeavours which is a shame but not really such a big deal and I’m back fully focusing on each way stuff I think. It’s fair to say normal matched betting is going to take a firm back seat going forward.
If anyone is interested in each way sniping I have written a couple of guides but before giving you the links, just one more time:
It’s NOT easy money, you can lose, especially over the short term, there are many ups and downs, and it’s not for the faint of heart. Having said that, if you wanted to know exactly what Each Way Sniping is and missed my guides I just wrote on the subject, check our part 1 here, and part 2 here.
Obviously if you want to make any money doing matched betting or each way sniping you should be using OddsMonkey… so here is my usual spiel about that:
If anyone is interested I have been using 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. One of the best things about it is the Forum/Community aspect as you can learn loads of new and interesting ways to profit from gambling that aren’t just your standard “Do offer, lay off, get free bet, lay off, win £3.50” type of, let’s face, quite boring, time consuming and laborious matched betting methods. Some of these methods are what helped me to have a bumper Cheltenham 2017 and are currently bringing me in over £1000 per month betting on each way sniping! Now, back to the update!
savings rate, net worth and all of that tomfoolery
OK so let’s not sugar coat it, our expenses were pretty outrageous this month. However with a ridiculous month on income we have broken our all time savings rate record of 69.8% 5 with a stonking 82.88%!!! Average savings rate now for 2018 is 56.67%. The downside of the above, if there could be one, is that we’re already planning on spending some of it rather than saving every single penny of it. Oops 🙂 – I’ll have a short update post on this soon but as a spoiler I will say these words to you: “new car” 6. So it looks very unlikely that we’ll maintain that 56% savings rate through to the end of the year but we’ll see how it goes I suppose!
Net worth did this:
Excluding house equity: £194,411 / +£23,140 / +13.51%
Including house equity: £278,668 / +£23,492 / +9.21%
Liquid Freedom: £99,768 / +£20,721/ +26.21%
As to be expected, all records broken here!
other updates
Blog – I feel I “owe” you all quite a few posts, here is the rough schedule of what I want to get out over the next month, in no particular order:
- 5 Year update
- Each Way Betting final post (FAQ, bit more figures analysis, and tying up any other loose ends)
- “New” Car financial analysis
Running/Personal – I had to pull out of the Rye 10K as Mrs T had an operation on that day in the end. She is currently recovering OK but the heat isn’t helping, bring on the cooler weather coming in the next few days please!
Reading – Found a random links you may not have come across before:
- Bullsh*t Jobs – An absolute classic from David Graeber who wrote a book on the same subject. “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week” – Why has this not happened yet then?
- Bullsh*t Web – Tangentially related to the above, why is web browsing still so slow despite an enormous increase in download speeds since the first 56K modems?
- Bullsh*t traffic – OK so the article isn’t actually called that but it’s also related to the two above articles… Why does building more roads not reduce traffic congestion?
- Jevons Paradox – All of the above are kind of examples of the Jevons Paradox in my opinion, which I’ve written about before here.
- The American Dream – Not sure if this is real or not but I really hope it was based on a true story in some way. It’s about a guy who worked his way up to a managerial status in a huge multinational corporation, then somehow “got lost” in the system and so continued to get paid despite having no team and no responsibilities. Either way it’s a very entertaining story (I was more amazed at how often he actually bothered turning up for work!)
BYE FOR NOW! 🙂
Notes:
- And cheaper than many non-renewable tariffs out there! ↩
- I will get a £50 referral fee when you invest a £1000, if you do then many thanks! ↩
- Capital Gains Tax ↩
- Not because of the £700 loss as such, which in the grand scheme of things was a mere blip on huge profits, but more due to the fact I was worried it could have gotten worse ↩
- September 2015 in case anyone was wondering ↩
- By this I mean new to us not a brand new car ↩
Discussion (11) ¬
If you are a member of the National Trust, your membership fee is considered for tax purposes to be a donation to a charitable organisation and as such you can claim tax relief on it.
Fancy that?
Also, there is a current discount on TCB of between £6 and £8 for membership.
Great tips on the membership there GFF!
We got a lovely picnic blanket for free this year which I’d assume you wouldn’t get if doing it via TCB, but I’ll definitely bear that in mind for next years membership. Thanks!
and one more thing – it’s good to see that there is someone else who is trudging towards FI despite having a family and large(ish) monthly expenses. We are in a similar position and I find a lot of the expenses are unavoidable (sadly) and it’s good to know someone else is doing this too.
|Thanks
Yea I’m definitely in the “have fun while on the journey” camp on that one, and although we probably do still waste a little bit of money each month, I think most of it is intentionally and therefore well spent.
And we’ve done tonnes of things over the years which are what you might call “macro frugal” which have saved us a lot of money (DIY projects, modest house), rather than focusing too much on the “micro frugal” picture of month to month expenses (other than the obvious no brainers like reorganising your monthly bills so they are the cheapest etc…).
As you can probably tell we certainly don’t scrimp on things like holidays and so on!
There is no right way for anyone and a lot of it will be down to what you can earn but one thing worth noting is that our combined wages from our jobs are actually that spectacular (for someone attempting to achieve FI in any case), after tax it’s just about 36.5K
The median disposable household income in 2017 was £27.3K: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householddisposableincomeandinequality/financialyearending2017
And according to this: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/regionalaccounts/grossdisposablehouseholdincome/bulletins/regionalgrossdisposablehouseholdincomegdhi/1997to2016
Where I live the GDHI (gross disposable household income) which I have read to be pretty much the same as disposable income (not sure why they felt the need to have two similar but slightly different terms for that!?) PER HEAD is £22,853, so for two adults in a house such as ours (I am presuming it doesn’t count children!) then that would be £45.7K so we are well below average earners for our area.
And yet most people I know are toiling away at their jobs with no end in site (at least it’s never come up in conversation that there may be one), probably earning far more than we are as a couple, and yet having no better life materially from where I’m standing. Yes they may have slightly newer and shinier and trendier things but none of it is really actually any better on a functional basic level.
Bearing in mind I’m already time rich compared to 99% of my cohorts (I’m contracted to work just 72% of what a full time person is) I would say on balance our lives are much better on balance, but each to their own as the saying goes. As you can probably tell from this far too long reply to your simple comment, I there is a whole post waiting in my brain to come out on this subject and it has been simmering away for a while back there, so thanks for the impetus to think about it again and get some words down onto the page. This is going into “Drafts” right now for some fleshing out and hopefully posting very soon! 🙂
TFS, well done on such an amazing income in July! I just had a look at your FI spreadsheet and I believe this is the first time I see it. Do you update all these manually every month? Must take some time!
Keep it going 😉
Michael
Hi Michael,
With the expenses we use Money Dashboard to keep track throughout the month, so a bit of tagging is required on that, maybe 1-2 hours per month in total. Then I total all the categories up and put it into the expenses/income spreadsheet which maybe takes 30-45 mins, then another half hour to check all of the ISA’s etc which takes about half an hour. The biggest time suck is going through all the bookie accounts to tally up my MB/EW profits to be honest which easily takes an hour if not more!
So anyway yea it does take a fair amount of time (tallying the above up it’s about 4-4.5 hours over the month in total) but I can’t think of a better/more efficient way to track everything unfortunately?
How do you track all of your stuff?
Cheers!
Money dashboard you say… interesting. I think they scrape the data from your bank account so I’ll probably wait until the open banking API is out. Maybe I’m being too paranoid!
Re matched betting, I keep a monthly excel for profits only. So after each bet, I go and populate it with the profit (or respective QL). That gives me my monthly/annual profits.
But it doesn’t tell me my MB bankroll. Which is why I keep a 2nd spreadsheet which tracks the latest known balance in each bookie. Going through all bookies is quite painful so I only do it quarterly / semi-annually. But every time I deposit or withdraw I adjust the bookie cell to reflect that.
So to conclude, at any point in time, I know my “own money” across all bookies if that makes sense. And every time I decide to update it I know the realised profit similar to what you do monthly.
I found this is a good low-maintenance way of doing it without having to go through all bookies every month.
PS. I loved the term “macro frugal” vs “micro frugal”. Spot on to what I believe too!
Yea they are scraping at the moment still, I have thrown the privacy sheets to the wind in exchange for an easy life… hopefully that won’t come back to bite me in the rear end!
That sounds like a good system, I just need to know the monthly figures to update on here really otherwise I probably wouldn’t bother. In fact I went about 3 months last year if not longer without checking because I just wasn’t doing much MB’ing and didn’t seem worth it. Having said that, when you are doing well on it, updating every month is a really good way to keep the momentum going otherwise you just have vague feelings about how much you’ve made. But I guess your P+L sheet does that for you which is great.
Hah… I thought that was quite good as well and was thinking of even writing a post on it 🙂
Cheers!
That is just a ridiculous savings rate – congratulations and well done on your awesome income!
Don’t feel bad that you didn’t/won’t save every penny of it – even if you spent half of it, your savings rate would be massively above the national average.
Interesting that you still make so much from your solar panels as I read recently that it’s no longer worth getting them fitted and the government is cutting down on subsidies – you got yours (or bought your house) at the right time.
Looking forward to Part III of your EW betting guide – started well this month but these past couple of days have been a killer so back to zero, just in time to start my no-lay accas. I’m not sure how I will cope if I end up having bad runs on both!!!!
Hi weenie,
Cheers! If only it was repeatable, my spreadsheet says I’d be able to FIRE in just 4 years!!!! I can’t see me ever managing to pull in 20K+ a month though even if I significantly up the each way stakes (gubbings would come a lot quicker for a start and I don’t think I’d be able to handle the volatility with much higher stakes than I am already doing).
Yea we got lucky with the solar panels, the FIT rate was locked in for 20 years so the rate won’t change for that whole time, it will just go up and down depending on how much sun there is and therefore how much energy they generate. However panels are now far cheaper. I haven’t looked into it recently but it still may be worth doing it if you can get a good deal on the panels! If not now then as the price continues to drop, in a few years they will definitely be competitive on price even in “cloudy, rainy” England.
Always annoying to give some back no matter when it is eh! I have had a couple of days off so may have managed to miss a bad spell hopefully. I would hope that doing both NLA and EW would balance out the variance as they are two totally different things, but yea in theory you could get a bad run on both at the same time and that would be a killer!
GL on both! 🙂