july update – plus the inevitable question gets asked
Is it August already!?!?! The summer is more than half over but at least we’ve been having some decent albeit madly changeable weather this year. Anyway enough water cooler chat, let’s look at how the TFS finances stacked up this month!
To summarise, it was yet another high spending yet high income month, but if you want to see a few more details please read on…
expenses
Our total for the month was an eye watering £3,460.45 which is our highest of the year so far. Here are the lowlights:
- Groceries £388 – Gah! Has Brexit really pushed food prices up that much already?! 😀
- Clothes £74 – A definite improvement. Well done Mrs T!
- Golf £77 – Not bad considering I felt like I played a fair bit. This brings the average to £91/month so within the £100/month budgeted
- Going out £395 – I’m changing the name of this category (used to be called Dining and Drinking) because it is just used as a catch all for when we go out and do something, for example bowling would fall under this category, which is clearly neither dining nor drinking. Although I’ve written about many times that I probably drink a little too much, I don’t want to give everyone the (false) impression that we’ve spent £395 on literally only eating food out and drinking alcohol! Anyway this category is always going to get bigger in summer months so pretty happy with this. I budgeted £250/month on average and we are running at £207/month at the moment, so well within budget!
- Holiday £596 – This was in part what we spent on our IOW trip but we’ve also had another unexpected holiday pop up for next year that we had to pay a fairly sizeable deposit down for, which is due to a friend getting married in Dubai of all places. Very ostentatious I’m sure you’ll all agree! Anyway he is a very good friend of around 20 years so there was practically no chance we weren’t going to go, it will be expensive upfront but it’s all inclusive once we get there and seeing a friend tie the knot is obviously priceless! Anyway we’ve spent £1077 on holidays so far and from a budget of £1500 I’m not sure we’re going to hit that due to this unexpected addition (definitely not if the balance is due before 2016 is out!)
- Car tax and MOT £196 + Insurance £220 – We serviced last month and taxed and MOT’d this month, which worked quite well splitting it out like that. It passed with flying colours, not bad for a 13 year old car! We’ve spent £870 on the cost of owning a car so far this year (not including fuel) and I budgeted about a grand, so looking pretty good on this front.
- Charity £31 – The only category where I would like an increase! Anyway this brings our yearly total donations up to £308 which means we’ve still got to make £405 according to my 10% of profits “pledge” I made here. We still need to work out what charities to give to which is the main issue holding us back here.
- Children £19 – Little Ms T is back to her frugal ways, nice work baby!
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.
income
Luckily July is my bonus month which slightly cushioned the blow of the high expenditure. We made a total of £7047.49 which was pretty ironic considering I was only actually working for about 2 weeks in July 🙂
Income included but was not limited to…:
- TFS salary plus bonus £5878 – Pleasing!
- Mrs T maternity pay £680 – Slightly more than usual, we’re not sure why though. Perhaps a tax rebate or something like that!
- Matched betting / Secret Side Hustle £0 – After a great June and start of July as I “played” up to the end of the Euros, I decided to kick back and have a well earned rest for the remainder of the month.
- Normal betting £169 – Found a value bet on the F1 and steamed in on it which luckily came in, and then lost a bit on the golf 1
- Solar Panels £209 – Nice one Cyril, nice one Sun!
savings rate and net worth
Similar to last month, the high expenses balanced out nicely with a high income and we hit a savings rate of 53.22%. This brings our yearly average up to 45.35%, which is great, and to be honest far better than I would ever have thought when I first made the switch to part time work nearly a year ago. It would be nice to retarget our goal to 50% up from 40% but realistically we still have 2 holidays to go on and now another one to pay for, so unless I start smashing the Matched Betting out of the park it would be a very big ask to meet that. So I’m gonna leave it at 40% which I think is still a respectable target for a couple with a baby, one earning statutory maternity pay and the other working part time!
Net Worth has jumped up nicely again:
Excluding house equity: £118,386 / +£5,472 / +4.85%
Including house equity: £193,045 / +£5,9832 / +3.17%
The investments part of our NW went up again around 5% whilst as far as I’m aware the pound hasn’t fallen much more than it has done post Brexit, so I am guessing this is actually a real positive move, or at least to maybe where it was pre-Brexit in any case. Maybe the world isn’t ending after all 🙂
life
We had another busy month which was book ended by a holiday to the Isle of Wight and another 2 weeks off at the end of the month, so can’t exactly complain! We’ve been enjoying the weather, going to local parks etc and even a day out in Brighton (expensive! but fun) and also trying to finish off some of the DIY and gardening jobs around the house. The garden still looks rubbish as I didn’t plant much in time for spring this year but some flowers are growing and we have an ample crew of tomato plants on the go which are staggered so should have a decent supply in about 2 weeks till the end of September hopefully.
The bathroom and kitchen are all but finished so I will finally put some before and after shots in my next post for anyone who’s interested. Baby T has also started eating baby rice which is hilarious and nearly free entertainment, which ticks all the boxes for me 🙂
Running update – I have done practically no running since Baby T was born. Which is worrying as I have entered the ballot for the 2017 London Marathon, so I could do with getting some training runs in early before I even find out whether I’m “in” or not!
Booze update – 20.74 units/week so only a smidgen over my target!
Blog update – Randomly my silly post on reading a personal finance blog post for dummies got picked up by Rockstar Finance which meant blog traffic spiked briefly. Thanks to J$ for putting me up there and if any new readers have stuck around, thanks and welcome to the blog (feel free to say hi below if you have)!
Pants update – You remember me going on about my pants last month? Well Mrs T, despite claiming she never even read that post, took it upon herself to do what many of you suggested and take them to an early pant related grave. Luckily, I rescued them from the bin and used them as a rag to clean up some old brushes when I was painting the skirting boards, so their death was not in vain!
the inevitable question
What is this inevitable question I hear you ask!?
Well right at the end of my last shift at work they asked me whether I would be interested in coming back full time.
Quite hilariously, the preamble to the question went something like this:
“You in next week then TFS?”
“Nope, got my two weeks off”
“Ah yea, living the dream. Living the dream”
“Err… yea I guess”
“So anyway I was wondering what your thoughts were on coming back full time?”
I slashed the idea down as quick as a jungle guide slicing through the dense rain forest with a razor sharp machete, as you would rightly imagine, so didn’t really give them a chance to offer me anything for the privilege of chucking away more of my hours for their noble cause of making shit tonnes of money – or in their words, to stop “living the dream” (Thanks for such a kind offer! 🙂 ). But I have many very good reasons to believe that no offer was on it’s way in any case, the most obvious of which is that despite everyone working their butts off this last financial year, and the company growing profits and revenues by around 20%, no one got a pay rise. Let me repeat that:
No one got a pay rise!
Not even a standard inflationary payrise 2! This is also despite a firehose of bullshit sprayed upon many of the more junior members of staff about if they worked hard this year they would be duly rewarded. Luckily I’ve heard all of that before and kept my nose well out of the whole situation, but there were some people were pretty miffed about the whole thing.
Even more: The carrot has now been firmly re-dangled and they said there is a spanky new pay rise system whereby if people work hard and excel they can now offer pay rises “at will” rather than waiting till the end of year or whatever. Apparently all you have to do is put your life and soul into it for say 6 months (minimum) and then ask the question of your manager.
I think you’d forgive me for having a rather cynical view and having my doubts about this whole thing 😉
As usual I’m keeping my head down, working hard for my allotted hours when I’m in the office but firmly staying out of any silly games like that or office politics.
How was your July?
Have you ever been “promised” pay rises of bonuses only to ever get them taken away at the final hour? Let’s hear your stories of corporate fuckwaddery below!
Discussion (27) ¬
Thanks for an eye-opening update. I think you are quite brave sharing so much information about your personal finances 🙂
I am also looking forward to getting my solar panels payment shortly. I was fortunate to get in when the payments were at their highest, so this one should be around £700, all tax-free, of course. Yes, three cheers for the summer sunshine!
Never tried matched betting, but I keep reading about it. May have to roll up my sleeves and give it a go before too long.
Keep up the good work 😀
Nick
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Hi Nick,
I dunno, it used to phase me but you get used to it pretty quickly. What’s the worst that can happen eh? 😉
Wow, that must be be a very early (or large) install to get that sort of payment. Nice one!
I like your blog by the way and keep meaning to come over and read more. Thanks for commenting again!
Nice one TFS – your assets are rocketing up all over the place, and that’s some mega-income! Really low “routine” expenses too this month. Oh, and I also enjoyed the fact that you tagged this post “corporate bullshit”.
Haha, I like to think I call BS when I see it, and what happened with the pay rise situation was definitely BS!
Nice work TFS. It sounds like your ducks are in a row and the planets are aligning for you. Actually, considering that you don’t seem to be making many sacrifices (holidays, golf, and more holidays lining up) your savings rate of over 45% is pretty bloody good mate.
I know what you mean about the office BS lol. I worked my arse off for a company once who use to tell us the same thing. “Work hard and we’ll all do well”. “When the company does well we’ll reap the benefits ” yardy, yardy ya. Anyway, the company made a big profit that year but there were plenty of excuses why us workers weren’t getting a pay rise. All of the bosses got brand new cars though . What a joke.
Anyway, enjoy the rest of your summer and keep up the good work. Cheers mate.
HA! I’ve been retired a week now and have already had someone interested in hiring me. I might try to make it into a part-time (like 10 hours per week) gig but I have no intention of going back.
I think that is something one needs to get used to if one is planning to retire early. Most people worry about if they check out of work and get in a bit of a pickle their earning power will be forever diminished, but from my experience so far, and from what I’ve read of other popular bloggers who are already fully retired, the main issue is actually being strong enough to turn down all that extra money you could be earning which obviously would be using up more of your most valuable currency: time, and the money is not particularly needed.
10 Hours a week, now you’re talking fella!
Do you have any resources for Matched Betting I should review? looks like a sweet side gig… how much risk is in it?
Hi Chris,
I promise I will do a matched betting post at some point!
But… if you wanna get started the website I use is called Odds Monkey and it has very comprehensive tutorials to get you started. It is worth paying for but you can do the free trial here anyway:
Odds Monkey
This is an affiliate link by the way, if you wanna avoid that for some reason just google Odds Monkey and it will be the top hit.
Worth mentioning that the only real risk is if you muff up any of the bets, e.g. back the wrong thing, lay the wrong thing, put the wrong stake in… etc… If you are slow at the start and careful you should be fine though.
If you do the Odds Monkey free trial you should make about £45 risk free I think.
Let me know if you have a crack and how you get on!?
Aha, I’ll be using that link to sign up, cheers!
Cheers weenie, appreciate it
I’ll give it a go mate thanks! I need to start diversifying income sources and every little bit helps. You should be proud of your side hustle.
Cheers Chris and good luck (not that you need it!) 😉
Nice bonus there TFS, that’s a great income you got in and that’s with you taking a break from the side hustles – well done!
Also, congrats on being able to turn down the opportunity to go back to full time work. If you didn’t have your finances in good order and you didn’t have a plan to get to FI (and didn’t have the support of Mrs T) it would have been harder to resist the lure of extra money and corporate promises.
At Old Co, people used to get rewarded by ‘going the extra extra’ mile (I add the second ‘extra’ because everyone is expected to do at least one ‘extra’!). The awards were either bronze or silver and one gold was awarded each year.
Over the last ten years, I got my share of a few bronzes (around £80 of vouchers per award) and also one silver for the completion of a project (around £200).
Funnily enough, whenever managers or senior people got awards, they only ever got silvers, never bronzes – the lower vouchers obviously not good enough for them but hardly fair when much of the time, it’s their team that’s helped them get the award!
Pay rises – I’ve had many years of zero pay rise (including this year) and many years, it was just 2%, which was kind of tough when we heard how many billions of profit the company made.
If only it wasn’t only once per year eh?! 🙂
Very true but if I didn’t have all of that in place I would never have been doing part time in the first place. I just don’t think anyone else (at work that is) really understands what I’m actually doing despite a few dropped hints about not needing the money, preferring my time etc… Maybe the penny will eventually drop at some point, will be interesting to see if it does.
Yea we’ve had many zero pay rises throughout the years especially around 2008 etc… At least there was a slight reason then. What are they blaming this time, Brexit no doubt! 😀
No false promises of pay raises here. I’m in a union, so pay is very much set in stone. We just negotiated a 2% pay raise retroactive to April 2015 (!), so that will be nice going forward, plus I will get the extra 2% for the past 17 months or so all at once! I’m looking really looking forward to that paycheck.
Wow that is cool Norm. I don’t think I know anyone who is in a Union!
I wish we had more of them over here but work tends to be so fragmented nowadays there isn’t much chance to build solidarity with todays generation of workers. Maybe a new paradigm is needed for the digital age… social networks of unions or something like that. Hmm…..
Way to make that bonus money! It definitely helps boost the numbers in tough months.
Best of luck in the marathon next year. I expect you to medal. 😉
Woah there DbF! I haven’t even got in to the race yet… You have to wait till October to find out whether you got a place. But obviously if I do I’m looking top 3 minimum yea… 😀
Good one TFS! Well done this month! I am working hard to get a bonus and a raise for the next months. 20 more days till I see a difference!
Good luck with your bonus, Makayla!
Hi TFS,
Ah I remember the days of being a permanent employee and the “will we, won’t we” get a payrise/bonus this year. In my last permanent job (2007-2012) I was enrolled in the management bonus scheme which I was very excited about…as I recall it was a chunky percentage of salary *if it paid out*. Trouble is I never got to experience it because it was dependent on the company being in a particular tier of profit level, the target for which was reset each year to be higher and higher. Despite significant increases in profit each year, because we never hit the overall target the bonus didn’t pay out. Even though the division of the company you worked in might have smashed the target, if another division failed we all failed. It was really demotivating actually. I don’t recall being particularly blown away by any pay rises either…though I think there were one or two small ones while I was there.
I don’t trust companies to look out for existing employees in terms of remuneration any more (sadly). I think it’s a bit like how insurance companies give their best deals to new customers, employers offer the best deals to new starters, but once they’ve got you, you’re on an increasingly worse auto-renewal deal each year!
For this reason I’m very happy to be a freelancer now, I set my own salary and benefits package to suit my personal preferences. If my company profits I benefit, if it dips, I know I just have to do a bit more work next year than I did the last!
I’m really impressed with the amount of your income given your part time and maternity leave circumstances…way to go!
OR
Hi Organised Redhead 🙂
“It was really demotivating actually” – Totally with you on this one.
The bonus culture we have today is total bullshit if you ask me. It forces people to focus on narrow sets of figures and targets and therefore takes peoples time and energy away from other less hard to measure areas of how to run a good business. It can also obviously cause perverse outcomes as people try to game the system. And as you say you can miss out when it’s not your fault or even as the company grows every year which doesn’t seem fair, as the levels set seem pretty arbitrary don’t they.
I’m sure there are some good studies I’ve read summaries of on the internet about this 🙂
Thanks OR, I am very lucky to have a decent job that let me do what I’m doing and I don’t forget that every day, even when I’m on the packed commuter trains kind of hating life, I remember I’m still in a much better position (time wise at least) than 99% of the people on that train and things don’t seem so bad anymore.
Hopefully we can keep up the savings rate for the rest of the year, that would be a great achievement for us.
Cheers!
Nice job in July. Looks like you’re doing very well. It’s too bad about the frozen pay. We had a few years like that when I was working full time. It’s disappointing when you hear that kind of news especially when the company is making good profit. Nice to see your net worth increasing post Brexit.
Hi Joe,
Thanks for the comment and good to see you are still enjoying the ER lifestyle!
All the best.