Isle of wight cabins

 

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!

Notes:

  1. I backed Jimmy Walker in The Open then he won 2 weeks later at the PGA Champs! That’s why I love golf betting (not!)
  2. I know you could argue that inflation is effectively zero right now but but c’mon, as if they’ve even taken macroeconomic issues like that into account!