theFIREstarter

Hope you’ve all been enjoyed the hot sweltering inferno like weather this past week or so. I certainly have! 8)

We’ve been busy as usual in June – I can’t remember the last time I said we had a quiet month – but the summer months for me are all about getting out there and enjoying the weather as much as you can, so it’s all good as far as I’m concerned!

Let’s have a look at how the spending and saving went down…

june income

1. Mrs TFS still has £250 automatically taken out for her sharesave scheme so this is amount after that deduction (which I then add back on in another part of the spreadsheet). I am getting booted out in 4 months of mine and am in a transitionary stage of the share save scheme, so mine is taken out after this income amount. Any questions on that please ask 😉
2. It was time for our yearly cashback for our American Express Platinum cards. Whoop! I love cashback! 🙂
3. We did a car boot sale last Sunday which I completely forgot to mention in my three frugal things post, so that really should have been called four frugal things! Anyway we made £40 net “profit”, so after costs of the pitch etc… I also picked up the Pointless board game for £1. Now that is what I call a bargain 🙂

Overall a pretty standard month for income! No further comments, your honour!

june expenses

Total expenses: £2,486.13

To keep this post at a readable length I will summarise the main categories of spending here, but if you want to see a more detail break down just see the full spreadsheet here ¹.

I’ve updated the spreadsheet yet again – sorry I just can’t help tweaking it 🙂 – I’ll go through the additions a bit later though.

• Groceries £291.18 – Bah! The days of sub £200 grocery bills seem like a hazy dream right now. Still, we blew about £70 on my birthday BBQ, and it was totally worth it. Slow cooked pork ribs finished off on the BBQ?! You better believe it sonny Jim!!! We are also trending at £260 average for the year now which still isn’t excessive in my opinion.

Frugal fun for kids… it’s the classic card board box robot game!!! 🙂

• Personal Electronics £140 – Mrs T decided to chuck a glass of water over her iPhone and it finally bit the dust. I’m still going to try to revive it and/or we’ll just sell it on eBay to someone who might be able to, to recoup some of the cost. But in the meantime we bought a second hand iPhone 5c ² which was in fairly good nick off of Gumtree. How good is Gumtree compared to craigslist in the UK by the way? I can’t believe craigslist is of any use to people in the UK, there is never anything (decent) on there when I’ve looked!? I’ve noticed Gumtree are advertising a lot recently, I am wondering what their business model is and I hope they don’t start charging to place ads all of a sudden.
• Clothes £54.22 – I’m now resigned to the fact that there will be around ~£50 coming out of our accounts spent on clothes and unless it’s far over or under, I think I will just not mention it again 🙂
• Golf £95.90 – Roughly on budget and it seemed like I played a fair bit. Average is £85.14/month which is under budget as well. This makes me happy 🙂
• Dining & Drinking £236.97 – Quite a lot of going out this month. Again the good weather had a lot to do with this! We also had a nice afternoon out in London for my birthday, but managed to *only* spend about £80 on that including a meal and numerous drinks along the South Bank.
• Garden – £22.48 – We bought a strimmer! I tried borrowing my sisters lawnmower but it was just far to big and cumbersome for our diminutive lawn. We looked at getting a second hand one but new ones were so cheap it seemed a bit silly.
• Holiday – £20 – We’re off to the sunny Isle of Wight next weekend with family and had to chip in £20 for our share of the car ferry. Accommodation will be free. Score!
• Sponsor £30 & Donations £42 – Hah… typical isn’t it. The month my conscience kicked in and I dropped a few £’s on some donations to charities, it was the London to Brighton bike ride so a few people we knew were asking for sponsorship. Not complaining, merely an observation 🙂
• Gambling – £25 – Oops. Need to get back out of the habit on this one. I staked £75 and won £50 back so overall loss of £25. I’ve also deposited £50 this month so if I blow through all of that, or win some back, I will knock it on the head. There is nothing really interesting to gamble on right now so just slipped back into old habits here, no excuses and slapped wrist!
• Bank charges – £25 – No we didn’t forget to pay a bill on time etc…! It is the yearly charge for our Amex card. As mentioned above we scored £113 worth of cashback for the year so obviously it’s worth paying the £25 for it!
• Overall £2486.13 – Well it seemed like a busy and expensive month, including a £140 purchase of a new (to us) smartphone, yet we still came in under the £2,666 target average I laid out here in our yearly budget, which surely backs up MMM’s point about most of lives being an exploding volcano of wastefulness. It does make me wonder what we could achieve with a few quieter months? Our average total spend is now down from £2946.17 to £2869.50.

One final comment worth adding is that now we have 6 months of proper expenses tracking under our belts it is interesting to start seeing the longer term averages and therefore where we are actually overspending. I might dedicate a separate post to that but for now I will note that there are no particular categories that are deviating that much from the initial estimates. BUT – there are quite a few small categories that I didn’t include that all add up to make us the ~£200 over budget that we are right now, which really hammers it home that all of those small things do count!

june net worth

Well what have we got here then? Yes it’s a new improved net worth table! Rather than keep things simple, (stupid!) I decided to throw a lot more numbers at myself and you guys. Hope you don’t mind 🙂

Hopefully it should be fairly self explanatory though, I’ve simply added two extra columns for:

• MOM +/-%: Meaning Month On Month percentage increase or decrease.
• MOM +/-£: Meaning Month On Month absolute value in pounds increase or decrease.

I thought that it would be particularly interesting to see how the investments part of the net worth is increasing or decreasing each month and over time. This was also key to working out how much to add each month when executing my value averaging strategy (more on this in a moment).

Finally I have added a totals row for each section, so “Total Investing”, “Total Cash”, “Total Pensions” and “Total Property”. I wasn’t quite sure where to put The House Crowd investment as it’s both an investment and it’s in property, so I stuck it in the property section.

1. Overall not a great month, as the markets turned south. Ouch! This is the first month we’ve really had a decent chunk of our own cash (not including pensions as such) where things have taken a hit.
2. As I invested the SIPP cash last month this actually means that the SIPP is down by £475 this month. Not exactly chump change! This is not worth worrying about as sure it will recover at some point in the future whether that be next month or 5 years down the line (And I can’t access any of it until at least 2038 anyway! 😀 )
3. Total investing is actually down £884 then this month! I haven’t made any new contributions as still building back up cash reserves.
4. I’ve moved a few rows about and put the House Crowd investments into “Other investments” (previously in property which didn’t make much sense, as it is an investment to provide an income, and the property section is really just about our house equity) along with the share save investments which are kind of illiquid and aren’t part of the more liquid/market based portfolio, which is now split into it’s own section. This is to facilitate value averaging calculations (see below).
5. I couldn’t resist, and had the sadomasochistic urge to calculate the total loss from Mr Market this month. So including total investments and total pensions, we are looking at a total net worth wipe out of £1647 this month. Scary stuff! Or not. Again I am surprisingly calm about this right now as it’s pretty meaningless at this stage of the game. In any case let’s hope the Greeks sort their shit out and everyone can enjoy some gains over the next few months.

extra bonus section

I also added a little section at the top of the Net Worth Tracker tab that calculates the amount we should contribute to our investments each month if we are going to follow my value averaging system, as I’ve already spoken about here. Here is the table with brief explanation:

1. I’ll leave this as 50/50 for now but you can change it with just one cell at the top left hand side of the spreadsheet to see how it affects the calculations.
2. This is needed because I need a reference point from the start of last month before any market ups and downs have affected the figure.
3. The above contribution figure added to last months “portfolio end value” gives me my reference point to compare to.
4. The target value is the Surplus cash * Target allocation % + Previous months reference value
5. Surplus cash is used in the formula in (4) and is taken straight from the income v spend figure, automatically calculated on the Spend Tracker tab
6. Amount to invest (A) is Target value (A) minus the “portfolio end value” for the current month (June in this case). As you can see this is actually MORE THAN the surplus cash I have available for this month, which again was mentioned as a drawback of using this value averaging method in the last post I made. In this case we’d just make a 100% contribution of £1,438.55
7. I also wanted to make another set of values which takes into account that I’m already stashing £250 of my “Surplus cash” into the share save, so those are already allocated to funds. Obviously I can’t magic up an extra £250 to put into the “market investments” section so I will take the £250 off the surplus cash figure and then recalculate the Target value (B) and amount to invest (B). Obviously this brings the figure out to invest as slightly smaller than in section (A). Although again it came out as £1478.28 which is more than the surplus available, so I’d just invest £1188.55 in this case.

After all of that faffing about… We’ll still actually not invest anything this month*!!! However I’m glad I got the spreadsheet and calculations ready to rock when I do need them.

*This is because we’re still building up cash reserves, but will be doing this going forward from next month when I should be getting paid my yearly bonus (Yay!) and so cash reserves will be flowing like the amazon in monsoon once again.

june savings rate

1. Another month very close to the 50% mark but just not quite there just yet!

So there you go. It’s our second best month in terms of savings rate ever and have to be honest it still didn’t feel like we tried very hard. So hopefully progress can still be made and we’ll edge forward towards 50%!

On the downside, July looks horrendously expensive as we have:

• Car insurance due
• Car has got something else wrong with it ³ and we need to get this fixed before driving up to York for the meetup next month!
• Short trip to the Isle of Wight
• Work summer party x 2
• Some other random nights out planned. Well it is beer garden season! 🙂

On the plus side as I mentioned it is bonus month so I’ll be trying my best to keep as much of it as possible this year!

How did you get on in June!? Let us know in the comments below!