theFIREstarter

Copyright Tesla Motors (Aren’t you glad I didn’t lead with the picture of the pants?)

Wow what a belter of a title and lead photo eh?

We’ll get back to the Tesla and the pants later but we have a lot of boring financial stuff to go through first so let’s crack on with that!

expenses

We spent a total of £3259.84 in May, another expensive month! Here is the highlights list:

• Groceries £341 – Still higher than usual. I think I may just have to up our target budget to £300/month (It was previously £230) now that baby T is here, seems fair – groceries includes everything including nappies, wipes, formula, etc… We did in fairness have a BBQ with 30 people for my birthday which costs  a fair bit to cater for!
• Clothes £134 – Seems about average of late 😉
• Golf £119 – Seems about average also!
• Dining and drinking £419 – Wowza, that’s the highest it’s been for a while (August 2015 to be exact). On reflection I would say it seems we’ve swapped going out on the piss to having nice lunches with family and other friends with babies. Which is all very nice but maybe one to watch so it doesn’t get out of hand (a picnic or having people round is just as much fun but costs a lot less, for example). One big expense here was we had a date night which cost about £70, well worth it seeing as we haven’t been out together on our own for about 9 months.
• Gas & Electricity £84 – Bumped up from a lowly £46 as our account was actually in debit! This is too much, it should be around £60 I think to cover us for the year but we need to catch up and I couldn’t be bothered to argue with OVO. Once we’re caught up I’ll try to get them to lower the direct debit again.
• Car maintenance £439 – This was probably the biggest one off expense this month, although not unexpected. We decided to get the car serviced and although I could have wasted 2-3 days myself trying to do it to save some money, I decided it just wasn’t worth it this time round. It needed 2 new tyres which I wouldn’t be able to do anyway so would have maybe only saved £200 which wasn’t worth it for the amount of time and work I’d have to put in (plus I know I could just spend that time matched betting and make far more per hour anyway!).
• Birthdays £57 – It was my birthday (whoo! another year older!) so I guess most of this was spent on me 🙂
• Admin £50 – We got baby T a passport which we’ll need when we go to Madrid later in the year.
• Children £165 – Her highest month of spending! What a little spendthrift she is 🙂 . The large bulk of this was that we bought a cot-bed, as she is going to move into her own room soon. Oh don’t they grow up fast 🙁 – on the plus side, more sleep for us (hopefully).

So as I say overall another expensive month, but if I look at last years figures it always gets more expensive around this time of year as we have yearly car expenses, those were actually paid in July last year but we got the bulk of it done in June this year so hoping that July will be less expensive. Also if we compare year on year in 2015 we’d spend a total of £17,217, and this year we’ve only spent £16,752 so a slight improvement. Bearing in mind we’ve renovated the kitchen and had a baby in 2016 I think that’s pretty damn good.

income

Luckily our slightly higher than average expenses were more than covered by a slightly higher than average income, which was a total of £5163.44!!! Mrs T is now on statutory maternity which works out as £567/month which ain’t bad really when you think about it. On top of that and my wages our income was boosted by:

• Sold stuff £16
• Matched betting £760 – Great month due to the Euro’s being on, lot’s of high value offers flying about (hello Bet365 in play offer I’m looking at you!) and lots of rather crap low ones as well most of which I managed to avoid but got caught wasting my time on a few of them. I also had a bit more time to spend on it though which naturally means you earn more. Please note I’ve done this up to the end of the Euros (July 7th) to make it easier to work out, so July profits will be a lot lower than this due to the shorter period and basically there is eff all sport on for the rest of the month. Roll on Premier League!
• Normal betting £385 – Had some money in an old account I was playing around with a while back, which I finally withdrew so the profits are now realised. Also backed Portugal for the Euros after reading this article from Goldman Sachs saying they were a good value bet! Perhaps the first half decent thing an investment bank has done for a long time 😉 – Anyway that made £270 so a good win, cheers to the economists at GS, and I hate to say it, Ronaldo and Co. Well done Portugal!
• Secret side hustle £1231 – Boom! Spent more time on it this month and so very much like the matched betting I earnt more.
• Credit card cash back £109 – Our yearly cash back from our Amex platinum card. Lovely.
• The House Crowd £500 – They’ve given me £500 worth of investments to write some articles about my experience in investing with them over the course of a year. The first of which you can read here if you missed it!

savings rate and net worth

The income/expenses kinda balanced each other out and we ended up with a decent (for us) 44.77% savings rate. This brings our yearly average to 43.38%, which I am largely over the flipping moon about, as it means our Net Worth continues to increase and our slow march to Financial Independence moves on to the beat of the drum.

Net Worth has jumped up again:

Excluding house equity: £112,896 / +£4,926 / +4.56%

Including house equity: £187,113 / +£5,386 / +2.96%

This is all hunky dory but it’s worth pointing out any increase from the stock market this month (£2027 / +5.11%) is completely nullified by the fact that sterling dropped so much ¹. In fact it’s worse than that as it’s not just the increase from the stock market that has been shot down, it’s the total of your Net Worth, which is a bit crappy to say the least. I am taking the grown up stance of completely ignoring this and carrying on as usual, I mean what else can you really do? I can’t be bothered to re-evaluate the value of our net worth with regards to exchange rates, I never did before so I’m certainly not starting to do it now.

If the prices do go due to Brexit I guess it will just be reflected in my expenses figures and therefore the final number to reach to get to FI will go up as per the 4% rule, which should all be handled in my spreadsheet.

other updates

A reminder of my goals in 2016 (seriously, for me as well, I have totally forgotten what they were until I just checked the post on it)

• Savings rate of 40% – Currently 43.38% 🙂
• Matched Betting £500/month – Currently £420.67. This rises to £505/month when you add in wins from normal gambling. Pretty happy with that!
• Super Secret Side Hustle £750/month – Currently £693.33 however this was £0 in Jan/Feb so on a montly basis it will be well past the target.
• Alcohol consumption less than 20 units/week average – Very mixed results so far… See below for an update!

Alcohol

It’s been a roller coaster few months on this, here are the results for 2016 so far as I can’t remember when I updated this last:

Jan: 5.6 units/week

Feb: 4.22 units/week

Mar: 4.99 units/week

Apr: 16.89 units/week

May: 28.48 units/week

Jun: 22.97 units/week

Not surprisingly having the baby Feb meant I didn’t go out and get drunk much in the months surrounding that event 🙂

There was obviously some kind of kick back effect in May though, oops! Looks like things are settling back down around the 20/week level which although is probably borderline alcoholic for some people, I’m pretty comfortable with.

Happy birthday to TFS

The blog past it’s 3rd year of running on July 3rd. Go me! I never thought I’d keep it up this long if I’m honest. I will try to do a 3rd year update if I get time later in the week.

Charity

A few posts ago I mentioned about giving away 10% of any matched betting & side hustle profits to charity, as it seemed like quite a decent thing to do. I haven’t forgotten about this but am still weighing up what charities to give to, but to keep you in the loop here are the current figures on what will be given:

Total charity donations 2016: £300

Total MB/SH profits 2016: £7200

Total donations needed to hit 10%: £420

I should have really taken this number off of my Net Worth and profits as I go as now I’m going to take a big hit when I finally donate it, so when that happens the savings rate will take a hit. Unless I do it in smaller chunks, which seems a bit pointless because it will all come out in the wash anyway. Anyway just wanted to let you know that was still on my mind and I haven’t forgotten about it, just haven’t got round to executing on it yet!

Life

We’ve been busy again in June. I had another 2 weeks off real work but seemed to be working as hard as ever around the house, and now with the help of Mrs T we have a fully functioning nursery ²! It’s amazing what a lick of paint etc… does. I also did some tiling in the kitchen and a few other small jobs:

Please ignore the wonky plug sockets, they are just not screwed in properly!

Still got a few bits left to do, in fact the list is never ending. No complaints though, I’m really enjoying this DIY lark, it keeps me busy and out of trouble 🙂

We also just came back from a week in the Isle of Wight (again) this time with all the in-laws, 7 adults, 2 kids and 2 caravans, all great fun. That was technically in July but I’m writing this in July so I may as well include it here (in the vain hope that the July update won’t be as long as this one!)

Further leisure time was spent watching some of the football, playing a few rounds of golf, seeing friends and family and having a few days out with Mrs and baby T (making good use of our National Trust membership!) I also “celebrated” turning 35 and enjoyed my first fathers day.

you musk be kidding me?

So the title mentions that I’m seriously considering buying a Tesla. Don’t worry, it’s nothing imminent, but when the Model 3 comes out, and maybe a few years down the line when hopefully you can pick one up for a bit cheaper (say 10 or 15 grand) I would seriously consider changing my current motor vehicle strategy which could well be described as: “buy an old banger for about a grand and keep it going for as long as possible, rinse and repeat”. This strategy means it is costing us about £1000 a year to have a car not including the petrol, which I think is a pretty cheap way of owning a car. It does however mean I don’t get to swan about in a brand new BMW or Mercedes every few years like some people I know do, who coincidentally will be working till they’re 65.

Why the sudden change of heart on buying a more expensive car? It’s simple, I’ve spent the last month of so reading the Wait But Why series on Elon Musk ³ (The CEO of Tesla) and I’m now pretty convinced that:

Tesla well may just change the world

EVs (Electric Vehicles) are going to be a disruptive tech ⁴ and will change the world we live in much quicker than most people anticipate, and Tesla is the main company driving that change.

It’s worth pointing out that EVs also have much lower running costs; practically zero servicing is needed due to the much simpler engine design, no oil, no gears, less moving parts, etc… So if I spent 15k up front I know that my ongoing costs would be much lower than if I spent 15k on a internal combustion engine (ICE) powered car. Not to mention the savings on petrol, and the obvious feel good factor about helping out with that whole climate change thing, and buying a part of “the future”.

I just walked to the train station and noticed how noisy and smelly ICE cars actually are, it’s amazing how you don’t notice things like that until you really pay attention. I’m sure if you put someone from a remote place next to a busy road they would think we were crazy to ever allow this to happen! I can’t wait for the day where my walk along the street is quiet and my lungs don’t get choked by exhaust fumes, hopefully nearer the turn of the next decade rather than the end of it.

Musk is now a personal hero of mine, and I would highly recommend reading the whole Wait But Why series if you have a few spare hours/days depending on how fast you read!

If you didn’t know, Musks other project is sending humans to Mars via his other company Space X, read more about that here. This is really inspiring stuff people! Musk could well save the human race on 2 fronts: climate change mitigation via EVs and clean electricity generation, existential threat by colonisation of Mars. It sounds batshit crazy but seriously read the articles first before making any rash judgements on it. If you can’t be bothered to read the article then just watch this video and be amazed. This is real folks, not something out of a sci-fi film! The future is here!

Final note on this, not to be outdone Jeff Bezos of Amazon is also at it with his company Blue Origin. I’m not sure if this video is sped up but look how fast this baby comes down!?

pants

Which finally brings me onto the subject of pants. Here is the picture you’ve all been waiting for:

Pants!

It’s not really about the pants as such but I wanted to make a point of function over form. The reason I’m not throwing them away is that they still work absolutely perfectly, the cotton is worn but the elastic is still as tight as the day they were bought. And seeing as hardly anyone (well, apart from the whole of the internet now) gets to see my pants then the only way I’m going to throw them away is when they fail in the function department, much to Mrs T’s chagrin ⁵.

People who throw perfectly working things away just because they look a bit worse for wear really wind me up and should at a minimum be chucked onto a huge pile of slightly less than perfect humans for a day the minute they get a spot on their face or something like that, to see what it feels like.

I feel like that sentence was a great one to end on so that’s your lot this month!

For those that have made it this far… well done! Sorry about such a long update but there were quite (clearly!) a few things I really felt the need to tell you about 🙂

Some questions for you:

How was your June, hopefully you smashed it out of the park on all fronts!?

Any matched bettors out there, how was your Euro 2016?

What do you think of Tesla/Musk? Would you consider buying one (A Tesla, not a Musk, that is)? Would you consider going to Mars if the opportunity does arrive in our lifetime?

How manky do your pants go before chucking them away?