marathon april – income & expenses report

May12
by TFS on May 12, 2017 at 8:04 am
Posted In: Budgets, Matched Betting, TFS Updates

As the title suggests my thoughts and activities in April were dominated by running the London Marathon, but we also had quite a lot of other social engagements as well which made it a really fun month all round. But how did our other marathon, the slow jog to reach Financial Independence, get on?

expenses

Remember the figures below are in the current format: £Current Month (£2017 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)

  • Total £3187 (£3555 / £3210) – Another expensive month, and although it has actually brought our average down believe it or not, we haven’t had one under £3K yet this year. We need a couple of those at some point to if we’re to bring that average down to under target. May is not looking good either as we’ve got loads on again *grimacing face emoji*
  • Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848) – At least somethings on target 😉
  • Household £767 (£654 / £599) – Averaging £56 over target here but once again we need to get our groceries shop down. Somehow. I don’t know how! Has anyone else noticed their food shopping bills going up in the last year or so, or is it just me?
  • Going out/Holiday £379 (£1073 / £750) – Although we had a lot on it was more family engagements which tend to work out fairly cheap overall, so a nice reversion (part way) back to the average this month.
  • Transport £220 (£97 / £172) – 2 lots of Petrol and a small car repair bill this month.
  • Personal Care £55 (£94 / £90) – Not much to say here really.
  • Home/Garden £237 (£69 / £85) – We bought a few bits and plants for the garden, re-turfed our back lawn as it was looking horrendous, and bought a foot stool for the lounge, brand new as we couldn’t find any from the charity shops!
  • Lifestyle £208 (£223 / £165) – Over budget here but £70 was cash which should have probably just gone under the going out section.
  • Gifts/Charity £44 (£128 / £215) – Not much going on here for once and yet again I seriously need to pull my finger out on the charity front, or I’m going to face a big “charity bill” sometime soon.. heh 🙂
  • Hobbies/Sport £229 (£160 / £150) – A big bill here this month mainly due to me having a golf competition with *the lads* down at Princes in Sandwich Bay. A lovely course and well worth the extra money spent! Also signed up for another half marathon in July to keep me running after the big event of the Marathon is over.
  • Admin £8 (£2 / £10)
  • Financial £5 (£122 / £57) – The average is slowly coming back down to normal now after that horrendous tax bill in January!
  • Children £187 (£85 / £70) – A big splurge by TFS Jr this month! 🙂 We had to buy a new car seat as she’s growing out of her old one. Finding a second hand one in decent nick is actually quite hard as they do last a long time which ironically means they get destroyed by most kids by the end of their lives. So we swallowed it and bought a new one, it was £150 but Mrs T hustled it down to £130 from Toys R Us as they had a £20 off deal if you spent over £100 (thought I’d mentioned it in case anyone else out there randomly needed something for a kid for over £100!). It lasts like 5 years or something so seems like a good investment (and it’s the law… haha).

I was at first a bit disappointed that it was another expensive month, but there were a couple of medium one of expenses in there. Even though May is looking like another doozy initially, I am still optimistic we can actually come in under £3K. Fingers crossed!

income

Figures in the same format as expenses…

  • Total £4121 (£4816 / £3657) – Another month where we’ve beat the target nicely.
  • TFS Income £2360 (£2186 / £2140) – Not bad.
  • Mrs T Income £533 (£682 / £600) – It looks like Mrs T is going to slowly go down back below her “target” here but they’ve messed up her tax code which means she’ll get a rebate soon, which will bump it back up, then her normal pay will be around the £600 mark.
  • Solar Panels £96 (£44 / £45) – Solar Panels FTW!
  • Cashback Credit Cards £10 (£2 / £8) – A small amount maybe but not bad for just spending what we’d normally spend. Oh to have the travel hacking opportunities of the US FI crowd though 🙂
  • Ratesetter £6 (£18 / £0) – Not much going on here this month, just the usual trickle of interest from my £1000 invested. If you want to sign up and take advantage of the £50 sign up bonus which is still ongoing, use this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link!) or read my post on it for more info.
  • The House Crowd £72 (£18 / £0) – Received the yearly payout of dividends/interest on some of the properties/loans I’ve invested into via The House Crowd. I’ve written a few articles on them if you want more info, they are grouped under this tag link here: The House Crowd.
  • Child benefit £82 (£82 / £82)

Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £934 (£1746 / £750)

If anyone is interested I use 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! Now, back to the update!

There weren’t that many highlights this month as I took a bit of a break after a manic March on this front but from what I can remember:

  • Re-instating my years old “Golf Betting System (TM)” on Betfair which got a few winners for a few hundred pounds each. Please note this is straight up gambling so I won’t be revealing my system and/or encouraging others to do it! It used to make money but I quit after deciding it took too much time and was too stressful, but I’m now doing it more casually and for smaller stakes so hoping it can be more sustainable and fun.
  • A few residual profits from offers I did in March that hadn’t quite settled in time came through in April, so that was the bulk of the other profits.
  • That’s it! Sorry, a bit boring this month compared to last month!

 

savings rate, net worth and all of that rigmarole

Pretty happy with a savings rate of 29.41% which keeps our average around the 30% mark at 31.79%

Net worth did some of this:

Excluding house equity: £141,053 / +£183 / +0.13%

Including house equity: £219,870 / +£643 / +0.29%

Liquid Freedom: £65,374 / £169 / +0.26%

 

Other Updates

blog updates

You may or may have not noticed a post that looked suspiciously like a paid post I published the other day and I wanted to apologise to all readers for that! I didn’t enjoy the whole thing and it wasn’t worth the money in the end 1, so I’m now officially updating my stance to not accepting paid posts that aren’t written by me, and you have my word on that. If people want to pay me for writing stuff where I have control over what I decide to write about (given a brief) then I will still do that but I won’t be accepting straight up blatant paid posts as I don’t think it fits here. I did have another idea though and I want to float it to people/fellow bloggers. As I’m sure my fellow bloggers have noticed, the amount of offers you get each week for paid posts seems to be rather large and it seems to be an easy potential source of income, so I thought I might just set up another website and funnel any paid post opportunities that way and see how much income it can generate, and if advertisers will go for a blog/site that has little traffic (compared to this one at least). My gut feeling is that they don’t care too much where their content goes but it will be an interesting experiment to find out.

What are you thoughts on this guys!? I know a lot of these types of things are just low quality articles intended to either gain SEO link juice or sign people up through links embedded into the page, but on the other hand… £££ 🙂

 

 

other updates

Golf – I played in our first “Major” golf tournament 2 of the year, which I won! Which was nice.

Alcohol – I drank an average of 21.29 units/week in April, which is slightly more than I would have hoped for given an upcoming marathon. And you’d think most of that was after April 23rd (which would be some week long bender if it was) but no… you’d be wrong there as it is amazing how quickly 2/3 beers a couple of times a week adds up! Anyway it didn’t do me any harm by the looks of things so all good here.

Marathon – This post is already quite long so I’ll indulge myself and write up a whole post just on this I think. Stay tuned for it! A small bit of info though, I managed to beat my target of 3:30 and got a time of 3:28 so was very happy about that, and was OK enough to have a quick pint afterwards. A big thanks again to all of you blog readers who sponsored me, and if anyone else out there wants to chuck a few pennies my way for Young Epilepsy, here is the link one last time*:

Sponsor me here!

*Actually probably not seeing as I’ll do another post about the whole day haha.

 

How was your April? Hope you all smashed it!

Notes:

  1. I marked it up as a paid post at first and they told me to remove that section! I wonder if they are reading this… doubt it but I’ll find out soon I guess… haha. ↩
  2. This is 6 lads pissing about with clubs and balls in a rather expensive field for 9 hours, before anyone gets any images of grandeur ↩
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