theFIREstarter

TFS Jr making some tracks in the snow

Brrrr!!!! What a cold, snowy and generally all round unpleasant month March was, if you don’t like cold weather that is! I happened to quite enjoy it for the most part, but it’s getting kind of old now. Roll on spring I say!

Hopefully your Net Worth increases weren’t as frozen as the weather was! Our savings have finally started to heat up a bit after a slow start to the year. Let’s ‘ave a butchers shall we…?

(Oh and sorry for the horrendous “pun” – if you can even call it that – in the blog post title. It’s cos of Cheltenham init? There was lot’s of matched betting being done… get it now? No? Apologies once again)

expenses

As usual you can check out my Awesome FI Tracking Spreadsheet for a full breakdown of Income/Expense tracking and Net Worth tracking, as well as updated some of the summary sheets as well. Remember you can copy this to use/update as you please using Google Sheets “File -> Make a copy” menu command!

The figures below as usual represent: £Current Month (£2018 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)

• Total £3256 (£3605 / £3205) – Around an average desired spend month so overall very happy with this!
• Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848) 
• Household £569 (£594 / £586) – Slightly under budget but that is mainly because of no council tax again. Things change back to usual next month on that front! We had what can only be described as a whopper of a grocery bill this month, but we did a MuscleFood ¹ order and a couple of other big shops that should mean that April’s bill is a lot smaller.
• Holiday £145 (£864 / £333) – We booked up a one night stay in Eastbourne for Mrs T’s birthday and 2 nights away with friends. These bloody groupon/wowcher offers are just too cheap to ignore sometimes aren’t they!?
• Going out £636 (£412 / £467) – A big month on “going out” but admittedly some of this does include some stuff for the future (tickets etc) plus we bought about £120 worth of booze in bulk which should stand us in good stead for the next few months, which I thought was more fair to classify as going out, then groceries.
• Transport £91 (£202 / £192) – Another cheap month but the front brakes are now squeaking on the car so might have to get that looked at in April.
• Personal Care £53 (£90 / £92)
• Home/Garden £29 (£26 / £100) – Bought a bird table and feed for the garden from a bank holiday weekend trip to the garden centre. We know how to live!
• Lifestyle £118 (£132 / £141) – Clothes spend crept up slightly but nothing much to report really.
• Gifts/Charity £629 (£276 / £187) – I’m starting to think I’ve under budgeted for gifts already this year. It turns out we just seem to really like buying people gifts. However, the main bulk of this is actually Charity (£450). I’ve allocated a big chunk of £400 here on charity (we actually only donated £50 in reality)  for this month because of the whole 10% of matched betting profits go to charity thing. Spoiler alert: I made a decent amount this month. But didn’t want to kick the can of the charity donations down the road to subsequent months where income may be lower and it would ruin our savings rate. Basically, I’m trying to smooth out our month to month savings rate somewhat by using some sneaky accounting ². Anyway the bottom line is that I’ve put £400 extra down for charity in March when in actual fact it will be donated in April, but won’t show up on April’s monthly update. I think I will start doing this every month with the whole betting/charity thing because then it will give me a kick up the arse to actually donate it straight away the next month, because it’s already “come out of the budget” so to speak, and last year we ended up donating in huge chunks as kept forgetting, which did in fact cause some spike downs in our savings rate on those months, which I found a bit dispiriting and the opposite of what I should have felt when donating! OK, I think we all get it now, let’s move on…
• Hobbies/Sport £68 (£61 / £149) – Not much going on here, golf season is about to kick off though so good we’re running under budget for this so far!
• Admin £3 (£44 / £20) –
• Financial £5 (£3 / £15) –
• Children £61 (£62 / £60) – And incredibly consistent performance from TFS Jr so far this year and she is bang on track to hit her budgeted spend. I guess we must be super parents or something? :). Bonus feature – “TFS Jr’s catchphrase of the month” – Is currently “Naughty Daddy!” although it still remains to be seen what exactly I’ve done wrong. She even says this a lot when I’m not actually present, e.g. I’m at work or something. So it must have been something really bad if she remembers it that well. The only redeeming feature about my sorry situation is that it seems I’m not alone in my crimes, as we often get a “Naughty Grandad” as well. 🙂

income

Figures in the same format as expenses…

• Total £6495 +£395 Pension (£4785 / £4422) – Wowza! Already breaking target average which is some going considering Bonus month at work isn’t until July.
• TFS Income £2472 +£395 Pension (£2543 / £2500) – Nice average month here.
• Mrs T Income £667 (£615 / £600) – Standard month again although pretty big news on this front… Mrs T has quit her job! Yes, she is better at quitting her job than her supposedly “I want to quit my job” type of husband. Short story is her boss turned out to be a total bitch face, and as there is only 2 of them in the office, it made life pretty miserable most days for her. We talked it through and decided she should just leave even without something else lined up because, well, money isn’t everything is it?! She is obviously on the hunt for something new but haven’t found anything suitable yet, but hopefully something will come up soon.
• Ratesetter £55 (£22 / £5) – They are still running a decent signup offer, the terms are now you get a free £100 if you invest £5000 for a year. It’s a lot to stick in for a whole year but still pretty good for the free money, so if you’d like to avail of this offer then click on this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link!). Also looks like someone signed up through my link so I got £50 from that, so many thanks to whoever did that! 🙂
• Child benefit £82 (£82 / £82) – The gift that keeps on giving
• Refunds £25 (£13 / £5) – This is mainly doing Delay Repay for my train ticket whenever there is a delay getting from/to work!

Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £3181 (£1403 / £750) – Well here’s where it gets interesting! This probably deserves a whole post in itself, but I’ll try to give you a brief rundown instead:

• No Lay Accas – £459 – This is a very accurate figure as I track it using the OddsMonkey profit tracker (you can track all of your matched bets on there but I only chose to track this type as it makes it so easy to do so)
• Cheltenham “matched betting” £332 – as per my wrap up here, although I lost some other money that week, I will roll that into the figure below as it is more suitable to go into that I think.
• Each Way sniping + other gambling – £2390 – This figure contains quite an epic up and down (then up again) story which can pretty much summarised thusly: I started the month with a crazy win on the horses where I bet two 16/1 shots in a double and they both won, so I won about a grand! Then I proceeded to lose some of that by doing some each way snipes but with far too big stakes, I was trying to walk before I could run. I then lost a bit more (£400ish) of it during Cheltenham week, and a bit more trialling out a Greyhounds system (another £400ish!). I don’t regret that last one as you have to be “in it to win it” as they say – I just wish I’d kept stakes lower before I found my feet with any of it. The system would probably work long term but I don’t think I’ll be doing it, for now at least, as the racing each way stuff is going so well. Anyway – Losing on Cheltenham week really was the slap in the face that I needed so I decided to take it seriously, set up a spreadsheet and do the each way thing properly and keep my stakes consistent. If you want any info on how it all actually works, read the OddsMonkey guides on this page and also this forum thread here, I am pretty sure you need to be a full member to read those pages though – sign up here if you want to check them out. Anyway, the first week was kinda boring and was barely breaking even, but the second week went absolutely nuts and I just kept hitting winner after winner. I ended up £2200 up for the two and a bit week period where I started doing it properly, and the rest of the profit was just from various winnings/losings on other random bets over the month.

I would just like to caution that just because I’ve done well with this so far this month, doing the each way sniping is not easy money and there is no guarantee you will win so I definitely don’t want to encourage people to follow me in on this. But the maths says that over time you should win if you stick to hitting horses that have a rating above a certain percentage. It works well for me because I can get away with spinning OddsMonkey at work and you have to be quick to jump on the good prices before they go. Also, I would advise against betting the night before or early in the morning as you are far more likely to get your accounts closed/restricted quickly doing that. The best thing about it is that it works on “offer gubbed” accounts, i.e. accounts where you have had offer/promotions eligibly taken away from you. You will likely be “fully gubbed” ³ in time, i.e. they will restrict your stakes to near zero, and at that time you simply move onto another bookie account.

It’s certainly not feasible for every matched bettor to use this method successfully, but I guess you could try it at weekends or evening racing, if you have any spare time free. And obviously take the stakes nice and low from the start before you get a handle on it. There is definitely a bit of an art in picking the right horses to back (I would avoid anything below around 4/1 as a rule, for example) and getting on quick enough. I would suggest starting with £1 each way until you are comfortable with it and have done at least 100 bets and have made some decent profit. I would do stakes as a percentage of you bank, so if your bank is £1000 then I would do 0.5% each way per bet (i.e. £5 each way), this should let you withstand any bad luck and losing runs, but as I say nothing is guaranteed here.

Anyway… My ROI for that stint was a ridiculous 70.79% from stakes of £3107 on my bets. Not exactly chump change, but that is with a default stake of £10 each way over 190 bets, so it all adds quickly! I am not stupid enough to think this 70% will keep up long term, and in all likelihood I will probably hit a losing streak soon so may even end up losing in April or other future months, but over time I am hoping to make around 10% ROI on it. If I stake £4K a month which seems like it is easily doable with consistent efforts, that is £400 quid and I would happily take that.

I could write more on this but I’ve written a lot already and honestly I as I say I really do not want to encourage anyone to do this, because it is technically just gambling and I wouldn’t want anyone to end up losing off of what I’ve said… so unless anyone is actually really interested in it, this is all you are going to get on the subject for now.

Strategy going forward

In case you hadn’t guessed already, I’m going to concentrate on both the Each Way stuff and the No Lay Accas. If I can make an average of £400/month on Each Way and £350/month on No Lay Accas then that is my target done and dusted already, and from what I’ve seen so far this is acheivable. The other thing to consider going forward with the Each Way is to increase my stakes once I’ve made enough profit to be comfortable to do so. I think I might do this once I hit profits of £3K for want of an arbitrary number, but I won’t do anything stupid like double my stake, and probably just go up to £12.50ew or £15ew or something like that.

Finally on matched betting, read (or skip) the usual spiel about OddsMonkey:

If anyone is interested I have been using 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, and go into more exciting and potentially more lucrative no lose acca and each way betting.

Ooooh actually I have to say one final thing to say on the subject and that is I finally beat the monthly profits of my good friend, blogger and matched bettor ERG/MBG who only made a paltry £3122 for the month! I hope you can all join in with me laughing at him and also taking pity at his slim pickings ⁴ 😉

savings rate and net worth

The uber income and moderate spending adds up to a very decent 52.74%, right on track for the 30% target for the year! Hopefully we can kick on from here and at least maintain that throughout the rest of the year.

Net worth did this:

Excluding house equity: £157,015 / £1,021 / 0.65%

Including house equity: £239,160 / £669 / 0.28%

Liquid Freedom: £72,906 / £3,003/ 4.30%

Looks like the markets stuttered again but still a slight overall increase due to the savings, which is nice. More importantly a big jump in the Liquid Freedom category and we’re back over the £70K mark for the first time since last October. Let’s get that over the £80K mark as soon as possible this year shall we?! 🙂

Mini crypto update – Still haven’t done a proper spreadsheet on this yet but rest assured I can tell you that I am heavily in the red at time of writing as Cryptos have crashed to recent lows again!!! I’ve tried buying on the dips one last time, and now I’m definitely done with it (I know I said that last month, but I mean it this month, hah!). Anyway, I will fill in the spreadsheet I found which works out all of your profit and loss in the coming weeks and do a separate update on the whole thing. I maintain that the Net Worth part of this is still what I’ve put into it so far, until I lock in losses (or profits (hah!), either of which I’m not planning on doing any time soon) so that figure will stay static for now at least.

More updates coming soon…

Believe it or not I actually have a bit more to write about March, including a links round up, but seeing as this post has already gone over 2500 words I’m going to call it a day and do another mini update for the next post.

Oh and I know I keep promising the No Lay Acca guide… That is 100% for sure the next post after that… Pinky promise!!!!

How was your March? Good I hope!