March Income/Expenses Report – Episode III – Revenge of the SIPP
The view from Cloud City … Tuesday
Well I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a bit of a crazy month! We’ve been busy and have admittedly spent a lot of money, as you will see below. I also decided to cram a load of money last minute into my SIPP as this is probably going to be the last year for a while at least that I’ll be a 40% tax payer. SIPPs are bloody great and I wish I’d started to fill one up a few years ago, but I never really knew how good they were (or what they were at all). If you don’t know either then check out this great article from Monevator which explains all: SIPPs vs ISAs
Play around with this handy SIPP tax relief calculator from Hargreaves Lansdown. You have about 2 days left of the tax year to get some money in there so be quick if you haven’t done it yet and have spare cash laying around waiting to be invested! (You can put the cash into the SIPP and decide where to invest later on, by the way).
So the bottom line is that we had high expenses that were somewhat offset by the tax boost that was given to us by shoving a load of money into the SIPP, so still maintained an OK savings rate. We obviously can’t do that every month so really need to focus once again on keeping the outgoings down, which I am confident we can do for the next few months, until we incur some big expenses in summer when we come to do the Bathroom etc…
Enough waffling… onto the gory details!
March Income
| Categories | March | Notes |
| Total | £5,869.13 | |
| TFS | £2,681.95 | 1 |
| Mrs TFS | £1,050.77 | |
| Interest TSB 1 TFS | £6.01 | |
| Interest TSB 2 Mrs TFS | £0.00 | 2 |
| Interest Santander | £13.13 | |
| Cashback Santander | £2.27 | |
| Cashback CCs | £0.00 | |
| Solar Panels | £0.00 | |
| Gifts | £0.00 | |
| Sold stuff | £0.00 | |
| Refunds | £250.00 | 3 |
| Other | £25.00 | 4 |
| SIPP Tax back | £1,840.00 | 5 |
- My income that hits my bank account is higher this month as our Sharesave scheme got cancelled, so the £250 that was normally automatically deducted from my paycheck is now paid to me instead.
- WTF!? No interest TSB?! What are you playing at!? Email has been sent, explanation demanded!
- We got a refund from the Air Source Heat Pump deposit we put down, as we decided not to go with this in the end. Read more about that decision in that link type thing that I just linked to a second ago. The one that said Air Source Heat Pump. You know the score by now.
- £25 was lottery winnings from Mrs TFS (Groan! I can’t exactly grumble though as you will see in a bit)
- This is the 20% tax bump that we automatically receive into our SIPP account by putting in £9,200 into it. Wahey! I should be able to claim another 20% back on top of that, which as far as I am aware gets paid directly as cash back to us after you fill out a self assessment tax form. As I don’t really know exactly how much we are due from that, I don’t want to assume what we’ll get and will just count that as income as and when we receive that money.
March Expenses
Total expenses: £3,765.29
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.
- Holiday £915 – This is the main reason why it’s been such a bumper month on the expenses. We paid for flights to Madrid, but also decided to get most of our Euros as the exchange rate is so good right now. I have a stag do on Friday in Berlin and also got Euros for that as well, and should have enough for our trip to Madrid and enough left over to get us going for our second family holiday to Spain. So effectively we have paid up front for 3 big cost items, which means those months we should now spend a lot less than previously thought. So it’s not all that bad!
- Groceries £292.24– D’oh! After two good months this seems like a lot, but I bet it is still small compared to a lot of other “normal” people :). And in all fairness, we ate like kings this month, including treating Mrs TFS’s parents to a slap up Sirloin steak meal at ours which was quite expensive, and a few easter egg purchases got chucked into the figure as well. We also still have about 2 weeks of dinners of food in the freezer and cupboards, so I’m really keen to actually eat what we have next month and should hopefully see a dramatic reduction again in April.
- Phones £16.99 / £33.36 – Mrs TFS’s first smaller phone bill. It’s not that much less but better than nothing considering she is still in contract. I still haven’t sorted out a cheaper landline bit, slapped wrist TFS! I will add this task onto my next sprint so it doesn’t get forgotten about! 😉
- Clothes £79.88 – Not sure what happened here. A girl’s gotta shop I suppose! Just as a guy’s gotta golf…
- Golf £102.65 – Played a fair bit of golf this month but still around my budget of £100/month so I’m pretty happy with this. No handicap reduction just yet but I can feel an improvement and am positive it’s just around the corner.
- Dining & Drinking £524.18 – We had two birthday nights out with friends this month (I miscalculated last month and all the spending from the birthday at the end of Feb actually came through in March!), a big day/evening out in Brighton with Mrs TFS’s work friends, and I had a leaving do to attend to. Either way you cut it though, this is a lot to spend on food & booze! Seeing as the stag do is already effectively paid for, for this month, the only big thing in April is the corresponding hen do for Mrs TFS, so I am thinking next month will be a lot less once again.
- Car service/mechanics £0 – The TFS Mobile is 2 month and counting without any repairs needed. I am still happy with this outcome!
- Gas & Electricity – £176 – We didn’t pay anything last month and then got stung twice this month! Also they are blatantly charging us way too much, £88 per month when we are averaging £70 in the winter months, so I am guessing around £50-60 for the year round average. Anyway there isn’t much we can do but wait for the rebate cheque when the amount gets significantly positive.
- Garden – £100 – Mrs TFS has been scouting for a garden table and chairs on eBay/gumtree/etc for about a month and we finally got a great deal that was just around the corner to pick up. A really nice hardwood round table with 4 chairs and a big umbrella as well, must have cost around £400 new for the lot!
- Gambling – £107 – I’ll address the elephant in the room: I used to be quite a big gambler. 99% on sports gambling and only on sports I know a lot about (i.e. golf). I know you probably aren’t going to believe this, but I actually used to make a bit of money on this, I stopped because the time vs money effort wasn’t really worth it in the end. Anyway, there are some great offers to be had when you sign up to new bookmaker accounts and since I signed up to Topcashback(affiliate link 2) I noticed that you can combine some free bet offers with cashback, so it’s a double win! I’ve opened up a few accounts and taken on some shrewd 3 long term golf bets (Ryder Cup, Money List bets, etc…), used the free bets to top up those bets and gain cashback from Topcashback. So I fully expect to get most of this back and with a chance of winning a four figure sum on top of that, I thought it was a good move. But if/when the money comes back in, that will just come into the income report, so for now, it’s obviously an expense!
- Overall £3,765.29 – Obviously, an expensive month, and this brings up the monthly average in 2015 to £2,985.73, which is well above the £2,666 I laid out here in our yearly budget. However as much of this was future spending for April/May that we’ve paid for up front, I am confident the average will be back down to around that figure after the next 2 months have passed.
March Totals & Savings Rate
| March | Notes | |
| Net Worth | £73,189.80 | 1 |
| Years to FI | 18.70 | |
| SAVING PERCENTAGE | 43.74% | 2 |
| March | ||
| Total | £2,930.61 | |
| Income vs Spend | £2,099.88 | |
| Share Save 1 (TFS) | £0.00 | |
| Share Save 2 (Mrs TFS) | £250.00 | |
| Pension 1 (TFS) | £453.69 | |
| Pension 2 (Mrs TFS) | £127.04 |
- This has gone up around £8K since last month. This is in part due to the ~£3K saved this month but also previously I had been removing ~£4K off our Net Worth as that spending was already allocated to the kitchen/bathroom renovations I have mentioned previously. I have finally come to the conclusion that I can’t be bothered with silly adjustments like that, as and when we come to spend that money, our Net Worth will take a big negative hit… so be it!
- It could have been a mega month with the SIPP tax boost! Alas… 43% will have to do
That’s it for now! I was going to write up my goals progress but will save that for another post on Monday due to: A) This post is already nearly 2000 words long. B) It’s 5:58am on Friday and I am getting picked up for this Stag do at 6:05am!!! I’ll catch up with everything on Monday if I’m still alive 🙂
Auf Wiedersehen, Pets! 🙂
How did you do in March!? Let us know below!
Notes:
- Remember you are free to copy this to your own google drive and edit to put your own figures in there! Let me know if you do so and make any decent additions and I can graft them onto my own one? Or any suggested additions, again just let me know. ↩
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- In my humble opinion ↩
Discussion (19) ¬
Holy smoke! That eating out expense is pretty insane! Still; A pretty heavy month nicely offset by the tax relief on the SIPP. And to think.. I get stick for spending £2 a week on my gambling 😉
Haha, that seems a bit harsh ERG, unless it’s the lottery which I will continue to give stick to Mrs TFS for for as long as she does it 🙂
It’s funny about the “eating out expense” (it’s actually a total “going out” category, i.e. any expenses incurred on nights out including most travel, I can’t be bothered to split it down into food, alcohol, taxi, bus, train, etc…) as that’s not that much over the average for us, around the £200 mark each.
Different people have insanely different perspectives of what is reasonable and what isn’t I guess.
The perspective I am coming from is when I was 18 I used to go up to London and drop £100 on a night out (without a meal) without thinking twice about it. Bear in mind this was in 1999!!!!
So to spend £100 on a full day out in Brighton including a meal 16 years later seems pretty reasonable to me.
Obviously I still think there is work to do in that category but I’m not going to turn down every invite I get to go out, as I still find this sort of thing quite fun.
Admittedly it’s money up the wall, I can deal with that 🙂
Hi TFS
If I understand correctly your net earnings were £2,681 and Mrs TFS’s were £1,050 for a total £3,731. In contrast you’re spending £3,765. So you’re spending more than you earn… Hoping that’s a one off or FIRE is more than 18.7 years away 🙂
Agree with ERG also. That is some serious Dining & Drinking you’re doing there.
Cheers
RIT
Hi RIT,
I am taking that as a gentle ribbing as there was a smiley in the comment, but on a factual note it is entirely incorrect. We saved 43.74% when comparing total income to total spending this month. Fair enough the large SIPP tax bonus will not appear every month, but then neither will I be buying £700 worth of Euros, flights to Madrid, a garden table etc etc… every month.
All I can do is sum up incomings and outgoings each month and track them and mark them down, and at the end of the year see where I am at.
Someone who’s been in the stock market as long as you have should also realise that this is a long term gain and stressing over the monthly fluctuations in spending/income is probably not worth it.
Cheers!
Certainly was a heavy month! It definitely looks like you had a good time going out though.
Really well done for being able to set aside so much for your SIPP though. Me and There’s Value were recently having a discussion about SIPPs vs. ISAs. I still have to get my head around the SIPP genre!
Keep up the good work!
Haha, yep, it was!
SIPPs are awesome but it does feel kinda weird locking a lot of money away for such a long time. I fully plan on being around when I’m 55 though, so it makes sense! I also don’t plan on being a 40% tax payer when I am withdrawing either so it makes even more sense!
Dude. What happened?! “Don’t be sh1t at life” as our good Zombie friend would say. You’d better make up for this by having the frugalest April ever.
Mach Spaß in Berlin!
Prost!
Hah, thanks for the advice M!
Berlin was uber geil!
Prost!
Hi TFS
I saw your bit on gambling and went “oooh!”, because it’s something I’ve done before. I was doing very well too with my bets but instead of banking my winnings, I ultimately gambled it all away. I’ve really cut down on my gambling, although will have my annual splurge next week on the Grand National! Fingers crossed your bets come out good!
Summer fashions coming out soon – Mrs TFS will be out shopping again lol, although I guess like you say, a gal’s got to have a hobby too, like you have your golf!
An expensive month, especially the drinking and dining but with some of those expenses for the future, your average should hopefully come down.
Great work on lumping so much into your SIPP!
It’s a tough one weenie… I’ve seen a friend go bankrupt mainly via online poker (and very bad money management). It was hard to give advice because he used to lie about how much he won and lost so you never really know what to trust. That would make a great post actually!
Saying that, I think if you sensible you can make money. I’ve had some very nice holidays paid for with medium-large wins including Mexico in 2011 where me and Mrs TFS got engaged. I always like to joke that she owes that to Luke Donald (a golfer) who I won a big bet on… haha 🙂
Basic advice is don’t play casino games as you don’t have an edge! Sports gambling, you may have an edge if you know the sport well or put hours of research in. Overall for me, it’s not really worth it but still like a fun bet every now and then, or when taking advantage of some cashback/free bet offers it makes sense!
Oh yea and got to have a few small bets on the National… it’s a British tradition!
Cheers for the great comment 🙂
It would be great if that those golfing bets really came up trumps. You might be sitting on those new garden chairs (great bargain by the way) sipping champagne in the near future. Fingers crossed, and hope you survived the weekend 🙂
Thanks!
Just about survived. Chairs are looking great now we’ve cleaned and oiled them, not quite new but near enough for what we paid for them!
I like to play the betting thing right back at em with matched betting. You’ll never make as much as real betting of course but its pretty much guaranteed and pays for a night out (or a weeks shopping however you look at it).
http://www.savethestudent.org/make-money/what-is-matched-betting.html
Hah… that takes me back to my student days in ~2002! The offers were much more generous back then. Nowadays I just use the free bets to put a few bets on that I think look good and hope they win, but you can lock in some free money if you use that matched betting system. Too much effort for me but thanks for the link!
BTW, as far as i know, you can only draw from a SIPP at age 55 right? (could be moved to 57 now though). Have you figured out your plan in terms of your assets from the period when you retire before 55 to up to 55? It seems a bit more complicated in the UK to sort out an early FI plan because of the age N when you retire, to age 55 when you can draw from the SIPP, to then age 65 to when you are entitled to a state pension. I’d love to see a post about how you tackle this and how your mortgage will play a factor into all of it.
Hi Joe!
Great comment!
Yes I’m aware of the 55 SIPP age limit, I believe it is moving up to 57 in 2028 so it will affect me as I’ll be 47.
There is a merry dance of variables we have in the UK between those things you mentioned. I have thought about this both in general and have attempted to knock up some spreadsheets to model roughly what might happen as well. The spreadsheets were a bit of a mess which is why I didn’t make a post on it (I did them about a year ago). It would be great to try to tidy it all up into a coherent post for on here though as I am sure many people are in the same boat.
With the mortgage you have people like ermine saying he made a mistake paying his off early, but I am not so sure myself! Being mortgage free is surely a safe feeling rather than having all the money sloshing around in the market. I guess the main point is hold out for as long as possible paying it off so you can take the tax free lump sum from the SIPP at 55/57 and pay it off with that, on which you are getting at least a 20% boost on your cash/investments!
Thanks for the support and giving me the idea for a post… I will endeavour to get it out asap but this could mean some time later in the year knowing how recent requests have gone… 🙂
Cheers!