theFIREstarter

And the rivers ran red with the blood of my bank account in July!

Ah and we were doing so well :)!

I knew July was going to be an expensive month what with a couple of weekends away and also a few big expenses such as car insurance and tax being due, but we also got thwarted by the TFS Mobile (yet again!!!) when we finally decided to take it to the garage. More on that in a bit.

Anyway all told the bottom line this month was….

Yikes! This week I am short on time to do the full update and really think these reports are getting too long and boring (and “table-y”!) so I’ll write a bit about what we’ve been up to instead.

more car woes

There have been a few niggling issues with the old TFS Mobile ¹ and after some googling and getting not too far, we finally decided to take it to a garage. There were a few small issues but the total bill was looking around £400 and I didn’t think it sounded like anything I would like to try myself. Also the car has, in all honesty, been nothing but a pain in the backside since we’ve got it!!! We’ve spent about £1,000 on it since we got it a year and a half ago. We finally admitted to ourselves that we’d bought a bit of a dud and it was time to go our separate ways.

Despite all of the issues we actually love the Peugeot 307 and love the fuel economy of the diesel model, so decided that we’d just keep our eyes peeled for a much better version of essentially the same model. We struck gold within a week of looking and found a car that had only done 42,000 miles (compared to our one’s 136,000!!!), was generally was a lot more tidy, had been kept in good condition and well serviced (only 2 owners and service book with all the stamps in it etc…)

We managed to pick this up for a grand and sell our old one for £600, so for the net cost of £400 which equaled the maintenance estimate for the old one anyway, so although expensive we are overall happy with this outcome, given our starting position.

Lesson learnt: We bought the first car on a bit of a whim and should have held out for a better car with more service history etc… We have paid for this lesson in hard £££ (and not inconsiderable amount of blood and tears from my attempts at helping to maintain it)!!! Considering we bought it for £1,300 and sold it for £600 a year and a half later, I am fully prepared to admit “we got done” on this one 🙁

A back of the envelope calculation of the cost per month of owning with maintenance and depreciation = ( ( £1300 – £600 ) + £1100  ) / 18 = £100 per month! (That’s before tax, insurance and the usual stuff everyone has to do).

Our total transport cost this month then…

The service / parts etc were the diagnostic works on the old car (and they fixed up a few small issues they found) as well as replacing a tyre and re-fixing the exhaust back onto some new rubber mountings as they’d perished (those items were not included in the £400 estimate, that would have been on top of the £153.22 we’d already paid). We thought we’d never sell the damn thing without at least putting a little TLC into it first!

other expenses and stuff

There is genuinely not that much else worth reporting on but here is a quick summary:

• Car insurance was due and was about £220
• Golf was quite expensive and came in at ~£140 but not hugely over budget. The average for the year is still just under budget at £92.87 so not exactly the end of the world!
• We got a rebate from EDF when we switched energy suppliers as we were in credit. This came very nicely to £150, so I will report our next two months energy bills (which are actually £74) as £0 because then everything pretty much balances up nicely. At the end of the year I want to know how much we’re spending on the energy, not how much the direct debit is then finding out that our “income” is higher than it should be due to the stupid rebates. Hope that makes sense!
• Our total “Going out” bill including dining and drinking and “holiday” was quite high at £543.52 due to the trip to the IOW, I had a few work do’s to attend to, Mrs T went to Wireless festival, plus we had a trip to the races at Lingfield that was planned ages ago (we got one winner which paid for the losers so it wasn’t all that expensive to be honest!)
• I bought some practically brand new running shoes for £42 (new price was around £80!!!) – I’ve been using mine for four years now and they say to change them every year so thought I deserved a new pair… 🙂
• I paid out for some extra brewing equipement. But, I finished brewing my beer! I will do a post on this soon with how it all went. The final product is acceptable but I think is a little flat in certain bottles, so I think I didn’t put enough sugar in some of the bottles. I’ve only drunk 4 so far so hopefully there are more good than bad.
• Oh… and having waxed lyrical about the how you should quit playing the lottery in my last post, I have to hang my head in shame and admit I had a bit of a blow out on the sports gambling last month to the tune of £155. What a tw@t! I think I’ve finally got that out of my system ², so will be avoiding it like the plague for the foreseeable.

income saves the day

Despite the high expenses, my bonus got paid this month, so overall we’ve had a pretty decent one in terms of savings rate!

Total income was: £10,038.17

Which makes a total savings rate for the month of: 66.47%

So despite the high expenses, still good overall, but oh how nice it would have been to join the ranks of the 75%+ club for just one month of the year!!! Oh well, I am now looking forward to next July where I’ll be acting like a hermit the whole month and saving every penny of the bonus I possibly can do 😀

August should be slightly higher income as well as I always seem to get taxed to shit in bonus month then get a bit back the next (does anyone else ever get that? Bit weird!?)

I’ll update the savings rate and net worth page fully next week when I have a bit more time but you can always delve into things further as always by having a look at my spreadsheet (and remember you can copy and use that yourself if you so wish!)

goals update

I’m not even going to bother with a separate goals update post this month as not really had time to do anything on any of them, we’ve just been too busy having fun (and sorting out the car hassles!) as you can probably tell ³! 🙂

However 2 of the financial goal deadlines were due up when I got paid my bonus so let’s see how they went…:

• I wanted to hit 60% savings rate for the first half of the year – with the bonus month we finally improved at the last hurdle up to 50.53%, but that was still nowhere near really. LOSE!
• I wanted to increase Net Worth by £20k or 30% – We managed to increase it by £19,971.02 or 29%. I think that’s close enough to call it a WIN!?

It’s weird how we hit the Net Worth goal but not the savings rate one, I guess the conclusion there is that both our income and expenses were higher than predicted?

The good news is that in the second half of the year I’ll have a lot more income than I thought I would have when I drew up the goals originally, so rather than shooting for a 0% savings rate we should be able to revise that up to at least 10% or even 20%. I will do some forecasts and reevaluate those goals ASAP!

fin and see some of you real soon!

August is likely to be more of the same as July in all honesty but we’ll see! At least we hopefully won’t need to buy another car anyway… 🙂

We’re away this weekend with friends and also next weekend with the UK FI crew in York – hurrah! I’m finally going to meet some of you crazy bunch! Then I have a stag do the following weekend and finally hope to chill out on the bank holiday weekend. While it could be another really expensive month I just can’t see it being anywhere near as bad as this one, especially if we are a bit more frugal on our weekends away, which hopefully shouldn’t be too hard with all the frugal badasses in York 😉

Cheers and see some of you next week! 🙂