theFIREstarter

The beautiful town square and church in Benissa

As mentioned in my previous financial update, we’ve just got back from our Spanish holiday part II. So following Mr 1500’s lead I’ve decided to spam you with some holiday pics (don’t worry I’ve put most right at the bottom so you don’t have to go through them all if you don’t want!)

As usual time has been tight but I’ve made some progress with certain goals this month so overall I am happy. Read on to find out what went down and what went up!

I’m continuing with a Win/Lose/Draw to denotation how well I think I’ve done on each goal, should be fairly self explanatory!

I will only comment on any goals that have had or should have had some updates on to save on repetition – If you want to read the full list of goals though go here.

Let’s get stuck in shall we?

financial goals

• Set up a bank account for my new company (ASAP) – Still no progress. The day I identified last month was the day of the wedding we had to go to so it was pretty foolish of me thinking I’d have time to shoot into town and potentially spend hours setting this up! June looks much more empty thank goodness so I should be able to down there this month. Fingers crossed! Lose!
• Learn about and submit a tax form (April) – Still didn’t get time! Bah! This week seems busy as leading up to my birthday on Friday but hopefully will have next time during the middle of the month. Lose!
• Increase Net Worth by £20K or ~30% by end of year bonus paycheck (July/August) – I’ve back dated my Net Worth figures so they should be even more accurate now and put that up on the net worth tracker page. It’s gone up by £10,976 since starting to track it now ¹. This leaves me ~£9K to bump it up with only two paychecks to go, but with the bonus this should really be quite easy, which we are now all but certain to receive (phew!). I just need to make sure we hold onto as much of it as possible in the months after that! Draw!
• Achieve overall savings rate of 60% (First Half) – I guess with the bonus coming in victory could be pulled from the jaws of defeat but it remains to be seen with an average savings rate of only 44.53% so far this year. Lose!

home/garden goals

• Make my own bike shed – Absolutely no time for this one at all. All spare time I had was spent finishing off bits in the garden. Lose!
• Garden spruce up (March/April) – Design and create new garden layout – Remove stones and put down small lawn, build up flower beds and create vegetable patch(es). 99% Final time I will mention the garden as this is now basically done barring ongoing maintenance! This month we made some raised beds with the new sleepers we bought, smashed up and repurposed some of the old concrete slabs, finished painting the fence, planted some more flowers, seeds, and battled to keep our lawn in check and existing flowers and veg alive. I think we still have a lot to learn with this but nothing has completely died just yet! Oh and we also had about 3 BBQ’s to celebrate. Yeaaaaa buddy!!! Win!

physical goals

• Run 1 mile under 6 minutes – I ran a mile in 5:27. MEGAWIN! 🙂 

See run on Monday May 11th for 1 mile run time

• Run 2 miles in under 13 minutes – As the picture above aludes to I also beat my 2 mile goal, I did 2 miles in 12:51! This seemed so much harder than the one mile run to keep it going even though it was a slower pace. But anyway it is a Win!

• Run 5K (3.1 miles) in under 20 minutes – It wasn’t until a few days ago so technically not in May, but I did a 4 mile run and had in my mind that I wanted to beat 21 minutes so I actually messed up a bit there. The first 3 miles of the run came in at 20:28 and the last three miles came in at 19:58 so I guess I beat it anyway! Whoo! Win

• New Running Goals? – Having beaten all three of my goals I guess I need to set some new ones. Well I have a 10K to run on the 21st June so my goal for this month will be to do that in 40 minutes. Basically this means I will have to run slightly faster than the average pace of that 4 mile run I did for an extra 2.2 miles, and let me tell you, I was pretty spent at the end of the 4 mile run! Therefore this is a stretch goal for me, however with me beating my speed records in the lead up, also hopefully a realistic one to aim for.
• Improve general body strength – Do at least 2 x 10 minute Sworkit App body strength work outs per week – I think I did 1 sworkit. Same old excuses apply, been playing squash, golf and gardening so plenty of general exercise. I was considering dropping this one but now the gardening is over I think I should keep it to see if I can build up some upper body muscle the working out way! Lose!
• Get my golf handicap down to 20 – Played 4 times including a 2 round competition with some friends which I won, while my handicap dropped by 1 shot down to 23. Points wise I shot 38, 28, 31 and 32 points over the four rounds ² so there is *some* consistency building as well, and 2 of the courses I played were basically hard as nails weighing in at over 6,500 yards each!!! So I am going to have to call this one a win I think! Win!
• “Get better at squash” – Hard to quantify as usual but I played 3 times with “work friend” and won all 3 and once with “home friend” and also won. This sounds like an easy win then, but the games with work friend are always so close and I am not big headed enough to think that luck does not sometimes play a part. Anyway, there are no pictures on the stats card as they say, so we’ll have to call this one another Win!
• Average 20 weeks alcohol per week or less – Oh dear oh dear. It was always going to be a tough one being in holiday mode for practically half the month, but in May I consumed…. drum roll please…. 52.10 units per week. This is eye opening because I am now quite conscious of how much I am drinking and felt like I held back on numerous occasions, especially on the family holiday (apart from one day where me and the brother-in-law sank a crate of (33cl) 5.4% San Miguel – or “seniorita beater” 🙂 as we humorously called it – between us). For example I opted to drink sin-alcohol beer instead and was a designated driver so wasn’t really drinking in the day went we were out and about. So really it is eye opening and a bit scary as all other previous holidays I have not had that mindset and so would have surely consumed a lot more! Anyway enough waffle… it’s clear a Lose!

other goals

Write on average 2 posts a week for the whole of 2015  – I made 9 posts in May which I am more than happy with. I still need to build up some fully written reserve posts but for now I’m enjoying writing and feel I am posting a decent amount of content. Long may this continue! Win!

TFS Challenges – No challenges done. I think the first one to tackle might have to be the switch it off challenge because I just cannot see me ever getting 8 hours of sleep, not eating meat or spending only £25 per month on food – see: various mention of BBQ’s – right now! Lose!

conclusions

A mixed bag once again. I felt like I did well on the physical goals and the financial goals are slightly turning around, although I need to sort out my Taxes and business bank accounts! And I think my liver needs a good few months to dry out as well! 🙂

Hopefully I will have some more of these things licked by this time next month.

How did you get on in May!?

I’ll leave you with some more holiday pics or #holidayspam as it is now known 🙂

A nice vista of some Spanish mountains to start us off with

WHAT!? They sell empanadas in Lidl over here!? My dreams have come true. Yes I am that sad that I take pictures in foreign supermarkets by the way 🙂

Cute dog photo #1

Cute dog photo #2

Cute dog photo #3. Arrrrrrr!

Finally if you ever wanted to know what the TFS family do for entertainment, now you know. Yes we are trying to knock over plastic bottles with a pair of tights over our heads! It’s called Minute to win it and there are loads of games you can play. See here for an idea of what sort of minute to win it games you can play! Good cheap entertainment I can assure you!