theFIREstarter

Most random photo I could find from November!

Hey all!

Well as the name of the title probably suggests our good run of savings rates has come crashing to a spectacular end, with a lot of heavy spending all hitting us in one month (all entirely optional really, it has to be said!).

Let’s find out how/why/what the hell happened shall we?!

Quick note: This turned out to be quite a monster update in the end… I would go for a wee grab yourself a cuppa before continuing if I were you!

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 £8705 (£4576 / £3205) – Aghhghghhghg!!!!
• Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848) 
• Household/Bills £709 (£679 / £602) –  Includes “Groceries” which came in at £391 (£371 / £325) which isn’t actually that bad as we bought a bulk of stuff for Christmas, so hoping December’s bill is going to be slightly smaller than usual. In fact I know it will be because Asda messed up our delivery the other night and didn’t turn up, so Mrs T collected it the next day, and then they cancelled the payment! I am the sort of person who would correct someone at the till if they had undercharged me but when it comes to stuff like this I am not going to ring up and be put on hold for 20 minutes just to tell them I owe them money! Hah! Anyway they could still notice and chase us up but it’s been over a week now so I think we’re in the clear on it… 🙂
• Holiday £371 (£416 / £333) – Paid for flights for a holiday to Lanzarote next March.
• Going out £466 (£493 / £467) – Only slightly over budget here this year. I would expect a big month in December though as everyone and their dog wants to go out for “Xmas drinks” don’t they!?
• Transport £116 (£552 / £192) – I mean this looks kinda crap but if you take out the fact we bought a new car, this is basically bang on budget.
• Personal Care £114 (£110 / £92) – Nothing of note to write this month
• Home/Garden/what shit have we blown our money on this month £5605 (£684 / £100) – Yes I have officially changed the title of this category now until further notice and some modicum of frugality returns! So this month we finally had to pay for our windows which were around £4.5K, 2 new sofas which were around £900, and a couple of other small bits. The windows were old and drafty and the handles kept falling off (like literally snapping off so you couldn’t fix them back on) so they were always going to need replacing at some point, so why not do it while we’ve had a good year for income. Same with the sofas, our old sofas were about 10 years old and the cushions sunk so low when you sat on them, it was giving us both a bad back due to the bad posture – I’d tried putting spare towels and pillows underneath to no avail. We also looked for a second hand sofa for around the 100-200 mark and hoped to get one still in pretty good nick, but after 2 months of searching finally gave up and decided to just get new ones. They are mega comfy but also let you sit much more upright on them so much better on the back, you can’t put a price on a pain free back IMO! Hopefully they’ll last a long time!
• Lifestyle/Clothes £184 (£199 / £141)
• Hobbies/Sport £11 (£94 / £149) – Not much going on here this month! hah!
• Admin £0 (£14 / £20)
• Financial £5 (£19 / £15)
• Children £47 (£82 / £60) – Pretty good month for the little one.
• Gifts/Charity £230 (£384 / £187) – In case anyone has forgotten, I pledged to donate 10% of my betting/matched betting profits as per my post here. This has subsequently blown this budget category out of the water as I’ve made far more on this side hustle than I ever imagined I would at the start of the year. However we didn’t give any money to Charity this month due to me making a loss for the first time this year on the side hustle.. read below for more on that! However we have donated quite a lot to charity already in December in the form of “Christmas charity gifts” as we wanted to “make a difference” to some peoples Christmas if possible. I thought it would be worth writing about this now because if others thought it was a good idea and wanted to participate, it may feel like people have missed the boat if I wrote about it in January ¹. Anyway here are some ideas for you, with the partial help of this great page on Money Saving Expert we have so far donated/gifted:
  • Impact – Bought surgery to fix a child’s cleft lip.
  • Oxfam – Bought a pig and an animal poo digesting system (it creates gas for cooking) for my niece and nephew (i.e they get a card saying this was bought in their name). I thought they would find it quite funny but also they would appreciate the charity aspect as they are both lovely children like that. Don’t worry we bought them normal presents as well 😉
  • Make-a-wish foundation – Not a specific gift here but the donation goes towards making special memories for kids with critical illnesses and their families.
  • Crisis – Bought 2x Christmas dinners for homeless people
  • Good Gifts – Various Xmas related charity gifts including planting some trees
  • Centerpoint – Another homeless charity
  • Refuge – Helping women and children who’ve suffered/are suffering from domestic violence.
  • We also donated some pillows, bed sheets and a duvet to the local homeless centre.

I’m sure all of you do already, but please consider giving up a little bit extra of your savings rate to help the less fortunate this Christmas 🙂

income

Figures in the same format as expenses…

• Total £4800 +£395 Pension (£7972 / £4422) – Despite the high spending it was actually not a bad month for income again, so things could have been worse!
• TFS Income £4129 +£395 Pension (£2904 / £2500) – I managed to blag nearly two weeks at double pay (hah! take that, The Man™). We are so busy at work right now, and I was due to have 2 weeks off, but worked it on the condition of double time 😉
• Mrs T Income £496 (£457 / £600) – Pretty standard month here
• Ratesetter £57 (£56 / £5) – Ratesetter have bought their old, better offer back again! You now only have to invest £1000 for 1 year to receive a £100 bonus! If you want to avail yourself of this offer click this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link! ² – Thanks to the 1 person who signed up last month, you are awesome!) to get started.
• Child benefit £82 (£91 / £82) – Nice early Xmas present from the government here.
• Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £0 (£2677 / £750) – Woah! WTAF!? Haha. What can I say, November was a horrendous month on the each way sniping. I actually lost £1583!!! but am putting it down as a zero because:
  • 1. I am pig headed and don’t want to admit to the loss (in my income statement at least)
  • 2. More accurately I just don’t want our savings rate to be even more negative this month 🙂
  • 3. I am confident I will make this back and more going forward
  • 4. It’s already half way through December and I have in fact already made this back and more (although remains to be seen whether that continues to the end of the month, of course)

So figures wise, it will be a lot easier to just mark this down as zero, and then take off 1583 from any profits I make in Decemeber, so that is what I am going to do. Also… as the above links into the 10% profits going to charity thing.. I can hardly ask for £158.30 back from Charities we’ve previously donated to 😀 so again makes more sense to tally it up in this way.

In any case, here is the lovely graph of my profit/loss in November:

This is weirdly almost a mirror image of last month where I was down for most of the month but ended up being up with a surge at the end, as you can see I was up for most of the month but a few bad days at the end bought it crashing down.

Anyway, if for some bizarre reason you are still interested in each way sniping after seeing that car crash of a graph above  – I have written a couple of guides, but before giving you the links, please read and really think about the following disclaimer:

It’s NOT easy money, you can lose, especially over the short term, there are many ups and downs, and it’s not for the faint of heart. Having said that, if you wanted to know exactly what Each Way Sniping is and missed my guides I just wrote on the subject, check our part 1 here, and part 2 here.

And obviously if you want to make any money doing matched betting or each way sniping you should be using OddsMonkey… so here is my usual spiel about that:

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. Some of these methods are what helped me to have a bumper Cheltenham 2017 and are currently bringing me in over £1000 per month betting on each way sniping! Now, back to the update!

savings rate, net worth and all of that bugenhagen

Well obviously savings rate was going to be negative, and it was to the tune of -67.58%! The average for the year is down massively from 52% to now just 45.31%. Do you know what though, I’d have bitten your hand off for that at the start of the year, and I would be very surprised if we don’t now finish the year on a slight high and remain above the 45% mark, so I’m calling this, perhaps somewhat prematurely, a win for the year 🙂

With all that spending, Net Worth also didn’t do so great:

Excluding house equity: £188,649 / –£11,947 / -5.96%

Including house equity: £274,314 / -£11,595 / -4.06%

Liquid Freedom: £91,610 / -£12,325 / -11.86%

It’s probably worth mentioning I didn’t both tallying up my betting accounts properly this month as knew I’d been in the red, so I have estimated the amount in them (hopefully under by a fair margin) which probably accounts for some of the drop as well, I am hoping when I do the proper end of year figures this will bump up once again. But anyway either way, a pretty horrendous drop in NW mainly down to spending a lot of money.

Investments – I actually made 3 investments this month! The first was one of the new “App Banks” Monzo who did a crowd funding type of thing and raised 20 million in just a few hours. I took a £1000 chunk of that!

The second was quite a chunky one, I have invested in what I’d call an Angel investment fund, and the minimum I could put in was £12,500. The things I liked about this though is:

• You get 40% of your stake back due to EIS/SEIS relief
• It spreads the risk over about 12 companies
• So you basically have about £1K in each start up, but have only paid £7500 for the privilege
• There are further downside covers if any of the companies fail completely, you can claim more money back via the EIS/SEIS schemes
• I feel like getting in there early is the best way to capture upside of any startup. By the time you’ve actually heard about any of them you have missed the boat on really great returns (see Monzo above, currently valued at over $1 Billion!)
• Obviously the price I am paying to have a ticket on this ride is a huge amount of risk of lost capital compared to, say a global index tracker fund.
• The thing is I can’t really see any other way of getting any money into this sort of thing unless you are uber loaded? I did a bit of research and a lot of the things I found on Angel investing required a minimum £50K investment into a single company!
• Also, and also hopefully obvious, the fund do all the work, know their stuff, do the due diligence, and pick out the best companies for you. No way I’d have the time to do that!

At the least it will provide a bit of excitement and hopefully I won’t get totally fleeced, I will of course provide you with updates as and when I hear about it. The company is called RLC Ventures if any one is interested in looking them up (I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, btw!)

Finally I put another £1000 into, dun dun daaa, a Cryptocurrency. Yes I am a glutton for punishment. The thing is I “invested” into this currency when it had no working product and now it has one, with many users actually using it for what it is intended for and it seems to be doing pretty well, which is a lot more than what can be said for most other Cryptos! And it’s trading at about 20% of the price I originally bought it at! Anyway I thought I’d throw some good money after bad and massively average down my “break even” price point. I haven’t even added this £1000 to the “Cryptos” row of my Net worth because obviously they are all so far down now, I think I should start to accept that a lot of this just looks like lost money (although am going to HODL for a few years anyway just to see if they go back up again, you never know!). I may just cut that rows value in half at the start of the year just to more accurately reflect our current Net Worth. I’m not even going to tell you what Crypto it is anyway as I’m sure no one is even remotely interested, but I thought I better provide the update nonetheless… 🙂

Remember I’m not a financial advisor (as you can probably tell!) and none of the above is any advice in the slightest on what to invest in (in fact it’s probably more of a “what not to do” kind of thing haha) but I thought I would just be transparent and tell you what I’m doing.

I think next year I am going to just plough all of my betting winnings straight into an ISA or SIPP (maybe a 50/50 split) just to shore up the traditional investments, as I’m way to overweight in “alternative investments’ right now… One for the 2019 goals list!

other updates

New Hustle  – After reading The Saving Ninja’s excellent post on his Amazon Merch T-Shirt side hustle, I decided I would give this thing a crack myself! It has everything a side hustle should going for it if you ask me, with an extremely low barrier to entry in terms of both cost and effort, but should scale really nicely the more effort you put into it. Also a bit like with Kindle publishing (which I was never really that interested in tbh) the ceiling for earnings looks like it could actually be really quite high, with many people making a full time wage (and more) from this. Also I really like the fact that it scratches some of that “creative” itch as well. You can be both creative in coming up with funny or cool ideas/sayings to put on T-Shirts, but also have a crack at designing them yourself if you so wish. Although it looks like the common advice is to just pay someone on an e-freelancing website about $4 per design, which I may end up doing just to get a lot of designs out there a lot quicker, but I do like having a play around with GIMP from time to time, so it would be fun to see what I could come up with.

Unfortunately I have no other news, nor even 1 T-Shirt design I can show you yet, apart from that I’ve successfully set up my Amazon Merch account, and also signed up to Merch Informer as recommended by the good Ninja.

December is always hectic so this is one to get cracking on in January! I will obviously let you know how it is going in the monthly updates when I have more news!

Huel – My food blender has given up the ghost so I’ve not been able to have it for a few weeks! I was going to try to hold out till Christmas and get a new one as a present but I got impatient and should be getting one delivered in a few days now. I am looking forward to getting back on it. I definitely feel like my diet has gotten worse again since not having it. As mentioned in my round up post, it’s kind of like a placebo but it just gets you thinking healthier in general when you are in the habit of having it every morning, but that is good enough for me!

I’m sure more stuff happened in November but this has been long enough and seeing as we are half way through December now I’ve forgotten it already!

Hope you had a good one and Merry Christmas to you all if I don’t post again before the 25th 🙂