october income / expenses report – stocky horror show
Well I know I always say this, but what a busy month October was!
We had a nice holiday away (seems ages ago now!) to Menorca and then had more illnesses in the house, a hospital visit, and clearing out my Nan’s old house to deal with when we got back.
I also made my first podcast appearance, being interviewed by Ms ZiYou – go check it out here if you haven’t done so already.
And let’s not forget there was the UK FI London meet up which was great fun!
But the question on everyone’s lips is obviously… how did our finances get on this month, especially with the horrors of the stock market drawdown!? Let’s find out…
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 £3423 (£4153 / £3205) – Over budget again, but actually not that bad compared to other months 🙂
- Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848)
- Household/Bills £554 (£676 / £602) – Actually under budget for once here, with a particular mention going out to my boy “Groceries” which came in at £244 (£369 / £325). Although there is no doubt November and December will be high grocery spending months due to the extra crap 1 you buy for Christmas, I still don’t think we’ve done too badly on this category so far this year.
- Holiday £553 (£421 / £333) – We took £500 worth of Euros to Menorca and actually came back with about €160 which was nice! We are saving them for our next European holiday rather than bothering to change them back and losing out money due to the exchange rates and changing fees.
- Going out £176 (£496 / £467) – A record low for the year so far! With the holiday and then illnesses there wasn’t much scope left for going out.
- Transport £113 (£596 / £192) – Nicely under budget!
- Personal Care £113 (£109 / £92) – Pretty average month here, which mainly consisted of lots of prescriptions!
- Home/Garden £528 (£192 / £100) – I’m thinking of changing the name of these monthly reports to what shit have we blown our money on this month? Pretty catchy huh!? 🙂 . Yea so we bought a new mattress. I keep waking up with a really bad back and our mattress is not only 10 years old but wasn’t that great when we bought it. All of this recent talk of memory foam drew me in and decided to bite the bullet. It was about £500 but if that works out as 3650 better nights sleep over the next 10 years that works out at 13p per night… worth it IMO! Anyway, a big shout out to Kieran who runs new(ish) FIRE blog Money On FIRE who’s side hustle (or should that be main hustle?) which allows him to lead a FIRE style life is actually a mattress review site called The Dozy Owl which was really helpful in choosing our mattress! We went with one called “Emma” and it has been very comfy so far.
- Hobbies/Sport £78 (£102 / £149) – One category that looks like it will come in under budget for the year!
- Admin £3 (£16 / £20)
- Financial £5 (£21 / £15)
- Children £55 (£86 / £60) – Think we mugged off TFS with a £60/month budget slightly here. Will allocate a bit more to her next year I think!
- Gifts/Charity £225 (£389 / £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. About £250 for the charities this month which is pretty good going!
income
Figures in the same format as expenses…
- Total £7037 +£395 Pension (£8298 / £4422) – Another rock solid month on income!
- TFS Income £3077 +£395 Pension (£2781 / £2500) – Higher than usual as I did some overtime in September.
- Mrs T Income £614 (£435 / £600) – Slightly higher than usual as they’d underpaid her in a previous month.
- Ratesetter £107 (£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! But it runs out soon, so click this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link! 2 – Thanks to the 2 people who signed up last month, you are awesome!) to get started.
- Child benefit £82 (£91 / £82) – Nice as usual to receive this.
- Investment Income £143 (£1712 / £400) – Got some interest paid from a House Crowd investment, which was a decent chunk to be fair. Read more about The House Crowd here.
- Solar Panels £233 (£64 / £45) – With such a sunny and long summer, no surprise that this payment is so high! Go on the solar panels!
- Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £2731 (£2944 / £750) – A solid month, although this doesn’t really tell the whole story which was full of ups and downs (mainly seemed like downs if I’m perfectly honest with you!!!). Somehow pulled it out of the bag right at the end of the month. To show you just how volatile this game of each way betting is, here is my running P+L for the month in graph form… just look at those peaks and troughs people!
Yes you read that right, I was 3K down twice in the month and right at the end basically won about 5K within the space of a few days! I am on pretty high stakes now (max stake is £50 each way) so don’t think you would be getting these sorts of figures if you are only betting £2.50 each way. But it’s worth bearing in mind it’s not just an easy slow march up the profit mountain. Variance people… variance!
It’s also probably worth explaining why that profit graph finishes at around £800 but my profit on the month was nearly £3K? It’s because I do my each way spreadsheet(s) in exact months, but don’t tally up the money on the 1st of the month and I lost about 2K on the first few days of October, which were recorded into last months profit figures, hence about 2K extra this month. Hope that makes sense but if not please ask me a question about it!
If you still courageous enough to be interested in each way sniping after seeing that precipitous 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.
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 hocus pocus
Despite only being our 4th lowest spend month of the year so far, we still spent quite a bit. The high expense/high income trend to the year continues! We still managed a 52.59% and the average for the year is still over 50% as well at 52.06%!!! The bad news is that the new windows payment finally came out on the 1st November 3 so November is going to be an absolute horror show. But it is what it is and we’ve still done pretty well up to this point in the year I think!
Net worth didn’t do so great with the stock market drop:
Excluding house equity: £200,596 / –£1,378 / -0.68%
Including house equity: £285,909 / -£1,026 / -0.36%
Liquid Freedom: £103,935 / -£2,361 / -2.22%
I mean actually when you look at that, it’s not all that bad, compared to some other updates I’ve seen so far! I guess our stash isn’t really big enough yet for that to completely overtake our Net Worth gyrations, and the contributions for the month offset much of the stock losses. I’ll take the positives out of that for now 🙂
One thing you will all be glad to know is that I finally put some more money into the stock market, depositing £5K into my SIPP and purchasing that amount of the Vanguard All World ETF. I will probably stick another couple of grand in there next month to make sure I’m definitely under the 40% tax bracket for the year, as I keep accidentally working overtime and earning more money when I should be telling them to stick it and chilling out instead… haha.
other updates
FI Meetup – I attended one of the FI London meetups (aka beers in a pub) and thoroughly enjoyed meeting both fellow bloggers and FI aficionados! It was great chatting to people about money, life in general, and hearing people’s stories. If you haven’t done so yet for any reason, I would thoroughly recommend coming along to one! There are two and a half events scheduled soon:
- FI UK facebook group meetup – LUNCH – Saturday, November 24, 2018 at 12 PM – 2 PM
- FI UK facebook group meetup – DRINKS – Saturday, November 24, 2018 at 2:30 PM – 5:30 PM – Both at The Onslow Arms The Street, West Clandon, GU4 7TE West Clandon
- FI London facebook group meetup – Wednesday, December 5, 2018 at 6 PM – 11 PM / Metropolitan Bar, Wetherspoon, Baker Street, London
I’m probably more likely to attend the one in London as Clandon is a bit of a pickle to get to from where we are, but either way hopefully you will be able to attend one or the other if you are in the South East area.
Reading – I’m currently reading a book called City of God by Paulo Lins, which is also a film. I watched the film ages ago and thought it was really good so thought I’d give the book a go. It’s nothing to do with finance! It’s about Gangsters in the Rio de Janeiro slums (favelas) in the 60s, 70s and early 80s. Not sure if I’d recommend it as it’s a pretty brutal book, but if you have seen the film and/or find that sort of thing interesting then it’s definitely worth a read!
I’m not sure if I’ve mention the blog indeedably before on here but I’m really loving it so far, the author really has a way with words, and even introduced me to what has got to be one of the best German words ever invented:
Finally here are a couple of mandatory holiday snaps because, why the hell not!?
Ciutadella, Menorca – lovely old town with harbour area
Cala Galdana, Menorca – Beautiful beach!
Oh as usual apologies for the lateness of my monthly update 🙂
great work again – stellar earnings.
Just be warned that matched betting can become unmatched gambling.
I don’t think I would have had the stomach to stick at it with some of the losses that you’ve racked up this month – and I’ve done matched bettting before (but concluded that it was a risky waste of my time and required dedication to do it well and a lot of focus – and I have enough of that in my job. 🙂 )
“Just be warned that matched betting can become unmatched gambling.” – I think I’ve made great pains to emphasise this point many times myself GFF but thanks for underlining it for me 🙂
There is a big difference between matched betting which is not really all that risky at all, and each way betting as I’ve been doing for the last few months, which is literally just gambling (in the hope that you have an edge) which I fully acknowledge – this game ain’t for the faint hearted! But there is nothing stopping you from giving it a go with much smaller stakes of course (but then there is of course the whole “what’s the point” and “waste of time” elements which are still relevant points!)
Cheers.
You have got b*lls of steel to ride that EWS rollercoaster! Not for me, your graph just confirms that.
Congrats on the savings rate, really impressive given you have a kid, have holidays and don’t work full time – although overtime? That’s full time sneaking in by the backdoor!
I listened to your podcast and it confirmed to me how the picture we have in our minds about how people might look, havign read their blogs, are at odds with how they sound!! I think that makes sense? Same when I listened to Ken’s UK FI podcast – he does not sound like i thought he would! Then again I probably didn’t either!
I’m loving the podcasts as you get much more into the person being interviewed, what makes them tick etc.
November and December are always a write off for my budget. Given I have a budget you’d think I’d have learnt how to budget for those 2 months wouldn’t you?
Hi Tuppeny,
Cheers! Or maybe it’s just balls of stupid, who knows 🙂
I did make some rather rash huge multiple bets which is part of the reason there were those two huge drops. Barring those I might have even been 5K up on the month. Still, there is no point in ifs and buts, I’ll take a decent profit on the month and move on I think!
Yea I know I know… They offered me double time to be fair and I couldn’t turn it down. Definitely going to be hanging back on any overtime next year for sure though!
I’m a bit confused actually… how did you know what I look like from reading my blog? Haha! But yea I know what you mean about perceptions from the writing and then reality not matching up to it. The very first FI meetup I went to in York everyone said I was nothing like they thought I’d be like, which made me think maybe I’m not portraying myself very accurately on the blog!
Hopefully since then I’ve at least tried and succeeded with that a bit better.
I’ve only listened to a couple of the other ones so far… must catch up! I will let you know how I thought you’d sound once I’ve listened to your one 😉
November is going to be horrendous for us I already know that, just by how much is the question!
Cheers!
Another good month on the EW front! I “only” managed £183. Then again I only had a bank of £250 so not a bad ROI at 72%. My variance was more or less the same as yours. I was down £145 at one point (on a £2.50 EW £5 overall) and £120 at another. It was hard to keep going afterwards but I’m glad I did otherwise LMF would be asking if it was a good idea to keep going. November has been kinder so far, long may it continue!
Well done on your profits – I’m just wondering if you have your ROI numbers right? It looks like the 72% might be your growth in bank, which is different to return on investment (ROI) which is total profit / total amount risked. Awesome work nonetheless. Keep up the good work
AH yes you are right. It is growth in bank. Sorry about that.
Don’t actually think I can come up with a ROI figure as I don’t keep as detailed records as would be needed.
Thanks for the correction!
Nice going MrFive2Fire!
Yea I have now had two really tough months, July and October, but have still made a profit in the end of both of them. If that is the worst EW betting has to dish out then I can hack it. The good months are just awesome though 🙂
Does sound like you are confusing ROI with growth of bank as PF points out but either way a 72% increase in bank in one month is still pretty spectacular! 🙂
Cheers
Thanks. Most of the increase came in one day (£76 profit!) How do you keep your records? I’ve changed mine recently to just take the total in each bookie at the start of the day instead of each horse name, race etc.
Thanks for pumping my tyres up TFS, much appreciated. Your cheque is in the mail!
Congratulations on maintaining such an impressive savings rate; especially given your hobbies include some expensive ones like golf, beer, and children.
That matched betting rollercoaster looks like October’s S&P500 index chart, quite the ride!
Hi indeedably,
No worries!
Ironically I’ve played the least amount of golf this year than I can actually remember and the “hobbies” category is about the only one in the green so far! We’ve just used the extra income I’ve been hustling to get some stuff done in the house which wasn’t budgeted for. It needed doing sooner or later so no big deal. Hoping next year I can throw as much of any extra income straight into investments (especially if this long overdue stock market crash actually happens 😉 )
Yea the similarity is rather spooky isn’t it… haha.
Hey TFS
Despite it being a spendy month, great savings rate (and great average for the year!) and good to see you’re chucking some cash at some investments – get those divis rolling in for some passive income!
That rollercoaster graph for your EW betting is not what I want to experience! Just imagining I had a run like that makes me sweat, haha as I struggle when my losses are a few hundred quid, never mind in the thousands! But great job in sticking with it so you can showcase how it works and how variance is key.
Interesting that you’ve just got a new mattress as I’m thinking of replacing my 10 year old one with a memory-foam one too, so I’ll check out that dozy owl link for what to get, cheers!
Do you think that one of the reasons for your low groceries is that you and Mrs T are on Huel?
PS – awesome word from @indeedably! I need to learn how to pronounce that haha!
Yes weenie, I finally bit the bullet and did it! 🙂
Yea we probably have slightly too much cash sloshing about at the moment for sure. We still haven’t even set up a Jr ISA for the little one yet which is extremely negligent parenting on our part… slap on the hand there for us!
Yea the £5K positive swing within the space of a few days made the hard couple of weeks worth it… I do like the buzz of when it’s going well… not gonna lie! As long as you find your comfortable level that’s the main thing.
Ah cool about the mattress! Obviously I never tried out any of the others on that site, but would definitely recommend the Emma one on my experience with it so far.
Interesting point, and I would actually say no (unfortunately!). It was low this month because we were away for a week on holiday, and just ate a lot of stuff out the freezer which we’d bought in bulk previously. Having said that as I mentioned on the Huel post, it does make you think about what you are eating a bit more in general so maybe I have been a bit more conscious of that and therefore a bit more frugal with my work lunches which may have help.
Cheers 🙂
Was cool to have you on the podcast!
I’m still in awe of your matched betting – you are killing it there.
Yes, thanks again Ms ZiYou!
Great roundup as usual TFS – I had a similar topsy-turvy month on the Each Way Betting front but ended up with another record month (+66% growth in bank and ROI of 17%) November also going well thanks to a whopper win today on a horse priced at 41.0! Thanks again for getting me into EWB. I did write a guide and name-checked you as inspiration! Are you still on the Huel?
Hi Pursue FIRE,
Wow that is great! I should have had a better month in all honesty but I did some stupidly rash large Multis (my nemesis… although that one time it did pay off so I guess there is that) which really ate into my profit.
Ah I missed the 40/1 shot, didn’t see much come up at all yesterday but wasn’t paying all that much attention if I’m honest as was busy with other stuff, typical! It goes to show you if you miss that one big winner, that can be such a big difference in two peoples results.
Yea I saw your guide, nice one! I thought I commented on it but maybe I didn’t get round to it?! Thanks for the name check though! 🙂
Yep still on the Huel but mainly just for breakfast at the moment.
Cheers
Love that German word. I’ll put it in my vocab notebook and somehow sneak it into conversation with my German partner 🙂
Looks like a good month overall, although I don’t know how you manage to deal with those crazy dips with your EWB – that would keep me up at night!
Hope to finally make one of those London meetups in a couple of months!
Hah! You can let us all know how to actually pronounce it in that case, I have no idea.
It’s not for every kind of person that is for sure. I think I just have a high risk tolerance and a deep down faith in “the system”. But yea I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was p**sed off for a day or two after the big losses which ain’t great. I’m going to stick with my current staking levels for now and not go up again because I don’t think I could deal with any bigger swings than what I’m currently experiencing.
Would be great to meet you at one of the London meetups soon! 🙂
That is some impressive variance with your EW betting! Not sure if I could handle the sight of losing so much money and stick with it. I guess that’s why you recommend starting with such low amounts initially.
I listened to your interview in the UK FI Podcast yesterday and really enjoyed it. Always cool to put a voice to a blog! And I especially liked your comments on luck and privilege, I think it plays a much greater role in our successes than we realise.
Hi Dr FIRE,
Yep, I have to stress how stressful it can be, I’m not hoodwinking anyone into thinking this is easy money!
Thanks for the kind words on the podcast, glad you enjoyed it. I still have to listen to the last few in the series myself, they’ve all been great so far.
Cheers
Nice work TFS, I echo others’ admiration for your savings rate. I experienced the R part of FIRE at Easter, and I can confirm the long term pleasure is definitely worth the short run ‘sacrifice’.
Being retired I am able to spend some more time on gambling and I decided to reset my bank, start keeping better records, work out a strategy and stick to it. This includes following a couple of tipsters with a multiyear record of positive and rising ROI, some no-lay Accas using selected bookies’ ‘insurance’ offers and no-lay each-ways selected using strict criteria. I wager a conservative 1% of bankroll (0.5% ew) each time.
I started with a nominal £200 in mid-May and have been in the black every month bar one since then, my bankroll just breached £1100 (having a great November, up over £350). This is good because it means my stake is over £10 which means I usually qualify amount for some ‘free bet’ loyalty offers (Coral and PaddyPower), further boosting returns.
My variance is less than yours, maybe my selection is more conservative? I am sometimes tempted to put a bet on even though it doesn’t strictly match my filters, for example if OddsMonkey identifies an EW bet at a particular price and the price has slipped a point by the time I get to the bookmaker website. I always resist!
PS. Should have said thanks for publishing your guides to EW sniping, my strategy is based closely on that set out in those pieces, and after 205 wagers shows a remarkable ROI of 51%.
Thanks!
Hi Philip,
Thanks for writing about your “R” experiences so far, great to hear the grass is actually greener over on that side of the fence 🙂
Your ROI is remarkable! I guess being more conservative would get you a higher ROI, but then if you have many less bets you might end up making less in the long run anyway? E.g. I would rather have 10% ROI on £10,000 stakes than 50% on £1,000 stakes (But I’m sure the difference in stakes is nowhere near that amount, but is something certainly worth considering)
Anyway… keep doing what you are doing as it is clearly working for you that is the main thing. I’m sure you could sell your 51% ROI system to many people for a LOT of money 😉
Cheers!
Hmm just thinking about the figures you’ve given, you had 205 bets.
Let’s say that’s £10/bet so you have staked £2050 and made £1025 profit, sounds about right from your figures.
You’ve been going about 6 months, and I’m averaging about 700 bets per month. Admittedly some are multis so let’s call that 600 per month of singles and say £10 stake, at which I would have staked £36,000 so to get your profit of £1025 I would only need an ROI of 2.8%. I would say the average long term ROI you could expect from doing this even at high volume I would say is around the 10% mark.
So it does give some weight behind the “more volume of bets” argument.
Having said that, it sounds like your method may cut down the variance somewhat, and obviously if you just upped your stakes a lot if you were really confident in the system, you could generate bucketloads of profit. However after just 205 bets I would not be mega confident of doing so as it’s not a huge sample size.
Cheers again 🙂
Regarding the EW betting, do you have many accounts left? I’ve only been doing it for 2 months and after making a profit of 4.5k, I’ve been gubbed by about 90% of bookies I’m signed up with! I think the main reason why is because I do the same bet every time – £15 each way, and never vary it up. I see you do multiples which maybe makes you look more ‘muggy’.
Hi Tom,
Does seem quite unlucky to lose so many accounts in 2 months. Although in 6 months I have lost most of my original accounts now and it’s definitely getting harder, which is shown in my results.
A couple of ideas:
Is there a Mrs Tom that would be interested in each way betting?
There are ~125 bookies in the oddsmonkey each way matcher, try some out (let me know if you discover any hidden gems?!)
Cheers
Some massive ups and downs with the betting! It will be interesting to see how much you can fleece off the bookies before they start realising they’ve got to limit down your account. I hear most people who win say about 2-3 k up but you bet heavy judging from the equity graph.
Hi there Wice,
Well yea… I’ve had tonnes of accounts shut down already.
The thing is there is 125+ bookies listed on OddsMonkey right now, and so even if I can win an average of 1K from each of them before they shut me down that is 125K tax free “earnings”. It’s not an infinite length hustle, but it will sure last a lot longer than most people think it can do.
Cheers
Hey TFS,
Great to see your savings rate is nicely over 50%. Wow that’s enviable. Glad to see you got some of it invested in October. Other than my regular pension payments I haven’t invested this tax year yet. I’d love to max out my ISA allowance, but for various reasons I’m not sure that’s going to happen this year. I’ll get as much into it as I can though.
Having read all the comments, and given that your phenomenal income for the year has been significantly due to EW betting, are you worried at all about getting totally “gubbed out” over time, or do you have a back-up plan for this eventuality?
I must check out that podcast series…
Hi Corinna,
I haven’t got anywhere near maxing out my ISA limit since I started down this whole FI thing so don’t feel too bad about that!
Re: EW betting please see the comment above about 125 bookies on OddsMonkey!
Also bear in mind I also have Mrs T to help me open accounts in her name 😉 so even if say only 50% of those 125 were actually any good, which is probably quite realistic, then that is still a HELL of a lot of bookies to get through. 125K is 25K/year for 5 years. I think I would take that and I also think I would get bored of doing it before I ran out of bookies to bet with.
Cheers