theFIREstarter

Holiday 1: View over the mountains near Madreeeeed!

It’s been another hectic month so apologies for another late monthly update! I’m currently in the middle of 2 weeks off and my latest DIY project has been susceptible to a certain amount of “scope creep” shall we say! 🙂

Anyway back to October, it was a really fun month so let’s see how the finances went and what we got up to…

expenses

We spent a total of £2852.44 this month which seems slightly under average compared to the rest of the year. All good! This puts our monthly average at £3001 and so if we project that figure into November and December we’ll have spent ~£36,000. This is pretty much exactly what we spent last year and therefore ~£2K over my attempted budget I put up here near the start of the year. Not a horrendous miss if we’re all really honest with ourselves and I think we’ve got a pretty good bang for our buck looking back what we’ve done this year! It will be interesting in January to see exactly how it all matched up to my projections and what categories we went over and where we went under (if anywhere!). I don’t know about you but the next 2 months will be a long wait to find out 😀

Octobers expenses included but were in no way limited to:

• Mortgage £268 – Due to overpaying some of the new mortgage payment schedule upfront last month it was a lot less this month. Not really sure how this worked out but oh well – If only this was our new monthly payment!
• Groceries £357 – Back down to just about an acceptable level but we are still well over budget on this category this year (£334 > £230)
• Holiday £1338 – Yikes! We actually didn’t go mental on our two holidays and buy loads of designer gear although we did visit the biggest Primark I have ever seen – see picture below! But we had to pay to flights to Dubai as our friend is getting married there in February (~£750) which was a bit of a sting in the tail but will be well worth it once we are there.

Primark in Madrid – Not sure whether I was impressed or disgusted by this mecca of consumerism if I’m honest!

• Going out £117 – Low because all of our “going out” generally was on holiday so it got put under that category instead this month.
• Clothes £170 – Some of this was me I will admit to this month. Saw a decent shop when we were in Devon so decided to treat myself for once. Oops. Also see Primark comment above (All Mrs T on that one though 😉 )
• Golf £20 – Winding down for the season for sure!
• Charity £52 – Still seriously lacking on the charity front still but I have something up my sleeve which I’ll mention later on in this post. I gave most of this to The Syria Campaign. I honestly don’t know how much good this money will do but I hope it helps in some way as it is very sad what is happening over there!
• Children £40 – Not bad for the little one this month!

Remember if you want to look at the full figures or copy my spreadsheet to use/modify yourself just have a look at it here: my awesome spreadsheet. Note: You can use this yourself, just copy it and then edit your own copy by going to File -> Make a copy OR File -> Add to my drive OR File -> Download As (then select a format to download as).

income

Unfortunately our income took a bit of a drop this month as well. I just didn’t have too much time for Matched betting with all the holidaying going on which was the main cause of this, but we still pulled in £3491.09

Income this month included but don’t you even dare insinuate that it might be limited to:

• TFS salary £2009 – One good note on this is that next month I will be getting a slight pay rise. Partially as I’m working slightly longer hours and partly as I asked for a slight pay rise.
•  Mrs T maternity pay £680 – Final payment of this by our calculations, and she won’t have another one until calling all of her holiday pay in about 3 months time, so the next few months will be interesting! 🙂
• Matched betting / Secret Side Hustle £176 – Totally rubbish compared to the last few months! In all fairness I have some payments pending so I was expecting a slight increase in next months figures. However I’ve messed a couple of bets up big time, which I will be doing a post about very soon to show how things can go wrong if you are not careful! If anyone is interested I use 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.
• Ratesetter £155 – This included £5 worth of interest and £150 referral fees from this post I wrote. Cheers to the 3 of you who signed up, much appreciated! If you want to sign up and take advantage of the £100 sign up bonus which is still ongoing, use this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link!) or read my post on it for more info.
• Child Benefit £82 – Boom!
• Moneybackmortgages.com £177 – When you sign up to a new mortgage or remortgage through Moneybackmortgages.com they give you a portion of their commission back. I would heartily recommend their services if you have anything like this coming up (no affiliation at all just a happy customer – twice)
• Solar Panels £182 – The sun surely is the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s not too shabby on the eye as well…

Holiday: Sunrise in Devon

savings rate, net worth etc

Savings rate was a lowly 25.74%. This brings the yearly average eye wateringly close to the 40% level it would be nice to stay above at 40.43%!!!

Here’s where Mr Net Worth got his sticky hands into this month:

Excluding house equity: £127,598 / +£1,242 / +0.98%

Including house equity: £203,655 / +£1,702 / +0.84%

Liquid Freedom: £59,611 / +£1,112 / 1.90%

So even on a bad month our Net Worth jumps up by over a grand and the bulk of that was because of our savings. Not the end of the world when you put it like that.

One interesting (!?!) thing to note is I am part way through transferring my old work pension into my SIPP. This will let me invest it in lower cost funds than my employer might pick so seemed like the smart thing to do. But it means the figures may be slightly off because I’m not sure exactly when my funds exited the market. Hopefully I’ll be able to get them back in before any major rally happens! Anyway Net Worth may jump up or down a bit when it’s finally sorted. Also I’m not entirely sure what my new pension is worth now so again that may jump up when I finally find out. It should be about 7-8 months worth of £350 which is my plus my employers contribution but they haven’t built the system for me to check yet. Get a move on you idiots! 🙂

I think it’s fair to say I’m underestimating it in total so hoping it will only go up when these issues are finally sorted.

other updates

I completed the Brighton 10 mile race in 1 hour 12 minutes (7:12 min/mile pace) which I was pretty happy with considering I didn’t do too much training for it. However it was good to get some miles under the belt because towards the end of the month I found out:

I’m running the London Marathon 2017!

Gulp! I’ve only done it once before and not going to lie, I found it very, very hard! But I think I’m a much better runner now so really want to give it another good crack, get a better time and not practically die as I limp over the finish line!

This also ties into the whole charity thing I was talking about earlier because I couldn’t get in via the ballot, so will be running for a charity close to my heart. The thing is I have to raise £3,000 in exchange for the charity place, no mean feat!

I am therefore going to kill two birds with one stone and stump up £500 myself for this. This not only brings down the fund raising target to “just” £2,500 ¹ – it also neatly ties up most of my designated charity giving this year which currently stands at £504.04. When next year rolls in I’ll do a proper review of all the charities as noted by readers in that original post, do an allocation and try to stick to it throughout the year as best I can.

On a related note, it was lovely to read about Mr Money Mustache giving away a chunk of his Net Worth to charities, many of which were recommended by readers of this blog – nice work readers!

And that was my October folks.

How was yours?