TFS Challenge Log – blog article posting challenge

Oct09
by TFS on October 9, 2013 at 10:00 pm
Posted In: Blogging, TFS Challenge

Overview of Challenge

Main task: To post 3 articles per week minimum on the TFS blog.
Challenge start date: Monday 30th September
Challenge end date: Sunday 3rd November
Challenge total length: 5 weeks.

For more information read my intial post for the challenge here

Week 1 – ending Sunday 6th October

Challenge result: Failed

Final update: I posted 2 articles, which included the actual post of the challenge brief. I initially felt that this was a bit “cheaty” but then I figured, it was literally a post and I did spend a fair amount of time thinking about the challenge and therefore the overall writing of the post, so I’d include it

Reasons for success/failure: Too busy at work! I was going to bash out my final article on the Sunday but ended up working 9 hours (3pm till midnight) instead! I’m taking this in my stride and going to try to make it back up by posting four the next week instead. If I can post on average 3 articles per week over the 5 weeks, I am going to still consider this a challenge a success.

Week 2 – ending Sunday 13th October

Challenge result: Success!

Update Wednesday 9th October: I’ve posted one article so far and two if you include this one. I think I am going to include this post into the challenge because, again it is a post, and I will keep updating it throughout the challenge (it will only be counted once of course). From here on in I need to post two more articles which should in theory be quite easy. Once again though I seem to be having a nightmare at work, and funnily enough we’ve also decided to have a massive clear out of stuff so have inadvertently started the “Minimalist/house-decluttering experiment” I mentioned as a possible future experiment. As this is not really a challenge as such I think I will just try to write up one post on this some time next week to explain what we did and how we* got on. So maybe it’s not as cut and dried again as it seems. I’ve got a couple of posts lined up though, so the quota should be filled. Who thought this would be such hard work eh!

I’ve also added a challenge “hub page” so to speak, which you can now find in the top menu bar. Here I will list all challenges I’ve done, with links to the challenge logs and other various posts that may concern them. Exciting, no!?

Final weekly update: I managed to post 4 articles to get me back on an even keel. I have to say the challenge has really worked on two levels, it has “forced” me to post when I’ve lacked motivation to do so, but also has improved motivation rather dramatically in the first which has made everything else fall into place a lot easier. I feel confident of completing the challenge successfully for the next 3 weeks but we’ll see how it goes obviously.

 

More updates to come at the end of each week!

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*I keep saying “we” – I am referring to myself and the newly crowned Mrs TFS – we got married about 3 weeks ago. Yay! Also she has been extremely helpful with the decluttering process so far, so I wouldn’t want her to read this and think I’ve made it out like I have done all the hard work and sorting out. Back ↑

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Start your FIRE Part I – Making a budget and tracking expenses

Oct08
by TFS on October 8, 2013 at 10:03 pm
Posted In: Personal Finance, Start your FIRE

Welcome to the first in a series of posts called which I’m going to call “Start your FIRE”. I wanted to lay down a basic framework for new readers of the blog to read through, just in case they’ve never read a blog about Personal Finance before, or are just getting to grips with this idea of Financial Independence and could do with some pointers in how to go about setting up ones life to achieve this. Whereas my first few posts were looking into the possibilities of FIRE available to us in the UK, think of this as the nuts and bolts of how to start “doing it”.

Part 1 – Making a budget and tracking expenses

Budgie Budgets

No… I think you misheard me

You won’t find a personal finance blog that doesn’t recommend that you either make and stick to a budget every month, week, or otherwise somehow track what you have been spending. There is often much debate over which is better, budgeting up front and “sticking to it” or looking back at what you’ve spent and taking stock for next month, but really this is purely academical, so I’d say do whatever works best for you. The key point is with either method you should be 100% aware of where your money is going. If you combine this with setting yourself a savings goal, say 50% for example, then you will quickly start to think twice before any impulse buys. When you think you get to a point where there is no fat left to trim, I almost guarantee you will think of or find a way to do so. After a while you might well notice yourself graduating through the three stages of budgeting, which I would say look roughly like this:

1. Making a budget (and sticking to it!) – You create your budget with set amounts for all your set bills such as Mortgage, council tax, and a good estimation of those that can be variable (Mobile/Phone bill). Most people will also allocate a set amount into various categories which all fall under a blanket of what you might call luxury spending, which is clothes, the gym, entertainment, and so on. You check your budget regularly and fill in the expenses column diligently to see how you are doing as you don’t want to go over budget. You may start to think more about each purchase you make, whether it is completely necessary. If not you might put it back on the shelf. If so you might try to find the same or a similar product cheaper. You might also want to add an entry for a set amount of cash for savings or investments, and make sure you transfer this set amount of money at the start of each month. This system works well for most people who have just been introduced to budgeting as you “pay yourself first” – in other words you sock it and lock it* away in savings before you can spend it. I would imagine that savers at this level are saving between 0% and around 30% of their income.

2. Tracking your expenses – There is no budget per se as you’ve moved beyond having to allocate a certain amount of money for luxury items such as clothing, the gym, entertainment etc, and the only real reason you need to keep a track of things is to do some fine tuning. It’s obviously also nice to keep a record of everything, in case there are any anomalies on the bank statements. Also it’s a good idea to know what is left at the end of each month so you can sock it and lock 😉 it into your savings or investment accounts. As you have no set budget amount as such, this can be variable, but in general terms you know that the amount will be at or as near as possible to the highest amount you could save, with respect to your circumstances and the savings goals you would have set yourself. I would imagine most people at this level are saving up to 50% of their income if they had anything around the median level or greater.

3. Frugal expert – I have clearly not reached this stage so this is purely conjecture, but I would imagine that there are Frugal dynamo’s out there that have just done away with any kind of tracking at all, perhaps because they do not own a computer to run a spreadsheet, or maybe even do not have need for a pen and paper in their simplified zen style lives. If you meet anyone like this (or are one!) then I’d sure like to hear about it.

In terms of actually creating and filling out your first budget… I have a google spreadsheet in the making which I will post tomorrow for you to play around with, with some brief instructions on how to fill it out. Hopefully this will help a few people out in starting their FIRE.

And finally, good news! If you are even at the beggining of stage 1 you are already more financially aware than 90% of people in the country right now, and also well on your way to  living an affluent life.

Patience and sticking with it is the key from here on in.

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*That could be my first catchphrase for the blog christened right there… I like that quite a lot in fact 🙂 Back ↑

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TFS blog article posting challenge!

Oct02
by TFS on October 2, 2013 at 8:14 pm
Posted In: Blogging, TFS Challenge

challenge TFS

I love a good blog challenge, or as some other rather spectacular blogs call them, experiments, so I thought it was about time I’d do a challenge of my own. As any of the readers trickling through the TFS gates may have noticed, I’ve been pretty, let’s say “irregular” with posting articles s in the first few months of the blog, so it seems to make perfect sense to do a challenge for the blog itself to get some articles posted and things moving along in the right direction!

Here are the rules of the challenge:
Main task: To post 3 articles per week minimum on the TFS blog.
Challenge start date: Monday 30th September*
Challenge end date: Sunday 3rd November
Challenge total length: 5 weeks.

While not the toughest of physical or mental challenges I’ve ever taken up, it nevertheless will require some focus and obviously a fair amount of time and thought put into it. Considering that the 15 articles I will be posting in the next 5 weeks will triple the total number of posts I’ve made on the blog so far, the challenge seems like a valid one and one I will have to stick at!

Some idea’s for future challenges/experiments:

  • Live on minimum wage for a week (or longer!?)
  • Live below the line challenge – $1.50 per person per day for food for a week (I might have to up that to £1.50 as food tends to be cheaper in the US!)
  • Minimalist/house-decluttering experiment
  • Book reading challenge (I really might struggle with this one!)
  • No alcohol/caffeine for a month
  • Run 1 mile per day for a month
  • 50 press ups / burpees / sit ups per day for a month

As you can see I like both the physical and mental side of challenges, so if you have any ideas for future challenges, please let me know in the comments section!

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*Astute readers will note I’ve posted two articles this week already including this one, so I’m off to a fairly good start. Back ↑

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Monday Moan: Conned Commuters, Canyabelieve it?

Sep30
by TFS on September 30, 2013 at 10:20 am
Posted In: Rants

 

A Train Station - Last Week

Clapham Junction – The Land of the dissatisfied commuter

I’ve had a big chip on my shoulder, as I am sure 99% of other train or public transport commuters do in fact, about the cost of the train commuting and the service we get for it in this country, for about as long as I can remember.

Upon hearing a recent story about Southeastern trains refusing to print off a replacement ticket thereby forcing the guy to have to  buy brand new tickets for the rest of the year, has forced me into keyboard warrior mode and produce my first blog rant, a momentus occasion indeed! Furthermore, I tried to get into work early today only to discover there had been a very untimely “Over-running engineering works” at Clapham Junction, I either had to wait an hour for the next train or just come turn around head back home to work remotely, I chose the latter and decided to post this instead! 🙂

First of all then… regarding that story. They think it’s absolutely fair to charge a guy who has already paid in full for a years worth of train travel up to another £2000 because he lost his ticket – can you imagine this – a whole TWO times?! I mean Double-you-Tee-Eff!? It’s not even as if the tickets are decent and durable materials, simply being made out of a flimsy bit of cardboard. And these things are supposed to last a frigging YEAR!?

Even if you are meticulously careful and avoid losing the damn thing, they barely last six months anyway. And the magnetic strip to get through the automatic barriers wears out after 7-8 months, often sooner, meaning you have to queue up for the guard to let you through for the last 4-5 months of your season ticket. And god forbid you ask them to replace it for a newly printed one because if you lost that then you are facing a bill of another few grand, we all know how much it costs to print a bit of cardboard so that’s only fair enough of course!

Bottom line then – to charge that much for a replacement bit of cardboard that is simply a representation of a service you have already paid for is criminal… literally in my eyes. It should be against the law and the government should step in and stop this sort of thing from happening.

Pathetic Performance Prevents Pleasant Passage

Now regarding the service you get for your hard earned… My current yearly ticket is over £3000. I know people that go into central London are paying £4k, £5k and even more for the privilege of being rammed into tiny metal carriages, practically never getting a seat, and often experiencing delays (such as muggins here, this morning). While I fully appreciate Britain, especially in the South East, is fast becoming grossly over populated, and being crowded in central London is inevitable, I have to say that the reduction of services over the last few years is an absolute joke. I am speaking from a purely personal point of view at this stage by the way: My train, which is at just after 7 in the morning* from a station around 20 miles outside of London has gone from a 12 carriage beast down to an 8 carriage inadequacy in around 4 years, leaving the commuters fighting over the few seats that are left. The general crapiness of service in terms of delays does not really need re-stating except for maybe to point out the fact that many other countries seem to manage to run a decent service, and their tickets are often cheaper, relatively speaking of course.

Efficiency Emergency

This is a bug bear for most medium-large companies I have: They seem to love wasting money.

The perfect example for train companies, or many others in this country for that matter, is on air conditioning and heating. I don’t know if anyone else has realised but we live in the UK where the climate would generally be described as Cold/Temperate. The number of days where you’d actually need air conditioning on a train could probably added up using two hands, but for arguements sake let’s say around 50% of summer days you might need it on at a stretch, and even then only for a few hours of the day, barring our one in a blue moon “heatwaves” that seem to make everyone start acting crazy. However I find that still, at 8am in Autumn or Spring, where the outside temperature can’t be more than 16 degrees (C) the A/C is blowing cold air onto me. Conversely, there must be a certain temperature (say around 13 degrees) where the A/C goes off and the heating comes on. It would seem that the revolutionary idea of not using either when the temperature is moderate to save a bit of fare paying passengers cash, has not been thought of by the boffins in the National Rail Economic Efficiency Department (if it even exists, I am guessing not!).

In summary then, available services are being cut, while passenger numbers are increasing, while wasting money left right and centre, while mugging off individual honest paying customers using silly rules and regulations that should be illegal. And yet somehow having the gall to simultaneously increasing prices far above inflation.

And relax….**

The one obvious positive to take away from all of this is, one you are financially independant and out of the rat race, you won’t ever have to worry about rush hour commuting, so let’s get our heads down and work even harder to get to that goal!

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*I get up this early not because I have to start work so early, it is simply in a vain attempt to get a seat, anything later and you have no hope. Back ↑

**Well I have to say I feel a lot better now, I can see this becoming a regular feature. 🙂 Back ↑

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So I just got a pay rise

Sep06
by TFS on September 6, 2013 at 9:19 am
Posted In: Career

OK so obviously getting a pay rise is great news for me, however the purpose of this post is not to rub everyone’s face in my good fortune* but to tell you about some of the comments made by my boss, and the resulting conversation we had. Some of the topics I thought were pertinent to this blog, some I thought were just quite interesting, and some I found rather strange or amusing. (And some all of the above!)

1. Despite just giving me nearly a 20% raise she still said it was less than I deserved. Obviously I was over the moon with it, so I made the point I’ve made a times few times now that I’m not really too fussed about money and would prefer if anything more free time and less demanding work schedules**. I mention this quite often, in the hope that I am planting a seed that I can successfully negotiate a 4 or maybe even 3 day work week at some point in the future (with corresponding pay cut if necessary, of course), and approach the subject without causing too much of a surprise.

This led on to our usual chat about being understaffed; hence the demanding work schedules (bet you couldn’t see that one coming!). She made a really strange comment which was something along the lines of: “If we employ more people and everyone isn’t working on overdrive, then they’ll have more time to brush up their skills and end up leaving to employers who are paying higher wages.”

Wow… did I really just hear that? She doesn’t want workers improving their skills as then they’ll realise they are being underpaid and jump ship as soon as possible?! It’s just like the proverbial “Lock In” that Jacob talks about in chapter two of his brilliant and enlightening ERE book, or those psychological chains people often talk about which keep them tied to a particular job or position. That seems like serious backwards thinking to me, and I don’t think this is the right way to think about your business and it’s employees. I’d have thought a much more astute way to look at things employee wise would be to:

1. Hire enough people to do the jobs required, so people aren’t overworked and stressed. Greater job satisfaction.
2. Help develop staff as much as possible.
3. Pay them what they are worth!!!***

The final comment which just made me chuckle internally really, was about bonuses. The comment was something along the lines of :

“So next year your bonus should be quite a big chunk, so you can really do something with it like buy a new car, rather than just pay off your credit card bill.”

Oh if only they knew… 😉

 

 

* On the contrary, this site is all about helping others, so I’ll be writing a post or two soon about how to further your career and how to get a good pay rise. In the four years since 2009 I’ve managed to increase my salary  by 85%, in what is supposedly an economic depression, so I’ll be sharing the methods that I think were instrumental in helping me achieve this! Back ↑

**Please note never just say “I don’t really care about money” as I stupidly have done in the past, without making it clear that there is some sort of caveat or alternative you’d like instead (more free time). Many “managers” will hear that and just think, “ok no raise for you for the next few years”. Back ↑

***To put this into context this is not a company that is struggling in any sense of the word, quite the opposite in fact, and has the financial backing from a company in the top 50 of the FTSE 100. So spare cash for a few extra employees and a few raises where deserved should not be hard to come by. Back ↑

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