random update – aka what the hell have I been up to over the last 3 months!?

Sep18
by TFS on September 18, 2019 at 6:30 am
Posted In: Rants, TFS Updates

Random photo from Summer

 

Hey all!

Sorry for the radio silence around here for the last 3 months. Summer happened and things kinda got out of hand haha.

Anyway, thought it would be best to kick off posting again with a brief update on a few things. Here we go…

 

Work

Work has thoroughly p**sed me off to the extent that I’m 100% leaving as soon as the next bonus hits in January. The main two reasons being:

  • Pay rise request denied: I applied for a pay rise, the powers that be came back with a negative and said it’s because “I’m not bringing anything extra to the role”. Well that’s funny because I gave a list of things of why I was bringing extra to the role and my line manager agreed with it all. But that’s it, you don’t actually get to speak to the guys who decide anymore, they hide behind this extra layer of bureaucracy now. Jokes. Plus, you know that thing called inflation, yea you’ve basically given me a 10% pay cut over the last 3 years due to zero pay rise. Cheers fellas!
  • Lack of recruitment: Our department has been understaffed for a few years now anyway, and someone left in January. By May time it was clear they weren’t actually going to replace him (not that they actually told us this up front though. Great “employee focused” management there). I kicked up a minor stink about it and got a boatload of corp-speak about having to have business justification and us having to provide alternative road-maps depending on whether they hire a new body or not, plus any number of other management buzz words du jour. Why can’t people just act upon the blindingly obvious nowadays? Someone left in an understaffed team and so it’s overwhelmingly likely they will need replacing. You should be providing business justification not to replace them, not the other way around. I wouldn’t mind if the company was struggling and the purse strings were generally tight, but It is particularly galling because we get emails stating things like “we’re not going fast enough” and also they are hiring tonnes of other people in other areas such as “customer insight” teams and middle managers. Who do they actually expect to do the work these other teams are generating? You can’t “good idea” your way towards higher profits if no one is actually doing the dirty work of implementing those ideas. Truly bizarre.

Anyway I could write a full scale rant about the above situations but will stop there, as I’m kinda over it now and have just decided to leave them to it. I would quit now but I’m so close to the next bonus which is being paid in January! I also need to earn enough/pay enough tax this year to offset some tax I want to claim back from the SEIS/EIS fund I invested in late last year, so I think I can just about stick it out 🙂

 

Life

We’ve had a great summer in general with another family holiday to the Isle of Wight, plenty of other fun days and weekends out/away and topped it off with 4 weeks off work towards the latter half of August. Cannot complain with any of that! 🙂

We managed to convert our random little utility room at the front of our house from a junk store:

 

To a nice utility room / home office combo:

 

It’s pretty cramped in there at times, especially when the washing is hanging up on a clothes dryer 🙂 but it’s definitely a workable solution for when I leave work early next year and I finally have my own space to work from home properly, whoop!

We paid a carpenter/builder to fit out the room with proper stud walls and insulation as it was just bare brick previously, plus new lights and electric points etc. But the rest of the units, painting and flooring and finishing off I did myself, so saved a bit of money and it wasn’t too expensive overall.

We also got a nice garden store box which we stuck in the front garden:

(This is half built, it does have a roof, haha!)

Next year we’re going to get a bike shed as TFS Jr is finally old enough to get a proper bike at Christmas, which means I am going to treat myself to one as well. MMM would be proud (or more likely say “why the f**k has it taken you 6 years!? 🙂 you big wussypants?”)

 

We had a small tomato/cucumber/bean harvest which TFS Junior loved helping me pick, running around the garden shouting “beans, beans, beans!!!!”. Would she eat any of our homegrown produce though? Would she ‘eck! Here is an interesting looking specimen we picked though:

 

Personal Project

The final, and perhaps most important reason which really drove the nail home about being 100% sure I would quit work, and especially why I wouldn’t just look for a new job, is that I’ve been working on a personal software project and I’ve become absolutely wrapped up in it. This is also why things have been quiet around here as nearly all of my spare time I’ve spent working on it.

It’s been great fun, very rewarding, and I’ve loved just doing something off of my own back and making my own decisions on every little thing, rather than listen to the opinion of 15 other people which I value about as much as a cornucopia of slugs giving me advice on how to keep my vegetable patch in good nick.

The main point though, in case you missed it, is that I’ve really enjoyed this process.

Sign me up to more of this sh*t please! 😀

I’ve been staying up till 1am on many nights to get extra coding in I’ve been that excited about it. It’s been tiring, but it’s been worth it, and I’ve created something I’m actually quite proud of.

It also really highlights what I could achieve if I didn’t have a 9-5 job filling up most of my time!

“What the hell is it then?” I hear you asking!

Well, I can’t really reveal too much unfortunately, but it is to do with gambling – not really much of a shock there if you’ve been a long time follower of the blog, haha.

I also have a second idea that I’ve already started that I hopefully will be able to reveal to you all, and I think could help a lot of people out who are interested in Each Way Betting. I already have a prototype of it running so will do a proper post on this very soon.

Watch this space!!! 🙂

 

Financials

I mentioned a while back that I’ve kinda given up tracking the spending, my plan was to do a 6 monthly update. Well that’s long gone and I still can’t be bothered, however I did check all our accounts and got a rough Net Worth calculation so here it is:

Excluding house equity: £235,942 / +£46,887 / +24.8%

Including house equity: £326,817 / +£47,239 / +16.9%

Liquid Freedom: £123,412 / +£28,675 / +30.27%

Not too shabby! Just quietly steamed passed the 300K barrier in total NW at some point during the year. NBD

I don’t think 6 years ago I would even believe I’d have let such a milestone go so unnoticed but as recently mentioned, auto-pilot seems to be a thing now. What is great is that having a base and getting your financial sh*t even remotely together, it then free’s up your brain to concentrate on other things (such as side hustling and increasing income) which definitely feels like what has happened over the years.

The main bulk in the increase liquid freedom has come from matched betting income, plus unfortunately my Nan died during the summer so we got a small inheritance from that as well. The extra increases in the other categories are from paying off the mortgage principal, and gains and more additions to pension pots (SIPP and work pension)

I might try to just do a Net Worth update every month from now on as it is very simple to do, far easier then tracking all expenses. And if Net Worth is constantly going up then it means I have a positive savings rate (in a general and long term view, at least) so if that keeps on happening I know we’re moving in the right direction.

 

 

I’ll leave it there for now but hopefully that’s given you an idea of what I’ve been up to over the last 3 months, and I will sign off by saying Happy Blogoversary from way back in July when TFS turned 6 years old!

That’s practically geriatric in Blog years, and still (just about!) going 🙂