really rubbish december update
TFS Jr being very helpful with the Christmas Decorations
Merry New Year folks (sorry, bit late on this one! Some things never change I guess 🙂 )
I hope you are trudging through the muddy puddle of a month that is January with as much aplomb as I am. Just to be clear, the title of the post refers to the fact that this update will be very short and most likely a bit rubbish rather than the fact that my actual month was rubbish. December was actually really great, had some time off and saw many friends and family. Text book Christmas. Right, onto the financials…
expenses
Remember the figures below are in the format: £Current Month (£2017 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)
- Total £3236 (£3645 / £3210) – Do you know what, I’d have bitten your hand off for that December spend at the start of the year. Shame every other month wasn’t as good!
- Mortgage £848 (£848 / £848)
- Household £825 (£722 / £599) – Groceries over by about £100, the killer as usual. I’ll be looking at this with a fresh pair of eyes next year. (Should have done it way earlier but not really had the focus to do so).
- Going out/Holiday £692 (£972 / £750) – Obviously gone way over on the going out budget this month which isn’t that surprising.
- Transport £102 (£147 / £172) – Actually under budget for a category for the whole year, a pleasant surprise.
- Personal Care £155 (£91 / £90) – Christmas haircuts etc. Pretty much bang on target for the year.
- Home/Garden £105 (£173 / £85) – A trip to Ikea for some much needed cushions and pillows here 1
- Lifestyle £231 (£223 / £165) – Usual story here yet again.
- Gifts/Charity £350 (£209 / £215) – The rest of the Christmas presents and so on. It all adds up, doesn’t it?!
- Hobbies/Sport £31 (£140 / £150) – Under budget for the year here too which is nice.
- Admin £0 (£4 / £10)
- Financial £5 (£47 / £57)
- Children £52 (£74 / £70) – Well done to TFS Jr for only going £4/month over budget for the whole year. Nice! 🙂
income
Figures in the same format as expenses…
- Total £3328 +£395 Pension (£4326 / £3907) – A pretty standard month for income
- TFS Income £2513 +£395 Pension (£2550 / £2390) – See above.
- Mrs T Income £667 (£700 / £600) – Standard again.
- Ratesetter £8 (£18 / £0) – Still chugging along. It’s worth noting that the offer has recently changed again. The terms are now you get a free £100 if you invest £5000 for a year. It’s a lot to stick in for a whole year but still pretty good for the free money, so if you’d like to avail of this offer then click on this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link!).
- Child benefit £82 (£82 / £82) – The gift that keeps on giving
- TopCashback (<– Referral Link) – £23 (£17 / £10) – Total cash back to date this year is now £206! Not bad for just spending what we normally would do. The best cash back deals tend to be on home and card insurance which really bump it up and the others are just all 1-5% on all other online purchases which quickly add up if remember to do all of them through the cashback website. Read my intro article on it here for more info.
Matched Betting / Gambling Hustles £0 (£609 / £750) – Oh dear. I still haven’t balanced the books properly on this one. So target for the year well and truly missed. I am “fairly certain” I would have been in the green this month but when January 1st came I had so many outstanding backs/lays it would have been a nightmare to tot it all up 2 (plus I moved a lot of the matched betting float around e.g. to Cryptos). Having said that, I’m currently on a very bad losing streak with the no lay Acca’s in January so maybe all of my hard work is going to be undone. The best offers last month were the 2 up early pay out offers with the Darts with Bet365. Such an awesome offer! I would look out for this and similar offers on other sports with both Bet365 and Paddy Power. Bet365 are doing it on the NFL which I’ve had a dabble with (missed any decent ones though unfortunately) and Tennis (which I’ve not but might back test it to see how many times it copped) but Darts is by far the best sport for this offer as players often get 2 ahead then choke a bit when they get near the finish line. So I will be doing my best to preserve my Bet365 account until they offer it again next year (well actually this year now!) or hopefully sooner on another Darts tournament 3!
Anyhow, I shall crack on with the no lay Accas and any other opportunities where the the maths are in my favour and hope for a swing in luck over the last couple of weeks of January and take a brief break from the whole thing as will be on Holiday at the start of Feb, so will definitely be able to do a proper tot up of whether I am finally back into the green or not. As usual OddsMonkey is the site I am using to find all of my no lay acca opportunities.
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! Now, back to the update!
savings rate, net worth and all of that Bugenhagen
We hit a savings rate this month of 13.25%. Our final average for the year was 22.82% so although far short of the 30% target I set at the start of the year it is still positive, which is something considering we spend an absolute tonne this year! I’ll have more thoughts on this in the yearly update so won’t go into any more detail here though.
Net worth did this:
Excluding house equity: £155,524 / £3,394 / 2.23%
Including house equity: £238,167 / £3,854 / 1.65%
Liquid Freedom: £67,344 / -£837/ -1.23%
I hear on the grapevine that markets have been on a bit of a tear again so I guess that’s why the increase. Nice!
On my spreadsheet, you’ll notice that on the NetWorth Tracker (NW Tracker 2017) there are a couple of new lines. One is for Cryptocurrencies and I will just keep that amount the same as what I put into it, until I sell out for either a profit (hopefully) or loss (hopefully not!). These markets are so volatile it seems pointless to actually update the amount they are worth on a monthly basis but if there are any interesting swings I will obviously mention them on the monthly update or separate posts with my thoughts and what I might or have done about it in terms of buying or selling more.
The other line is for Brewdog, which after reading weenie’s post on their “Equity for punks” offer I decided to also chuck a bit of money at it. They sound like they want to take over the world so it’s a small punt with a small potential for a big upside but realistically won’t really make much difference to the NW at all. But I like the beer, the company seems to have a good ethos and so it seemed to make sense to support them. As with almost everything nowadays, I have a referral link for this too but please don’t think I’m recommending this as an investment to anyone because I’ve mainly just done it as a bit of fun (although it’s worth bearing in mind you do get 10% off online orders and 20% off in the pubs/bars they run, which could get your money back within a year or two if you are a (VERY!) big drinker haha!)
Other updates
Muscley Meaty Goodness – We’ve recently started getting some of our meat based products from an online delivery company called Musclefood, and so far I have to say I’m really impressed! They always have great offers on so definitely watch out for those (in fact I would only buy anything when it’s one of the offers, but they send you about 3 per week so just we just wait for a really good VFM one and then order as and when our freezer has enough space accordingly!).
If you use my referral link here you’ll also get some extra freebies – I think at the moment it’s 4 extra chicken breasts – but like I say scour the site and offers section and combine this with some of the other offers, they are normally “hampers” where you get a really good selection of meat for like £30-40. My only gripe at the moment is they don’t offer timed delivery slots, which if “fine” because they have a special packing system which keeps the meat refrigerated for 24-48 hours, but it is a hell of a lot of packaging which ends up straight in the big, which is my main gripe with the whole system. If they did timed delivery slots (if you so chose to have one) this wasteful packaging would not be necessary. Apart from that though it’s really good, the meat is great, really big chunky bits of tasty meat, the chicken breasts are especially tasty and great value. Check it out if you like your meat!
That’s pretty much it for the year then! 2017 checking out!
Hope you all had a good one and hope 2018 is treating you well already!
TFS.X
Notes:
- I really hope you can sense the sarcasm in that sentence… haha ↩
- The way I work out profit/loss is simply add up all the balances on all my bookie and exchange accounts. I’m not very good at book keeping in this regard so if I’ve got more than a few bets running it becomes hard to even remember where I’ve got bets on… not ideal but there it is. ↩
- Done a bit of Googling and the World Grand Prix also has a 5 set format going up to best of 9 in the final, so hopefully they’ll do it on that one if not others! ↩
Brewdog! We went to the brewery when we were in Glasgow this summer and loved it! Got to play Catan there with the missus, who schooled my drunk ass. I came home with an overpriced hoodie to remember the place by. And yes: great beer. They do hops right.
Way to finish out the year, friend!
Ah that’s so cool! Have to remember to visit next time we go up to Scotland. To be fair most of their stuff seems overpriced to me so I only really drink it when I’m out and about anyway, so I doubt I’m going to make much use of my discount card! But I do really like the beers and if everyone else continues to be happy to pay for it, then my small investment will do well 🙂
Hey TFS
Congrats on the ~23% savings rate, considering you squeezed in so much and as you say, ‘spent a tonne’ in 2017.
I hear you on the bad run of no lay accas – only got a few more days to see if I can make any kind of decent profit! A shame that I couldn’t take advantage of Bet365’s Darts 2UP offer, although had I not been gubbed, that offer may not have caught my eye as I tend to stick to football and the horses, with a bit of tennis thrown in! I don’t think Paddy’s 2UP has ever come in for me, even though I do them most weeks.
Yay, good to see a fellow BrewDog ‘investor’, although as you say it’s all just for a bit of fun and discounts in bars!
Thought I’d join the crew after your recommendation. Thanks for pointing it out! 🙂
I’ve stopped the NLA’s for a while as on holiday and been focusing on Cryptos instead, so definitely made a loss on that in January. But will get back on it in Feb.
Looks like 2017 was a reasonably year all round, love how you share all the nitty gritty details with us.
Thanks Ms ZiYou!
Not much point in only sharing the highlights, right!? That’s just not realistic.
Cheers and good luck to you for 2018.
That’s a great rate of savings that you managed, even if it wasn’t quite what you were aiming for. It’s a nice sum that your website is making as well – paying some of the bills!
Not sure if this was spam or not but let it through anyway as at least half of it made sense (Not sure where you got that the website was paying any of the bills though!??!)