sensational september – income/expenses and “other” updates

Oct04
by TFS on October 4, 2015 at 12:31 pm
Posted In: Budgets, TFS Updates
Share save cheques

A tale of two cheques! The bank clerk was a bit surprised at the differing amounts as you might expect 🙂

 

Another month of 2015 down, only 3 to go. How mad does that sound?!

Quickly onto some figures for you. Would it surprise you if I said that this month our savings rate was… bum ba-ba-baaaaahhh:

70.31%!!!!

Wowza!

Let’s do the income breakdown this month first as that is where most of the action is…

income breakdown

The stars just aligned this month and we got a double whammy of extra income:

  1. I cashed my work share save scheme in and the shares had gained a very nice amount, about £2,300!
  2. Got the tax rebate paid from my SIPP contributions + tax return, which was £3,000

The bad news is that this is clearly not sustainable… booo. It’s nice to get a bumper month every so often though, that is for sure.

It was also the first month where I am on reduced pay due to going part time (which I am still thoroughly enjoying so far in case you missed it 🙂 ). So my pay has dropped from around £2700 to £2200 this month. It is worth noting that I think they’ve completely messed up my tax code so I am not expecting £2200 every month going forward (i.e. it should be less), I need to ring HRMC next week to confirm what is going on there.

On top of all that I also withdrew the money out of my TopCashback* 1 account that’s been building up for a while which was £109.

So that was all the income excitement this month!

 

expenses breakdown

Expenses were rather more average coming in at £2,866. I really thought we were going to come in much lower than that but then the classic happened and we got a few bills that you always forget about, the TV Licence (£145) and house insurance (£84), plus a few other bits n bobs. Still, not the end of the world, and we were away (yes, again!) in Bath for our wedding anniversary.

Other “highlights” 🙂 include:

  • Groceries £216 – About average for us and slowly going back down again after having a few expensive months of entertaining people in summer.
  • Holiday £230 – Seemed quite reasonable for 2 nights away in Bath and Longleat
  • Dining & Drinking £204 – This is actually low compared to our average this year 🙂 which is now at £285/month
  • Petrol £101 – This is above average due to driving to Bath!
  • Golf £68 – Below average but got an expensive October coming up on this one.
  • Clothes £99 – After a few months of going well on this Mrs T let herself loose a bit this month. She has a good excuse though which I will come onto shortly 🙂
  • Alcohol £42 – Around half of this was an ale brewing kit which I will be firing up very soon 😉
  • Gambling £5 / Lottery £11 – Much lower than previous months and this is the last payment (I think) for the lottery for Mrs T, which is good news.
  • Running events £60 – I signed up to two half marathons in Feb. More on this next week! 😉
  • We spent a fair bit on charity, gifts and birthdays. It was my in-laws ruby wedding anniversary and I felt the need to put my money where my mouth is on the refugees crisis.

As usual if you want to have a look at the whole breakdown and/or copy the spreadsheet to modify for your own uses then by all means have a look at it here.

Our average expenditure is now still well above what I targeted (£2,666) at £2,976. I don’t think we can pull it back down to that level by the end of the year, but we can try to get as close as possible. I don’t think there will be any more big bills to come now and dining and drinking expenses should continue to fall because we have some other rather big news to share….

 

meet TFS Jr

TFS Jr

… 😀 😀 😀 🙂 🙂 🙂 😀 😀 😀 …

Possibly a rather nice spanner in the FI works, as UTMT puts it 🙂

Yes, we are having a baby! Some of you may have noticed Mrs T’s tee totalling it at the York meetup?! Or maybe that just slipped under the radar as we were all just getting to know each other. Anyway either way, that was the reason she was being very reserved on the alcohol front that weekend 🙂

To be honest, this doesn’t really change all that much financially for us, and if anything I think it will help us batten down the hatches and get our spending down further. We’ll be going out and drinking a lot less, that is for sure, and that has already stared to show through in the bottom line a little. Oh and this is also why Mrs T’s clothing spending has gone slightly up this month, but this should go back to normal next month, I am assured 😉

Obviously there will be all new things to spend our hard earned on for the little one, with various companies trying to put the frighteners on us telling us we are horrendous parents if we don’t buy their products, but we’ve both agreed to be rational about it.

Besides, from what I hear from most people I know you are inundated with barely used hand me downs anyway so we’ll probably only end up buying a few small token items new, so we don’t feel like total leeches on society if anything else… 😀

 

net worth and investments update

In all that excitement I nearly forgot to do the Net Worth update! It has, thankfully, gone back up again this month. The stock market has about held steady so it’s mainly due to the good savings rate. Net worth figures this month are:

Excluding house equity: £92,741 / +£4,985 / +5.68%

Including house equity: £162,609 / +£5,367 / + 3.41%

I made three stock purchases this month as income was high and the market remains fairly good value from my amateur perspective (please remember this is not advice, it’s just what I did!):

  • I was keeping an eye on the Vanguard FTSE All-World High Dividend Yield ETF (VHYL:LN) and I said if it dropped below £30 per unit I would wade in. It duly did at some point during the month so I bought £2,000 of it in my Charles Stanley Direct ISA
  • I also bought £1,500 of VHYL in my BestInvest SIPP
  • I also bought £2,000 worth of Vanguard Lifestrategy 100% Equity (VGL100A:LN) which went through with terrible timing and executed at the highest price it had been all month! 😀 – In 10 years time that will be a minor blip so it’s not worth worrying about those sort of things.

 

Well that was my exciting and sensational September, I hope yours was as good as mine was! 🙂

 

Cheers!

 

TFS.x

Notes:

  1. This page contains affiliate links, each one is brought to your attention with the ‘*’ denotation. What is an affiliate link you ask?! OK well it’s fairly basic… If you click on, sign up through or buy anything via these links I may receive a small fee, which will help to support theFIREstarter blog. The key thing is that it will not cost you anything extra to use these links, although don’t go clicking on them willy nilly just because it may help me! If you think you will find the product/service useful and do click through, then a sincere “thank you” for your support. ↩
└ Tags: , , , , , ,