Howdi readers!

You probably noticed things have gotten a little quiet over here recently so I must apologise. It’s the first time I’ve missed a monthly update by more than a month. The truth of the matter is I’m suffering a little burn out on all three fronts that are normally helping me grind slowly but surely towards Financial Independence:

  • Being frugal
  • Writing the blog
  • Matched betting

I’ve also been exercising less and drinking more booze. Not a great combo and it’s all surely correlated I think you will agree! Rest assured this is a temporary glitch in the FI1.0 software and I’ll be back to normal soon.

Anyway, this is probably not the greatest first post to be writing since I got linked to by this Guardian article here which was related to the Channel 4 show How to retire at 40. After that, there was a huge surge of readers (which I was obviously totally unprepared for!) and I got a few new subscribers as well, so to all the new folks, a big welcome, and I hope this post does not disappoint you!

At least you will already know I’m a real person with (many!) flaws and not some kind of robot saving machine that seems overly unrealistic. It’s all about relate-ability… yo! 1

So I guess the main takeaway here for any newcomers that read that article and/or watched the (rather terrible 2) TV show is that if I can be well on my way to retiring early (OK so maybe not by 40, but around 50 by current calculations) then probably so can you.

The flip side of the overly negative sounding term “burnout” I used above is that I’ve been having a lot of leisure time instead which has admittedly been a lot of fun. We’ve had tonnes of weddings to go to, many days out and two holidays during May and June, and into the start of July, and I went on two stag dos on top of that. This crazy few months is pretty much at an end which is quite a relief to be honest (especially for my poor battered liver!).

 

monthly updates

Unfortunately this now means I have to tell you our financial figures for both May and June as I’ve not done so yet. I won’t do a full update but just provide the headline figures otherwise we’ll all be here all week, but as usual if you want to look at everything in more depth you can just look at my master spreadsheet here:

MASTER SPREADSHEET 3

Anyway without further ado here is what we spent, earned and saved (or rather didn’t save) in May and June:

May

Expenses: £3630

Income: £2876 + £395 pension

Savings rate: -10.97%

June

Expenses: £4194 (!!!)

Income: £3611 + £395 pension

Savings Rate: -4.7%

Overall not a great couple of months for either the bank balances or the FI war chest then.

Highlights of what we spent our money on during May/June were:

  • One stag do, two weddings
  • 2 week holiday to France, 4 day holiday to the Isle of Wight
  • Our washing machine broke down – despite doing all the easy checks it seemed we’d have to call out a mechanic which the cheapest quote I got for a guaranteed fix was £130. We bought a new one for £205 seeing as ours was 8 years old! 4
  • Yearly National Trust membership
  • Car MOT (Our crappy old 2003 Pug 307 passed first time. Yay!)

Highlights of the income:

  • Mrs T got a tax rebate so an extra £350 for her June pay packet
  • £153 cashback from our American Express Platinum cashback card (If you haven’t got one yet, sign up to this card through TopCashback.co.uk (<– referal link) you will also get £21 cashback!)
  • £0 from Matched Betting – A bit of a poor show really but after having such a spectacular first few months of the year, including Cheltenham, I decided to have a month off in May, which has turned into near enough 3 months off. I’ll get back on the profit train in August when the footy is back on! My goal here was to make an average of £750/month, and I’m still on an average of £1,163, so hopefully can still hit my target! 5

net worth etc…

I didn’t even check any of my investment accounts during this time so can’t give you a snap shot of our Net Worth, so nothing worth reporting here. Sorry!

 

onward and upward

Looking forward to the upcoming weeks now I’m back in work (seems strange saying that… but it’s true!) where I can get back into a routine, get productive, get writing the blog again and get exercising again. I’ve got a half Marathon to run this Sunday which will be a good spring board into getting fit again. Also it’s bonus month this month so looking forward to posting a positive savings rate again at the end of the month!

 

 

 

Notes:

  1. Or so the kids tell me nowadays, anyway?!
  2. I feel a bit bad for insulting the show seeing as presenter Rhik Samadder kindly linked to this blog in his Guardian piece, even though I didn’t even feature in the show(!?) but I think everyone in the FIRE community is agreed that it was a very shallow, disjointed show focussed far more on trying to be funny/entertaining than actually give people any useful information on how to actually save up enough money to retire early. Sorry Rhik! 🙁
  3. Remember if you want to copy my spreadsheet to use/modify yourself you can do this, 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)
  4. This really bugs me, why do things cost so much to fix compared to a new replacement? Our throwaway culture at it’s best: The part that was likely gone was the motor which was £80 for the part yet a whole new washing machine is only £205?! How does that work!?
  5.  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. 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. You can try it out for free as well –> Odds Monkey