stopping to smell the flowers – a most unproductive 2 months update
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:
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:
- Or so the kids tell me nowadays, anyway?! ↩
- 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! 🙁 ↩
- 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) ↩
- 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!? ↩
- 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 ↩
Discussion (23) ¬
C’mon TFS, get that chin up and give yourself a damn good talking to. FI is a wonderful place to be and there’s already not enough of us out there. We don’t want to lose a team member.
Maybe run the £0 budget process with every add then requiring the following questions:
Question 1. Do I really need this?
Question 2. If you decide it has to go in ask can I buy less of it?
Question 3. Once you’re buying the least ask if it’s giving you the best value for money.
Maybe run the lowest priced grocery shop process. At your next shop buy the lowest priced per unit of measure you need of every item. Then uprate in future shops where quality is not good enough.
Maybe start sweating the small stuff.
Start thinking quality of life and not standard of living again.
Re the alcohol intake. Have you tried not drinking for 3-6 months to see how you feel? You might be surprised.
Good luck with getting yourself back on track.
Hi RIT,
Thanks for all the tips as usual! Really do appreciate it.
The thing is I’m going for a slow jog towards FI rather than the 7-10 year sprint that your good self has done, so I’m not really that interested in sweating the small stuff to shave maybe 1 year off of my target.
The fact is our grocery budget could probably be shaved off by £100/month if we really cracked down, which would take some effort. But this is not what’s killing the budget these last few months, it’s because we were blowing hundreds of pounds on either a wedding, a stag do, or a thousand or so on a nice holiday to France. All of these things pass question 1, don’t make much sense for question 2 and value for money is a given in question 3 otherwise we wouldn’t have done it.
Totally agree on the alcohol intake. I would like to experiment with something like that but I tend to hang with a heavy drinking crowd so it could mean a bit of ostracisation in that respect!
Thanks for the kind words, and hope you continue to enjoy your FI/one more year-ish 🙂
Hi TFS,
Glad to see you are still alive 🙂 You need to have some down time and fun time, and this always tends to cost a bit more sometimes – nothing wrong with the occasional binge I find 🙂 Although two months in a row with a negative savings rate has to hurt a little – but, most importantly, did you enjoy it? Would you have looked back and regretted not going on the stag do or to the weddings?
This is the joy of having the spare funds, it hasn’t gone on a high rate credit card! I am also glad I am not the only one who sometimes has a negative savings rate 🙂
Good luck for the half marathon, and fingers crossed for a good bonus!
Cheers,
FiL
P.S. I wouldnt feel bad for insulting the show – it isn’t what the FIRE community would rate as any use, but as you say was done purely for entertainment!
Hehe, Thanks FiL! I am glad too!
Yea obviously enjoyed it all so no complaints really. Just feel like I’ve let everyone down on here more than anything… hah.
Thanks, bonus number is in and it’s pretty good while not amazing, although I haven’t exactly been working my rear end off this year as you can probably tell so again no complaints!
Cheers as always 🙂
Hey TFS
I hope you are suitably refreshed after your break away from the blogging and MB, although perhaps ‘refreshed’ might not be the word to use after the stag do’s!
My MB has taken a real hit this month too – family and sunny weather caused me to have different priorities but like you, I’m am gearing myself up for the football season – not long now!
Looking forward to seeing you back on track with things – you’ve got a reputation to your regular readers and to Guardian readers too to maintain! 🙂
Yes I’m not refreshed in any way and I guess that is the issue, I’m flipping knackered!
There is definitely a case for trying not to cram too much in but a lot of these sorts of things are out of your hands (aside from just saying you’re not coming).
Haha I bet most G readers that have come here have just thought, who is this joker and went on their merry way, but hopefully a few will stick around to see what the general vibe is about.
Cheers and enjoy the rest of the summer 🙂
A good hack is to join ‘New Zealand Heritage’ over the ‘Nation Trust’. For a family of 4, it works out at about £54.
http://www.heritage.org.nz/get-involved/join-us/membership-benefits
Hello Acacia,
Many thanks for the pro-tip/hack!
I have actually heard of that one before via ermine’s blog but I think seeing as the NT is doing some good work and the £108 isn’t going to break the bank (OK well technically it did but… you get what I mean haha!) then I’m happy paying the full amount to support them.
Cheers 🙂
It is also worth noting the value of the joint lifetime membership if it is something you are thinking of doing ongoing. Currently its about £1,800 for 2, which over the lifetime makes it relatively cheap (even for us older ones!), although you will still have to pay for the little one, worth thinking about!
Cheers,
FiL
How much time does it take to earn an average of £1,163 on matched betting?
Hi Tom,
You *Could* make this per month with about 10-20 hours depending on what methods you use. But it could take a lot longer.
It’s a bit of a “How long is a piece of string” question to be honest!
If you want to get a better sense of what you can do either see my matched betting category: http://thefirestarter.co.uk/category/matched-betting/
Or take a look at MatchedBettingGuy.com who has lots of decent methods for making big £££ quicker than the usual run of the mill matched betting advice.
Cheers!
Seriously?! Is this a joke? It’s a joke, right? Are you okay? It seems like you need an intervention.
Did that Channel 4 programme extinguish your FIRE drive? We promise it is more fun than potatoes and running out of loo roll.
Fingers crossed for the bonus and more focus next month.
Haha, no nothing to do with the TV show, I guess it was just a coincidence.
To be honest I’m less bothered about the spending, because most of this was within what I budgeted anyway at the start of the year, and it’s just lumpy the way it’s coming out, which is fine. But definitely looking to get back to blogging and generally sorting my shit out.
Cheers! 🙂
Looks like the mainstream media start to look at FIRE. The same is ongoing in Holland and Belgium…
And those blog burnouts happen. Mine was about a year ago, and i notice a second one popping up. this time, I am better prepared for that. Like yoo, too much other stuff ongoing… Fun is not bad…
All the best, recover and smell those flowers!
Oh really… that’s interesting AT!
Has it made a TV appearance as well or just in the papers/websites?
Fun is certainly not bad but there is always that thing nagging away in the back of my mind… “you have only posted one blog post in a month!” etc… etc…
Again this is not a bad thing and one of my fav ever MMM posts about the subject made me see this in a totally different light (I just used to thing they were annoying and that I was a weirdo). In fact I’m going to go and read it right now:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/21/embracing-the-nagging-voice-of-success/
Cheers Amber Tree and I hope you are having a good summer over there!
And he’s back! Nice to hear from you TFS. Thanks as always for stepping up with the honest figures. “One stag do, two weddings, 2 week holiday to France, 4 day holiday to the Isle of Wight, reduced income from MB and <5% in the red for the month….bloody well done, old chap! That's the sort of thing that sends unprepared people into a debt spiral on the never, never.
Dust yourself off now, revisit your goals and your "why", smile and get back in the groove.
I've got two off-road HM's in the calendar (September and November) and have tentatively started my training. Have a good run this weekend.
Hi SG,
Thanks very much for the positive comment, really appreciate it. It’s interesting to hear peoples different perspectives on this kind of spending/lifestyle I am living! Certainly am not frugal compared to a lot in the FI world. I would be interested to hear what others do when invited to family weddings or stags etc…? Do they just not go? Or maybe go to wedding, no present, don’t drink? Each to their own but that is not for me, and I’m not a “freedom at all costs” type of person.
The main annoying thing is that all these events seem to come along at once, the only thing we could really control was the holiday but it made sense to do this in June as I had 4 weeks off anyway.
Oh cool, what ones are you doing if you don’t mind me asking?
I’d like to sign up to one around November time.
HM was good, very hard as quite warm, mainly off road, and, well, serious lack of training. But it was a good slap in the face to get up off my ar$e again and get back into it.
Cheers!
Whilst you owe nobody an explanation, I suspect you may just be suffering from mid-FIRE fatigue. I quite like this article, which acknowledges the “boring middle” of FIRE:
http://www.bayalisistheanswer.com/fire-games/
Whichever way, though, you can be sure you’re not the only one to find saving up a bit dull past the initial zeal stage. Keep the faith, TFS 😉
Every action has a reaction eh FS?
I think that is true in both the physical world and the psychological one, well it does for me anyway.
Too much of anything will most likely produce a backlash at some point and I think this few months (well this whole year really if you look at my yearly budget I posted in January, most of this spending was totally planned) is certainly evidence of that.
The boring middle is definitely a thing and also unfortunately the longest part of it as well. At least I can say that the early excitement seemed to last a good 3-4 years, not too bad! 🙂
Cheers!
Hi TFS,
I’d like to thank you for such an honest post, which shows everyone (and especially any new Guardian readers) that those of us pursuing financial independence have just the same struggles and challenges as everyone else when trying to save lots. I find that reading about others who have an off month (or two) every now and again while on their FIRE journey, draws me in even more because I associate more. I definitely have off months, so I like to see how others cope with the same types of issues and how they overcome. I think it’s much more difficult to talk about the downs than the ups, but I feel it’s important to do so, because perhaps in sharing our own mishaps/fails we can help each other through those more challenging times.
Anyway, it’s good to see your post, and it sounds like you had a great couple of months of indulgence. After that, getting back to “normal” can feel pretty refreshing from my experience. I hope that is turning out to be the case for you too.
OR
Hi OR,
Well thanks for putting a spring in my step this morning with your very kind words! I obviously agree, no point in painting an overly simplistic and unrealistic picture of what FI or the journey to FI is like… people can smell bulls**t pretty easily in my experience so that’s not what we’re trying to do here.
“getting back to “normal” can feel pretty refreshing from my experience” – this is so true! A life of full time hedonism may be for some people but it certainly isn’t for me!
Cheers again OR 🙂