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Welcome to theFIREstarter! If you are interested in themes such as Financial Independence, Retiring Early, Downshifting, or simply just working less and living more then please stick around, I think we’ll get on just fine 🙂
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If you'd like to keep a track of new developments, money saving tips, money making tips, my adventures in attempting self sufficiency and simple living, free financial hacks and spreadsheets, and my general musings on Financial Independence, Personal Finance, investing, and the occasional humorous rant, then please consider following along. Those links again:
It’s that time of year you all look forward to, which brings much merriment to the FI community, where you can all laugh at how I achieved none of my goals that were set the previous January 🙂
You’re mostly out of luck this year though as I finally caught onto your game and only actually set myself one, reeeeeeeally easy goal last year, which was this:
Savings rate 25%
The great news is that I still managed to mess it up, falling just short at 22.82%.
Hi all MB’s out there, hope you had a great Cheltenham week last week and have recovered over the weekend?
I am still quite knackered. I was up at 5:30 every day last week to get into work early to get all my bets on (and then more throughout the day). It was manic to say the least.
Anyway, was it worth it? This year I’m afraid the answer turned out to be “no” but I don’t regret giving it a shot because as they say you’ve gotta be in it to win it! What will be interesting to work out is how much I could have roughly made with “Proper” matched betting as opposed to my no lay strategy, so that is what I am going to focus on here in my analysis.
I’m not going to go through a race by race round up as I did last year, because A) I haven’t got time, B) Doing that spanned 3 posts last year! and C) I think it would just depress me too much 🙂
So I’ll just go through day by day stats and write up a few notes of each day that were of interest.
Don’t think this guy will be winning any races any time soon 🙂
Any Matched Bettor worth their salt will know that it’s Cheltenham tomorrow and those more serious than I am have probably been preparing for it weeks or maybe even months in advance, as there are some long term “Pre-Cheltenham” offers flying about.
Anyway, I did alright 😉 out of the festival last year which was partly due to a bit of luck but also partly down to some major hustlin’, hitting up as many offers as I could, and also, I think, using my “No Lay” policy of never bothering to lay anything off on the exchanges. If you want to read more about that see my Cheltenham Part I write up from last year.
As I did so well last year using this tactic, I will certainly be doing it again this year (the major benefits really are less time to trigger each offer, and less/no money needed in the exchange accounts, rather than greater expected winnings, as this could go the other way and end up I could end up losing money, in theory!).
As usual I wouldn’t suggest anyone else do this unless they fully accept they could put a lot of effort into the week and still end up losing money. So most people are best off sticking to true MB where you back and lay each horse and free bet to guarantee yourself some profit.
With that caveat out of the way here is a list of what I feel are the best offers to be hitting up this week at Cheltenham.
As you can see from the above pic, we spent some of February basking on a lovely beach in Antigua! Actually a more accurate description was frantically chasing TFS Jr around, which let’s face it, was far more fun than just cooking ourselves slowly in the Caribbean sun anyway. But how did all of this extravagance hit our bottom line?! Find out below…
expenses
As usual you can check out my Awesome FI Tracking Spreadsheet for a full breakdown of Income/Expense tracking and Net Worth tracking, as well as updated some of the summary sheets as well. Remember you can copy this to use/update as you please using Google Sheets “File -> Make a copy” menu command!
The figures below as usual represent: £Current Month (£2018 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)
I’m going to do something rather daring and try to pack everything I did in twoposts last year into just one post!
So let’s keep things as concise as possible, you know what’s going on here… let’s dive in…
expenses
A graph, last Tuesday
Well there’s a nice graph to give you an overview of our expenses over the last 3.5 years.
Anyone who’s been following remotely closely will know that we were nowhere near our spending budget for the year, but let’s find out by how much shall we?
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Disclaimer
I am not a professional anything, and you should treat all the words you read on this site as ones that exist for your infotainment only. Even the ones in this disclaimer. I will not be held responsible for any kind of outcome from you following the advice or hint of a suggestion made on this blog, and will not be liable for any emotional damage inflicted by the stinkingly bad puns contained within. Read at your own risk. Some of the links on this website may be affiliate links, if you support me via these links I will be forever in your debt, not in any monetary sense of course. Like I'd actually put that in the disclaimer! Hah!
No. 1 goal: Don’t worry be happy!
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