the garden project – day 1

Aug21
by TFS on August 21, 2017 at 7:56 pm
Posted In: DIY

 

Good evening everyone!

I’ve just started another 4 weeks off of work (Heeeeyoooo! Props to the part time massive!) but rather than have any time to sit down and write thoughtful, useful, and google SERP 1 topping articles for you I’ve decided to completely rip my garden apart and put it back together again.

The reasons for this are many:

  • We currently have decking which is rotten and falling apart.
  • The garden is split into many small areas on different levels which we decided we don’t really like because…
  • It’s not great with a small child. You definitely can’t kick a ball around in there or run around at the moment, which seems a bit sh!t if you ask me.
  • Also this multi-area/multi-level set up makes a medium size garden 2 feel really quite small.
  • I felt like taking on yet another ridiculous DIY project with little chance of completing it on schedule and within budget 🙂

Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying I’m going to just post up some pics of my progress at the end of each day instead of providing any real financially related posts. He he.

Self indulgent? You betcha!

But hopefully some of you might find it interesting, and I’ll keep a running record of what we’ve spent so there is at least a vague relation to something financial on here too.

 

Here is the rough plan of what I’m going to do:

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Notes:

  1. Search Engine Results Page ↩
  2. 6.5m x 10m – Is that medium or still small? It seems quite medium to me ↩
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full time leisure is not the path to happiness

Aug10
by TFS on August 10, 2017 at 7:31 am
Posted In: Lifestyle Design, Philosophy, Psychology, Random Thoughts, Travel

 

Full time leisure is not the path to happiness

This may sound like an obvious thing to many who are well on there way down the Financial Independence path and have absorbed much of the philosophy surrounding it, but I think for those still firmly stuck in their cubical farms it is not something that would come to mind naturally. Even if they read it on some random blog someone sent them they might initially dismiss this statement as absolute hogwash 1.

If I remember back to my “pre-enlightenment” days, before I knew FI and early retirement was a thing, and even for the first couple of months of going down this path, I still thought that the ultimate goal was to loaf around, play golf and generally just indulge yourself, as this is the received wisdom of the crowd which seems to have been adopted from the American Dream to our little island, like so many other ideas have been.

But it soon became clear, at least it to me, that this is not the sort of thing you want to be doing for long term happiness, and I’m writing about it today for two reasons: i) I don’t think I’ve ever written about it before and ii) It came to the forefront of my mind again fairly recently as I had a couple of months of practically pure hedonism, which as fun as it was still left me with a feeling that my life was kind of missing something.

Consider that during this period, I had 4 weeks off work and downed tools to pretty much any other projects I have going on (Matched betting, this blog, etc…), could the missing piece of the happiness puzzle be… dum dum daaaaaaannnnn….

Work!?

“Sacrilege! Burn him at the stake!” I hear the hardcore retirement-ists say…

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Notes:

  1. Hogwash is my new favourite word by the way so be prepared for massive overuse of it in future posts 🙂 ↩
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jumping july – income & expenses report

Aug08
by TFS on August 8, 2017 at 6:37 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Matched Betting, TFS Updates

I’m back with a full report this month after slacking off a bit after the last couple, so we’ve got a bit more to get our teeth into!

We still had quite high expenses this month (although nowhere near as bad as in June) but income more than offset that so achieved a decent savings rate after all. Check out “the deets” below…

expenses

Remember the figures below are in the format: £Current Month (£2017 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)

  • Total £3327 (£3624 / £3210) – With 7 months gone, we’re still quite a way over budget for the year, and need a good couple of months that are under £3K if we are to bring this down. The good news (on the spending front at least) is that we have no more big holidays planned although we have a stag, a hen and a week away with my family (which should be pretty cheap in all fairness) in October. Either way its going to be tight if we are to get back under budget with an average of £2630 left per month to spend for the next 5 months. Honestly, I don’t think we’ll do it but it’s something to aim for at least 🙂

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budget for a two week family holiday to France (ferry and driving)

Aug01
by TFS on August 1, 2017 at 7:48 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Children, Travel

Bonjour mes amis!

That’s about as far as my French goes I’m afraid but we somehow managed to scrape by and have a cracking family holiday back in June regardless. As this is a personal finance blog I thought it would be interesting to share the financial details for you, so you can compare to your own experiences or maybe plan ahead if you wanted to do something similar.

 

pre-holiday budget

 

Pre Holiday Spending Cost
Accommodation & Ferry £623.3
Holiday Insurance £12
Car Euro breakdown Cover £21.25
Total £656.55

 

First of all we needed to book some accommodation (duh!) and a ferry over there. Luckily we live just over an hours drive from Dover so the Dover-Calais ferry is the easiest and cheapest option. You can probably get “Le Tunnel” for around the same cost but with a little one on board we thought it would be better to have the 1.5 hour break from being stuck in the car for her to run around (which proved to be a very good decision!). We spoke to people on the ferry with young children that had driven as far as from Sheffield so it goes to show this is possible from the majority of places in the UK as well, not just for us South-Eastenders 🙂

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Sennheiser Mx 686G review – plus avoid stans online store at all costs!!!

Jul27
by TFS on July 27, 2017 at 7:45 am
Posted In: Personal Finance, Rants

tl;dr – Do not buy these headphones, they are terrible! MX 686G Sports in-ear headset

I have a three pronged rant today for you, and you can thank Andy Webb at Be Clever With Your Cash for this 🙂

You see, I went to a small Fincon 1 London event a while ago and he made a very good point that while many blogs and websites endorse products and services they recommend, there are not as many that give out the warnings to avoid others that they’ve had bad experiences with.

The way the incentives are often aligned (i.e. commission for recommending customers) this is hardly surprising, but the negative reviews can be just as, if not more, useful to us all as consumers. Thinking about the popularity of TV shows such as Watchdog, Rip Off Britain, and good ole Martin Lewis himself who’s made a great name on both TV and web of warning people off things as well as recommending deals; it seems like people really do find this sort of thing useful.

So, I thought I better start using my small corner of the internet to do the right thing and warn you all when I come across the occasional bad egg out there!

This epic story started with my trusty old running headphones that started to buzz on the low frequencies, signifying that the drivers were on their way out, so I started looking for some to replace them. Having previously bought and loved Sennheiser products I though I’d stick with them as a trusted brand and got onto google to search for some new sports headphones.

And so it begins…

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Notes:

  1. Fincon is the now huge finance website/blogger convention that is put on Phil Taylor from PT Money (no, not the darts player 🙂 ), every year in the US of A. I got to meet some really cool bloggers including PT, JD Roth from Moneyboss and previously Get Rich Slowly fame, and Brandon from the MadFIentist, as well as many others who were all extremely nice folks as you’d imagine the PF blogger crowd are 😉 . Anyway enough name dropping from me, back to the post… ↩
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