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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 🙂
If all of that sounds right up your alley then you can follow along by:
If you'd rather have a poke around first then by all means do so! You can always subscribe later by using the link at the top right of the menu above.
If you want to get the full story you can start from the very first post here or for a more casual read, just see what catches your eye on the list of all posts page.
My thoughts and plans have slightly changed in the few years since I set up the blog, you can learn a little bit more about me and the main points on what those plans were and how they've changed here, here, here, here and finally here.
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:
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!
I’ve written before about Mustachian Spotting, a fun game where you attempt to spot people with the sort of characteristics that might lend them to the Financial Independence scene.
I’ve recently reached level 2 of this game recently, what excitement! Let me tell you what this entails:
This is where you get as far as having a real life conversation (I know!) with the potential fellow FI’er and to try to get a handle on whether they’ve heard of the most famous websites or books out there – I normally mention MMM and YMOYL 1 – to see if they are indeed already a confirmed worshipper at the alter of the Moustachioed one (or other FI pioneer).
It doesn’t matter whether they actually are or not, you will successfully defeat the end of level boss simply by having the balls to ask the question. I think this is a fair enough qualification for victory here, as stumping up the sentence:
Midway through an otherwise relatively normal conversation can seem rather odd if the person hasn’t already heard of it, and it is likely they haven’t, even if you think they are a secret MMM reader. I found a great tip for making this seem more normal is to ply them and yourself with alcohol first 🙂
I can unfortunately let you know that on the two occasions I made it to level 2 recently, the hit rate for having heard of any of this stuff was a big fat zero percent, so no extra special hidden fireworks ending after defeating this particular boss, but it was fun even getting to the point where I felt it was worth asking.
Here is a rough run down of my two level 2 encounters, as despite the zero hit rate there were some interesting things that cropped up in conversation.
Today we have another guest post for you from Lars Kroijer 1 who regularly appears on Monevator and is the Author of author of “Investing Demystified”. Here’s some more level headed advice to keep you away from wasting your time with active investing. I know I need to read this sort of thing fairly regularly to remind myself yet again to keep with passive investing! Take it away Lars…
As investors we are bombarded with stock tips about the next Apple or Google, read articles on how India or biotech investing are the next hot thing, or are told how some star investment manager’s outstanding performance is set to continue. The implicit message is that only the uninformed few fail to heed this advice and those that do end up poorer as a result. We wouldn’t want that to be us!
What if we started with a very different premise? The premise that markets are actually quite efficient. Even if some people are able to outperform the markets, most people are not among them. In financial jargon, most people do not have edge over the financial markets; they can’t consistently outperform the market by picking different securities / sectors / geographies from the market as a whole, especially after costs. Nor are they able to pick which of the thousands of fund managers have the ability to do it for them. Accepting, embracing, and acting on this absence of edge should in my view be a key moment in most investor’s lives.
If you ask most people their top 5 wishes I am almost certain that 99% of people would have “I want to win the lottery” or something similar in there, something that would have them end up extremely wealthy.
Having read around the subject of what makes us happy and also the many car crash stories of people who’ve won the lottery, I’m pretty certain that I’d never want to become so extremely wealthy overnight. On top of that, there seems to be many issues with people who inherit wealth.
So maybe the link here is receiving money, for whatever reason, that we didn’t really “earn”?
So, if I work my way up and earn my extreme wealth, things will be rosy will they? I’m not so sure. There are also plenty of stories of people who have (on a technical level at least) “earned” their wealth, and it has messed things up royally for them as well.
OK, you say, they are the sort of people who would have messed things up anyway and the money just helped them get there faster. You’d be a different story, right? I’m sure most of us on the FI scene
Either way, here are some examples of how your extreme wealth might be more of a burden you than a blessing.
As the title suggests my thoughts and activities in April were dominated by running the London Marathon, but we also had quite a lot of other social engagements as well which made it a really fun month all round. But how did our other marathon, the slow jog to reach Financial Independence, get on?
expenses
Remember the figures below are in the current format: £Current Month (£2017 Monthly Average / £Monthly Average Target)
Total £3187(£3555 / £3210) – Another expensive month, and although it has actually brought our average down believe it or not, we haven’t had one under £3K yet this year. We need a couple of those at some point to if we’re to bring that average down to under target. May is not looking good either as we’ve got loads on again *grimacing face emoji*
Mortgage £848(£848 / £848) – At least somethings on target 😉
Household £767 (£654 / £599) – Averaging £56 over target here but once again we need to get our groceries shop down. Somehow. I don’t know how! Has anyone else noticed their food shopping bills going up in the last year or so, or is it just me?
Going out/Holiday £379(£1073 / £750) – Although we had a lot on it was more family engagements which tend to work out fairly cheap overall, so a nice reversion (part way) back to the average this month.
Transport £220(£97 / £172) – 2 lots of Petrol and a small car repair bill this month.
Personal Care £55(£94 / £90) – Not much to say here really.
Home/Garden £237(£69 / £85) – We bought a few bits and plants for the garden, re-turfed our back lawn as it was looking horrendous, and bought a foot stool for the lounge, brand new as we couldn’t find any from the charity shops!
Lifestyle £208(£223 / £165) – Over budget here but £70 was cash which should have probably just gone under the going out section.
Gifts/Charity £44 (£128 / £215) – Not much going on here for once and yet again I seriously need to pull my finger out on the charity front, or I’m going to face a big “charity bill” sometime soon.. heh 🙂
Hobbies/Sport £229(£160 / £150) – A big bill here this month mainly due to me having a golf competition with *the lads* down at Princes in Sandwich Bay. A lovely course and well worth the extra money spent! Also signed up for another half marathon in July to keep me running after the big event of the Marathon is over.
Admin £8(£2 / £10)
Financial £5(£122 / £57) – The average is slowly coming back down to normal now after that horrendous tax bill in January!
Children £187(£85 / £70) – A big splurge by TFS Jr this month! 🙂 We had to buy a new car seat as she’s growing out of her old one. Finding a second hand one in decent nick is actually quite hard as they do last a long time which ironically means they get destroyed by most kids by the end of their lives. So we swallowed it and bought a new one, it was £150 but Mrs T hustled it down to £130 from Toys R Us as they had a £20 off deal if you spent over £100 (thought I’d mentioned it in case anyone else out there randomly needed something for a kid for over £100!). It lasts like 5 years or something so seems like a good investment (and it’s the law… haha).
I was at first a bit disappointed that it was another expensive month, but there were a couple of medium one of expenses in there. Even though May is looking like another doozy initially, I am still optimistic we can actually come in under £3K. Fingers crossed!
income
Figures in the same format as expenses…
Total £4121 (£4816 / £3657) – Another month where we’ve beat the target nicely.
TFS Income £2360(£2186 / £2140) – Not bad.
Mrs T Income £533(£682 / £600) – It looks like Mrs T is going to slowly go down back below her “target” here but they’ve messed up her tax code which means she’ll get a rebate soon, which will bump it back up, then her normal pay will be around the £600 mark.
Cashback Credit Cards £10(£2 / £8) – A small amount maybe but not bad for just spending what we’d normally spend. Oh to have the travel hacking opportunities of the US FI crowd though 🙂
Ratesetter £6(£18 / £0) – Not much going on here this month, just the usual trickle of interest from my £1000 invested. If you want to sign up and take advantage of the £50 sign up bonus which is still ongoing, use this link here (<– obviously it’s a referral link!) or read my post on it for more info.
The House Crowd £72(£18 / £0) – Received the yearly payout of dividends/interest on some of the properties/loans I’ve invested into via The House Crowd. I’ve written a few articles on them if you want more info, they are grouped under this tag link here: The House Crowd.
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. Some of these methods are what helped me to have a bumper Cheltenham 2017! Now, back to the update!
There weren’t that many highlights this month as I took a bit of a break after a manic March on this front but from what I can remember:
Re-instating my years old “Golf Betting System (TM)” on Betfair which got a few winners for a few hundred pounds each. Please note this is straight up gambling so I won’t be revealing my system and/or encouraging others to do it! It used to make money but I quit after deciding it took too much time and was too stressful, but I’m now doing it more casually and for smaller stakes so hoping it can be more sustainable and fun.
A few residual profits from offers I did in March that hadn’t quite settled in time came through in April, so that was the bulk of the other profits.
That’s it! Sorry, a bit boring this month compared to last month!
savings rate, net worth and all of that rigmarole
Pretty happy with a savings rate of 29.41% which keeps our average around the 30% mark at 31.79%
Net worth did some of this:
Excluding house equity: £141,053 / +£183 / +0.13%
Including house equity: £219,870 / +£643 / +0.29%
Liquid Freedom: £65,374 / £169 / +0.26%
Other Updates
blog updates
You may or may have not noticed a post that looked suspiciously like a paid post I published the other day and I wanted to apologise to all readers for that! I didn’t enjoy the whole thing and it wasn’t worth the money in the end 1, so I’m now officially updating my stance to not accepting paid posts that aren’t written by me, and you have my word on that. If people want to pay me for writing stuff where I have control over what I decide to write about (given a brief) then I will still do that but I won’t be accepting straight up blatant paid posts as I don’t think it fits here. I did have another idea though and I want to float it to people/fellow bloggers. As I’m sure my fellow bloggers have noticed, the amount of offers you get each week for paid posts seems to be rather large and it seems to be an easy potential source of income, so I thought I might just set up another website and funnel any paid post opportunities that way and see how much income it can generate, and if advertisers will go for a blog/site that has little traffic (compared to this one at least). My gut feeling is that they don’t care too much where their content goes but it will be an interesting experiment to find out.
What are you thoughts on this guys!? I know a lot of these types of things are just low quality articles intended to either gain SEO link juice or sign people up through links embedded into the page, but on the other hand… £££ 🙂
other updates
Golf – I played in our first “Major” golf tournament 2 of the year, which I won! Which was nice.
Alcohol – I drank an average of 21.29 units/week in April, which is slightly more than I would have hoped for given an upcoming marathon. And you’d think most of that was after April 23rd (which would be some week long bender if it was) but no… you’d be wrong there as it is amazing how quickly 2/3 beers a couple of times a week adds up! Anyway it didn’t do me any harm by the looks of things so all good here.
Marathon – This post is already quite long so I’ll indulge myself and write up a whole post just on this I think. Stay tuned for it! A small bit of info though, I managed to beat my target of 3:30 and got a time of 3:28 so was very happy about that, and was OK enough to have a quick pint afterwards. A big thanks again to all of you blog readers who sponsored me, and if anyone else out there wants to chuck a few pennies my way for Young Epilepsy, here is the link one last time*:
*Actually probably not seeing as I’ll do another post about the whole day haha.
How was your April? Hope you all smashed it!
Notes:
I marked it up as a paid post at first and they told me to remove that section! I wonder if they are reading this… doubt it but I’ll find out soon I guess… haha. ↩
This is 6 lads pissing about with clubs and balls in a rather expensive field for 9 hours, before anyone gets any images of grandeur ↩
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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!
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