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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 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:
The little one turned one in February, don’t they grow up fast!?
Don’t worry, we haven’t gone crazy and given her tonnes of money for her birthday present (she would just eat it if left alone for more than about 30 seconds!), I’ll explain why we’re flush with notes a bit later.
Before we get into the update a quick roll call of those who’ve sponsored me for the marathon in the last month:
If you’d like to join the ranks of the virtuous then here is the link to my page (again!), and if you leave a comment, please keep mentions of the blog to #tfs or cheeky nudge nudge wink wink say no more references to “fire” etc… as the others have done… cheers 🙂
As usual the January update comes quite late as I had to get through the yearly updates (and here, and here) first, but now that is done, here we go with the first monthly update of 2017!
How did we do in January? Not so bad considering I would say, we managed to kick the year off with a positive savings rate which was a win after some more high expenses and no maternity pay at all this month.
But first I just wanted to say a MASSIVE THANK YOU to all the generous people who have sponsored me so far on my London Marathon charity page.
As you are so great I will give you all a name check, it’s the least you deserve:
The combined total donated by all of these fine human beings is £240!! Amazing and really helps out with me hitting my target! Thanks to all of you again!
If you’d like to join the ranks of the virtuous then here is the link again (and if you leave a comment, please keep mentions of the blog to #tfs or cheeky nudge nudge wink wink say no more references to “fire” etc… as the others have done… cheers 🙂 )
Back to the update… I’m going to try to shorten the waffle on these reports now and only comment on things if I really feel necessary, also I will put the budget target next to each category in brackets so I don’t have to write “this compares to X which is our target monthly average yada yada yada” about 15 times, which again is a waste of words. See how you like the slight changes and let me know if you can think of any further improvements or optimisations you’d like to see 1 or alternatively if you prefer the old more “freeform” reports then of course just say so!
Just to be clear, by optimisations here I’m talking about things that might save me time writing the reports and you reading them, so please don’t suggest something like “I’d like to see year on year figures for every spending category with and without inflation weighting for the past 5 years”; “write less crap” on the other hand is a perfectly reasonable suggestion 😉 ↩
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Last time out we had a fairly comprehensive go over our 2016 expenses and set out a budget for the new year.
Now it’s time to have a look at what goals I set at the start of 2016 to see how we measured up. Seriously, I can’t even remember what they were now so I’m going to have a look now before carrying on writing…
Ah yes. So it looks like I cut myself some slack from the uber list of goals I set in 2014 and 2015. Thank goodness for that! At least it makes for a shorter post this time round. Here they are again with a pass or fail:
Savings rate of 40% – Fail with a final rate of 34.87% so no where near really. This was a combination of missing our budget and not quite earning enough.
Matched Betting £500/month + Super Secret Side Hustle (SSSH) £750/month – Originally two separate goals, but seeing as we now know the secret side hustle is also just a matched betting type of activity, we can just lump this into a single goal of £1250/month. Did I hit this target? Did I f**k. 🙂 – Actually I wasn’t too far off. I made an average of £927/monthwhich, considering the amount of time I spent on it each month, was fairly impressive. Also this includes January where I did no matched betting at all, so that was a bit stupid not to factor that in. Matched betting is great but sometimes I feel like a break from it and took a few weeks off here and there. To really hit these sorts of numbers you need to be very regimented on it and do it every week. It is definitely possible but that sort of commitment is not for me so I’ll reduce the target for next year!
Alcohol consumption less than 20 units/week average – Well it looks like I’m “Oh for Three” this year as there were quite a few months where I went over the average – 7 in fact. When you average it over the year it comes to 24.58 units/week as well so it is another straight up fail!
I’m part way through my analysis of the year and thought I’d just start off with the stuff that is a bit more easy on the eye so here are some graphs with a bit of commentary on each.
If you want a sneak peak at the figures that went into creating these graphs feel free to have a look 1 at the spreadsheet here.
In most cases where it made sense and I have figures for, I’ve added data for the previous year as well (that’s 2015 for those who haven’t been paying attention) to get a nice visual year on year comparison.
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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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