december update – levels you devils

Jan13
by TFS on January 13, 2017 at 4:53 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Matched Betting, TFS Updates

december present

 

Happy 2017 folks! Can you guess what exciting present TFS got for Christmas in the picture above? Yes it’s those lovely electric blue shelving units. I love them as they’ve totally cleared up our “junk/man room”. Hopefully you were equally as happy with your xmas haul.

Right back onto less conspicuous consumption related topics… how did we do in December on the ole budget front? Well the stars aligned and we spend almost exactly what we earnt, which is quite funny but a rather damp squib to end the year on especially combined with last months negative savings rate. The income and expense figures ended up within 18 pence of each other… hah!

I also have some pension update news (finally) which was good, read on to find out all the juicy details…

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matched betting #2 – how to completely rinse 888 casino free play offers

Jan04
by TFS on January 4, 2017 at 8:43 pm
Posted In: Fun, Gambling, Matched Betting

Wild Gambler Free Spins

Happy new year all! I hope you had a nice Christmas break from work (or FI life if you’re already living the dream!)

Talking of Christmas, my fave cracker joke this year has got to have been:

When is matched betting not really matched betting?

When you’re whoring casino bonuses of course!

In all seriousness, it’s always nice to have a bit of extra cash around this time of year so I thought why not post an easy way to make a bit of dosh?

OK, let’s do it!

 

1. sign up to 888 casino

Google 888 casino* and sign up. The current offer is that you don’t even have to deposit and get to spin a wheel upon which you will be granted anything in between £15 and £888 free play. Don’t be disheartened if you only get the £15 because there is usually plenty more to come in the form of emailed offers, so make sure that you actually leave any tick boxes ticked to receive further offers when you sign up – pretty much the only time I’d ever recommend doing this! 🙂

Also note that there is another casino called 777 Casino which is basically the same company and website with a slightly different paint job and name 1. So it’s worth signing up to both as it doubles the chances you will get emailed a decent offer.

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Notes:

  1. Where do they come up with these names? Creative genius at work huh? ↩
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negative savings november update :(

Dec20
by TFS on December 20, 2016 at 7:39 am
Posted In: Budgets, Matched Betting, TFS Updates

dsc_0795

Duck. Chillin

You’ve probably noticed this has been a very slow monthly update to get out, and the reasons are twofold. The first is that I’ve been ill for about 5 weeks running and have been very run down (on the mend now though finally which is good timing for the Xmas break!). The second is that we had a terrible, terrible month on the savings front and so motivation to put this out into the big wide world of the dub-dub-dub has not been all that strong!

Anyway, it happened, so here it is. I’m not actually that down about it as most of the spending is relatively justified, and I just happened to have a terrible month on the matched betting front which failed to cover the extra spending.

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Elizabeth Dunn & David McRaney – you have some great advice but why you hatin’ on downshifting?!?!

Dec14
by TFS on December 14, 2016 at 5:10 pm
Posted In: Happiness, Lifestyle Design, Personal Finance, Philosophy, Psychology

downshifting

Ahhhh…. downshifting

 

I came across a very much on the whole excellent podcast the other day thanks to Done By Forty’s excellent post called You’re Not as Busy as You Think You Are. The podcast features David McRaney who is the author of the excellent blog You are not so smart, interviewing Elizabeth Dunn who co-wrote the book Happy Money(<–affiliate link 1), which many of you may have read and sounds like a very good book. Here is a link to the podcast if you want a listen to it (It’s about 45 minutes long so make sure you have a bit of time):

YANSS Podcast – Episode Six – Happy Money

You don’t need to have listened to the podcast to read the rest of this post but I guess it would probably help so you can see whether you agree with me or not.

So as the title suggests there is some great advice in this podcast and presumably the rest of the book. I mean really great advice, most of which you will find yourself nodding along to thinking, hell yea, this validates most of my life choices in the pursuit of FIRE and happiness, etc etc… So it’s all good and definitely worth listening too. But there was one rather large part of it that irked me quite a bit and that was the supposed “debunking” of downshifting at the start of podcast which also got mentioned a few more times throughout the cast. Let’s review some of the comments made.

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Notes:

  1. This page contains affiliate link(s) to amazon. What is an affiliate link you ask?! OK well it’s fairly basic… If you click through and then subsequently buy anything (not just the originally linked product) on amazon I may receive a small fee, which will help to support theFIREstarter blog. The key thing is that it will not cost you anything extra to use these links, although don’t go clicking on them willy nilly just because it may help me! If you think you will find the product/service useful and do click through, then a sincere “thank you” for your support. ↩
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lifehacking: parkinsons law, deadlines, procrastination, and baiting the panic monster

Nov29
by TFS on November 29, 2016 at 9:08 pm
Posted In: Psychology

bookshelf-project

 

Do you find yourself working much better, faster and, I dunno, stronger(!?) when a deadline is looming?

I do too! What’s that all about eh?!

Do you also find that however long you estimate a task to take it always seems to take that long, and in fact you spend the last few hours before the deadline pumping out lots of high productivity hours of work to get it done in time?

Again me too!

We really need to get to the bottom of all this.

Turns out that at least one of these things has already been named and shamed a long time ago by a dude called Cyril Northcote Parkinson. Quite egotistically he called it Parkinson’s law and it states the following:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

The first thing I noted above kinda flows out of this “law” as well because people like you and me will often dawdle around a task if we know there is time in hand to complete it and then at the last minute when there is just enough time left to complete the task we will rush through it at breakneck speed and complete it at a level that is probably good enough but not really quite as good as we could have done if we’d worked at that rate the whole time.

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