Is it August already!?!?! The summer is more than half over but at least we’ve been having some decent albeit madly changeable weather this year. Anyway enough water cooler chat, let’s look at how the TFS finances stacked up this month!
To summarise, it was yet another high spending yet high income month, but if you want to see a few more details please read on…
This is the second post in a series about The House Crowd, who are one of the pioneers of property crowdfunding in the UK. If you want to find out more general information about the company and what investing with them entails be sure to check out my first post: an introduction to The House Crowd which I’ve written in FAQ form to hopefully answer any questions you may have had about them (and feel free to ask any others in the comments section!)
This time round I’d like to talk about how investing in crowdfunding can be very tax efficient, even if you can’t at the time of writing wrap these investments into an ISA or SIPP (more on this later though!).
There are essentially two types of investment you can take up with The House Crowd, one which pays dividends and one which pays interest. The structure of each investment is clearly explained when you receive the lender fact sheet.
As a quick aside, I’d also recommend signing up to their email list as you’ll get new investment opportunities emailed through as they come up, with all the basic info you need to know plus links to the more detailed lender fact sheet. I’ve found you don’t necessarily have to act that quickly to get on board with any given investment, but I guess if a sterling one came up then being on the email list would be of benefit here, and more to the point it saves you having to go and check their website every week or so. The frequency of emails is not annoying as they don’t just pick any old property to invest in so you will likely only get one email per week. It’s also worth pointing out you can obviously sign up to the email list without actually putting any money up, that’s what I did for about a year to keep an eye on what type of properties came up before finally diving in so it’s a good way of weighing up what it’s all about.
Back to the tax stuff! Let’s look at how these two type of investment payout structures can work out with your tax, with some examples.
Welcome to reading a personal finance blog post for dummies!
You may have just discovered the wonderful world of personal finance blogs, or may well be a seasoned veteran, but I am hoping the advice in this article will be helpful across the spectrum.
Reading a personal finance blog post might seem like a simple task to perform but judging from some of the rookie mistakes I see out there that people are making repeatedly, over and over again, I thought it was time to step in, help out, and make the world a better place.
Of course, many of the principals I talk about here hold not just for personal finance blogs but for blogs in general, but in particular those kind of blogs who like to dish out advice and/or are written by strongly opinionated authors.
Here are 5 basic rules to get you started on the road to mastering how to read a personal finance blog post without making any faux pas or causing yourself any unnecessary grief.
Copyright Tesla Motors (Aren’t you glad I didn’t lead with the picture of the pants?)
Wow what a belter of a title and lead photo eh?
We’ll get back to the Tesla and the pants later but we have a lot of boring financial stuff to go through first so let’s crack on with that!
We spent a total of £3259.84 in May, another expensive month! Here is the highlights list:
So as I say overall another expensive month, but if I look at last years figures it always gets more expensive around this time of year as we have yearly car expenses, those were actually paid in July last year but we got the bulk of it done in June this year so hoping that July will be less expensive. Also if we compare year on year in 2015 we’d spend a total of £17,217, and this year we’ve only spent £16,752 so a slight improvement. Bearing in mind we’ve renovated the kitchen and had a baby in 2016 I think that’s pretty damn good.
A prison cell doesn’t always have bars, you know?
I’ve mentioned in a couple of my update posts that the company I work for that currently owns my ass was moving/had moved offices recently and now we’ve settled in what do I make of it all? To give you some background it is a small(ish) web company that got sold off about 1.5 years ago by megaCorp and so we were given a stay of execution at the the old head office site of around a year, which was situated on a kind of industrial estate in the middle of nowhere (well, near Brentford) alongside a busy dual carriageway. The new offices are finally a place to call our own again and are based in the heart of bustling and hustling Hammersmith. So on paper this is a massive win already 🙂
But, is the grass greener at the new place or am I hankering for some of the perks of the old megaCorp offices?
The TL;DR is that, yes it has improved my (working) life considerably, but at the end of the day you are still working for The Man, which is the whole point of this post really.
Below are some pros and cons of the office move, please note I am fully aware pretty much everything I say below that sounds whiney is a massive first world problem alert but I’m just trying appraise the situation from an FI perspective rather than from the standard employee view.
Keeping The Cauldron (UK)
Financially Free By Forty (UK)
Quietly Saving (UK)
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