february 2016 update – and then there were three

Mar16
by TFS on March 16, 2016 at 9:00 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Random Thoughts, TFS Updates
then there were three

It’s early days but… surely the socks do not lie!?

Woah! Long time no see people!

Where have I been you might be asking? Well as the title and picture above have probably already given away, baby TFS has made a bit of an unexpected early appearance! So to say the last month has been a little bit mental is probably a gross understatement. To keep things concise here are a few bullet points for you:

  • Early Feb I had two weeks off to do up the kitchen
  • In the second week Mrs T had to stay in hospital so they could monitor her and the baby
  • Baby came on 23rd Feb, weighing 4lb 5oz, Mum and baby are doing fine!
  • Our house therefore was/is still a complete mess and I am still trying to get the kitchen done (pics to follow) while on Paternity leave now I’m back at work 1 🙂
  • Oh yea, I also signed up to do 3 half marathons if you remember!? Mini spoiler: I only got round to doing one of them

Phew! It makes me feel knackered just writing that all down but living it out has been both the best fun and rewarding experience of my life and at the end of the day baby is here and fine and that is clearly all that matters, we both feel very lucky to have a lovely little daughter.

Right, enough of the mushy stuff, let’s have a look at our finances!

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Notes:

  1. I started writing this post about a week into paternity and it’s taken me 3 weeks to complete… haha! ↩
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january update – expenses, income, and battling a cream tea addiction

Feb12
by TFS on February 12, 2016 at 9:32 am
Posted In: Budgets, Personal Finance, TFS Updates

january update

In January, Oi av’ mostly been eatin’ ….

 

Despite being half way through another stint of my 2 weeks off, time is shorter than ever so I am going to keep this one as brief as possible! The good news is there isn’t much to talk about on the expenses side of things which means:

A) This post will be shorter than average!

B) We didn’t spend all that much 🙂

All in all we managed a savings rate of 46.22% which I am mega chuffed with. I know January is normally pretty easy because, well, no one really even ventures out of their houses let alone is inviting you out to the local casino and strip joint, but I am still impressed with our frugal start to the year.

I’ve updated my spreadsheet with new Expenses and Net Worth tabs for 2016 and tied these up into a new 2016 summary in the Net Worth & Savings Rate Summary tab. You can check it out here and remember you can just copy this to your own Google Drive and then edit away to your hearts content!

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2016 goals and plans

Feb09
by TFS on February 9, 2016 at 9:16 am
Posted In: Aspirations, TFS Updates
2016 goals and plans

It’s a new dawn… it’s a new day…

It’s well into 2016 already so it’s high time I nailed my colours to the mast and posted up some goals, as is accustomed on a lot of lifestyle/PF based blogs nowadays.

However this year I am rebelling somewhat against the “SMART goals” crowd (and that includes myself from 2014 and 2015) and will not be relentlessly monitoring and tracking every single aspect of my life. If I’m honest the tracking and then writing about it on here can be an onerous task, and I’m not even sure it makes all that great reading.

I want to free myself from that burden so I guess my first goal is not to have too many goals!

I’ll still write about things I’m doing throughout the year ad-hoc if they seem interesting, I just won’t bang on about it every. single. month. Everyone’s a winner!

So yea, I’m going to keep it simple, much along the lines of how The Finance Zombie and Quietly Saving have done.

In fact, I think Where Eagles Fear To Perch has it bang on with his post about goals here:

Cut yourself some slack, FFS !

🙂

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budget 2016

Feb03
by TFS on February 3, 2016 at 8:05 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Personal Finance, TFS Updates
2016 budget

A fine example of one of my shrewd purchases last year* 🙂

Eh!? Bit early for a post on The Budget isn’t it!?

No silly, this is the TFS Household Budget we are talking about today!

Since I’ve now got a full years expenses locked and loaded into one of my spreadsheets I am hoping this years budget will be more accurate than last year, which wasn’t all that bad in the first place. There will be many life changes going on this and our income may be all over the place, but one thing that is fully in our control is what exits our wallets, so this is going to be a big part of whether we survive and thrive in 2016.

* Before we go into the budget a quick aside on the photo above, in case anyone was wondering about that. I decided it would be a fab idea to buy 20 Kilograms (yes, 20!!!) of Bicarb of soda to see if I could make some home made cleaning products, along with 20 Litres of white vinegar. A slight overestimation on what I needed! I do like buying things in bulk but maybe I took this one too far. I’ve very nearly got round to making some Dishwasher detergent but not quite done it yet, when I have done that and maybe got a few others under my belt I will certainly make a post and let you know how I got on!

 

budget summary

TFS Budget 2016

As usual I’ve split our spend up into “The Fun Stuff” and the “The Boring Stuff”. The fun stuff means our elective spend (“wants”) and the boring stuff is what I think is our bare essentials budget, what we could get by on (whilst still living a very objectively comfortable life, it has to be said) without going out of our way to spend any other money.

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2015 goals review

Feb01
by TFS on February 1, 2016 at 6:15 pm
Posted In: TFS Updates

Goals

Goal 1: Lay on floor (tick)

Goal 2: Get belly rubbed (tick!)

Onto 2016….!

Well, it’s February already and I’m still reviewing last year! I set myself a hefty lot of goals last year, maybe too many but I find it hard to not get excited and, well, I like making lists 🙂

I’ll be using my standard Win / Draw / Lose notation to describe how I think I did.

Let’s see how I got on then shall we?

 

Financial Goals

  • Set up a bank account for my new company – I did this but I cheated a bit and just set up a personal account to use for business purposes. There are draw backs to doing this though but if you are interested in the how and why then read my post on it here. Win!
  • Learn about and submit a tax form – This was in part to learn about how to sign up for and submit a self assessment tax form, and partly to claim back some SIPP higher rate tax. I did it, so it’s a Win!
  • Increase Net Worth by £20K or ~30% by end of bonus paycheque – I broke the net worth and savings rate goals down into two sections of the year as I was due to go part time in about July originally, and then slowly ramp that down to end up essentially unemployed hopefully self-employed by the end of the year. However this changed slightly (in my favour I think) to just going part time which started around September. This also affected some of the other goals below (in terms of having less time to do them) but I will try not to harp on about it much more than this once, I think you probably get this gist of it by now! Anyway by July we were short of the 20K net worth increase by £4, so I hope you’ll excuse me if I call that one a Win! (Although I am ruing those couple of bacon sarnies I bought for breakfast on the way to work in June! Damnit!)
  • Achieve overall savings rate of 60% – I can’t be bothered to go back and work this one out but we definitely did not hit it so let’s just call it a Lose! and move on 🙂
  • Increase Net Worth by anything positive – Due to reasons stated above this was a bit of a pointless goal, but we obviously did it, so it’s a Win!
  • Achieve savings rate of > 0% – Ditto to the above and another Win!

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