Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
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:
Finally! We’ve reached the end of the three part (originally designed to be one part! 🙂 ) series of my 2015 financial review. I hope I haven’t driven too many of you mad with it all. Despite being laborious and perhaps a little too in depth I’ve found the whole thing very useful and would definitely recommend it to anyone else out there, if you aren’t doing something similar already. It does help to be a bit of a stats and spreadsheets geek which I naturally assume you all are as you are reading this in the first place.
This time we are talking about my investment portfolio “performance”. I put it in quote marks because it sounds a bit overblown, it’s not like I am actively trying to beat the market or anything like that, I am just sticking money into index funds and ETFs and hoping for the best. If that weren’t caveat enough, then please remember none of what you read below is investment advice and please DYOR 1. If you missed them, here are some handy links to part (i) where we looks at expenses and part (ii) when we looked at income, net worth and savings rate.
Hellooooo and welcome to part (ii) of my 2015 yearly financial review. In case you missed the “more thrilling than bungee jumping” 1 part (i) where we looked in depth at expenses throughout the year, you can go back and catch up here.
Let’s jump straight into the financial treats I have in store for you, shall we?!
income
I think we did well on the income front this year, but similar to the expenses report, unfortunately I don’t have the full figures for 2014 to compare it to. Sure, I could just look at our pay packets for the year and do quick and dirty comparison, but there is so much extra income that we don’t usually even think about that gets added onto our basic salary it would be a pretty pointless comparison IMO. So we’ll have to wait till 2017 for the first full YOY figures!
The headline figure is that we pulled in £71,265.41 of income between the two of us (after tax). That seems like an awful lot of money but we still managed to spend just over half of it! 🙂
Here’s how the income breaks down with some notes:
No fluffy intro needed here, we have a lot to cover so let’s cut straight to the chase! 🙂
This is the first part of (hopefully) a two part series in which we are going to be putting 5 different categories of financial performance under the microscope today, which are: expenses, income, savings rate, investments and net worth increase 1. In each category I will be looking at averages where necessary, along with comparisons to last year or some other baseline where figures for last year are not available. Vamos!
expenses
The most important category deservedly comes first in part (i) and we’ll look at the other lot in detail in part (ii). It doesn’t matter if you are earning a six figure salary, if your expenses are not under control you will never reach Financial Independence!
Unfortunately I don’t have the full figures for 2014 so can’t do a year on year comparison, so instead we’ll be comparing that to the budget that I set out here nearer the start of the year. A non scientific comparison of the £24,375 we spent in 6 months (!!!) in the arse end of 2014, compared to the £36,792 we spent in 12 months in 2015 reveals that in all likelihood we spent a lot less this year!
Let’s start off, as I did in the budget post, with the overview. As usual I provide the table plus some numbered notes for my comments below…
Perhaps unsurprisingly we overshot the fun stuff budget by quite a margin! Find out exactly where in the more detailed breakdown below
Getting some green on the board somewhere feels good, even though it doesn’t cancel out the first line
OK so we are “under budget” for the bathroom refit, but realistically have a few more bits to buy so it will probably come in slightly higher than this figure
It’s probably worth pointing out that the original budget included £6,500 for an Air Source Heat Pump2 which we never ended up buying, and £1,000 for a mini Kitchen refurb which is still happening but I never got round to doing it. So I took those items “off the budget” so to speak, so the comparison is fair (otherwise we’d have come in about 6 grand under budget which would have totally been cheating!)
I thought I would include the yearly figures broken down into monthly averages
I think the interesting thing here is that £149.98 per month over budget doesn’t sound all that much, but that is nearly 2 grand a year when you add it all up. Imagine if our budget was based on what we were earning and we were in the red by this much per month. It is easy to see how bad budgeting can lead to debt spiralling out of control!
So on the top line figures, I think we did OK but as always definitely could have done a lot better.
I really like the idea of eventually trying to live tax free and we are not that far off of the £34K figure that we would (theoretically) be able to pull in from various investments and part time work to live off of that, and that is including a mortgage and doing some pretty large scale home improvements. I think this years budget will be largely based on hitting that £34K figure, for want of a better target.
Right, now let’s break it down and see where we passed and where we failed!
What was I thinking!? 🙂 The boiler is still going strong a year later! Never ask a barber if you need a haircut and never ask a gas fitter if you need a new boiler 🙂 ↩
If you found this page useful, humorous, or insightful please pay if forward and share the love...
Well I dare say it’s the result of the year so far you’ve been waiting for?! 😉
For those that are not in the know, we’ve been running a little spending challenge between myself and Mrs T for about 16 months now, and therefore 2015 is the first full year where we can really tally up who was the spend-fiend and who was the most fabulously frugal.
Before we set up this challenge, there was no real incentive for either of us to track what we were spending as it all just went into the same “spend pot” and so we could (and rather often did) just blame each other for what was deemed as overspending. Now we are fully accountable for what each of us spend, there is no hiding from the cold hard facts! This is definitely one reason why our spending has decreased on average this year compared to last 1.
the rules
The first rule of spending challenge club is… Oh god that one’s been done to death hasn’t it!? I wrote briefly about the challenge here way back in February, but didn’t go into too much depth on the rules. Here they are in their full glory:
This is for elective spend only, in other words “wants”. Therefore in theory we could get by each month with a zero in this category, if really needed (which is a real eye opener!)
Examples of things included are: Meals and nights out, clothes, hair cuts, golf, charity donations, gifts (christmas, birthday and any others), holiday money.
Examples of things not included are: Bills, Mortgage payments, groceries, car repairs, transport to and from work etc…
Any money randomly coming into these accounts must be accounted for. For example, if I won any money gambling or sold any items on eBay then this positive uplift must be taken off at the end of the month. We are tracking total spend here; there is no cheating by selling your old gear to buy new stuff, not on my watch sonny Jim(/Kim)!
There may have been a small amnesty on one of our holidays (for paying off the flights/accommodation, not the spending money) but it was agreed to be fair by both parties 🙂 . The overwhelming majority of our breaks away this year were paid for out of these “fun money” accounts, as they should have been.
That’s pretty much it.
To make things easy to work out we set up two TSB current accounts which pay 5% interest on up to £2,000 and stuck, you guessed it, £2,000 in each. So £2,000 is our starting balance at the start of the month, and all we have to do is subtract whatever is left at the end of the month and that is how much we spent (bearing in mind any adjustments due to rule #4 above). These figures get dumped into a spreadsheet at the end of each month and at the end of the year we can see who is victorious!
Yay Christmas! It’s over for another year… get over it :op. This is the tallest Christmas tree in the UK, in case you were wondering. (Wakehurst place, Sussex)
Why a disastrous December? Well it was only on the spending front but fully to be expected. Apart from that December was another cracking month for us, I got *most* of a bathroom teardown and rebuild finished, and we had lot’s of fun over the Christmas break. We also found out that Mrs T will now NOT be made redundant. See here for the initial story on that if you missed it, but now they’ve done a complete U-Turn and decided to have the office stay open and everyone can keep their jobs. So it turns out that, yes, those management people really were just incompetent buffoons! Go figure!
Anyway, back to the financial stuff… let’s find out how it all went down!
No RSS Addresses are entered to your links in the Links SubPanel, therefore no items can be shown!
Disclaimer
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!
Recent Comments