bathroom makeover!

Nov29
by TFS on November 29, 2015 at 9:17 am
Posted In: DIY, TFS Updates

bathroom remodel

 

You’ve probably noticed it’s been a bit quiet around here the last few weeks, and that is mainly because any spare time I’ve had, I’ve spent giving myself a crash course in plumbing and other DIY using the old fashioned method of YouTube and internet articles!

Yes that’s right, the bathroom remodel I’ve been wanging on about since January is finally here. In November! 🙂

I will make no apologies for the lack of words in this post as time is short and progress has been slow these first few days. I started the job on Wednesday and managed to rip most of it out in one day, however after day 4 it doesn’t really look like much has happened since then… haha! However a lot of planning and prep work has happened, it just doesn’t look like much to the untrained eye 😉

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags:
17 Comments

Going Limited: A Sole Trader’s Guide

Nov24
by TFS on November 24, 2015 at 6:53 pm
Posted In: Career, Side Hustles / Business

Hi folks, we have a guest post today written by Andy Hyland from AK Tax. As you may know I’ve been making a slow transition into self-employment so when he dropped me a guest post about limited companies vs sole traders I was very interested to read what he had to say! I found the article very useful so if you are thinking of making the jump to self employment, hopefully you will too!

 

Going Limited: A Sole Trader’s Guide

Two of the most important questions a sole trader can surely ask themselves are “should I go limited?” and “if so, when?” Unfortunately there is no quick or easy answer to either of these questions, as the response is dependent on a whole host of factors specific to you, your industry and your business.

In this article we’ll look at dispelling some of the myths around the of going limited and present a measured assessment of the relative advantages and disadvantages of trading as a limited company.

We’ll begin, by exploring the all-important legal distinction between a sole trader and a limited company.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
4 Comments

freezer leftovers fish broth gumbo

Nov20
by TFS on November 20, 2015 at 5:49 pm
Posted In: Bad Ass Cookery Class, Frugal Food
leftovers fish broth gumbo

Fish broth gumbo ingredients!

I haven’t done a cooking post in so long I can’t even remember the last one! Don’t worry though, we have still been cooking away, mainly all from scratch, being frugal yet still eating delicious meals. We have finally been making headway into eating out the contents of our freezer recently and I decided to knock something together out of a load of old fish that’s been in there for about 8 months 1. Here is what I came up with. I was going for a fish Jambalaya or Gumbo type of thing and ended up with a nice and spicy thick broth that was good as a soup or served up with some rice. It is very hearty and a perfect warmer for the cold weather that is surely just around the corner. Here is the rough recipe I used, but note the amounts are not particularly important, especially for the fish, just substitute in whatever you have lying around!

Ingredients

2 onions

3 bell peppers (red/green/orange for the colours mainly!)

Some old chorizo I found in the freezer. Maybe 50-100 grams?

3 Chillies off my chilli plant 🙂 (Just use chilli powder if you don’t have any chillies to hand, or none at all if you can’t stand the heat)

Some squid, sliced thinly

Loads of mussels

Small amount of scallops

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

Notes:

  1. Note: this is way past the recommended freezer storage time for shellfish which is 3-6 months according to the FDA, but I’m still alive to tell the tale! Your mileage may vary and all that, so be sensible, if it smells like a rotting corpse, best to bin it! ↩
└ Tags:
4 Comments

another one bites the dust… (maternity leave and redundancy)

Nov17
by TFS on November 17, 2015 at 5:36 pm
Posted In: Career, Rants
another one bites the dust

Will you get thrown to the lions one day?

Shock news!

Mrs T has been (or will be) made redundant!

As I mentioned a while back just another reason to make sure you have some decent savings to smooth out the peaks and troughs of life.

The full story is that on Friday the whole office got called into a meeting to be told that they’d all be moving to the main offices in London. The kicker is that there would be no pay rise and no help with the extra travel cost. For most of the people in the office this is basically a massive “fuck you”… you are no longer needed, surplus to requirements, so long suckers. The reason being of course no one is going to add 2 hours onto their day for an effective four grand a year pay cut.

The alternative to accepting the move is of course voluntary redundancy, which is a kick in the teeth for those that have been good servants to the company for 10+ years.

On a personal level it’s not really going to affect us much due to Mrs T going on maternity leave early next year anyway, and as this timely post I read (found via Monevator) the other day says:

It is very rare that you’re truly indispensable at work… In contrast, you truly are indispensable at home.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: ,
23 Comments

small income diversification to reduce the size of your retirement stash

Nov06
by TFS on November 6, 2015 at 7:41 am
Posted In: Financial Independence Planning, Life Hacks, Lifestyle Design, Personal Finance
small income diversification reduces the size of your retirement pot

These small guys all add up to a veritable force!

When you start to learn about investing, one aspect that quickly becomes apparent is very important, is diversification.

But do many investors think about income diversification? I would bet they don’t.

I would bet that in the main they are all about getting a big pay packet from a corporate job and trying to stuff as much away into their investment accounts, at which stage they will start to worry about the diversification factor. This obviously works well until the day they get canned.

I started to think about diversifying my income away from my day job a while back by trying to get some side gigs in the software development world, but you needn’t go anywhere near to that trouble to earn a bit of extra income on the side. In fact I bet most of you are already doing the things I mention in the table below!

But the key point is that it occurred to me, what are these small sources of extra income providing, in terms of helping us retire early? They are possibly being overlooked by all of us when calculating our magic number: the size of the stash at which we’ll feel comfortable saying sayonara to the day job and strutting off into the sunset.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , , , , , ,
23 Comments
%d bloggers like this: