are solar panels a good investment? a year in review

Oct12
by TFS on October 12, 2015 at 10:51 am
Posted In: Investing, Life Hacks, Money Saving Ideas

solar panels on our house!

 

We’ve been our “new” house a year tomorrow!

Some of you may remember me mentioning one of the things that attracted us to the house was that it had a Solar Panel or Solar PV (Photo Voltaic) installation, so I thought it was high time I did a write up on how those bad boys have been performing over the year.

(Update: For more information on solar panels, please see my Solar Panels FAQ here!)

 

tl;dr – did it save us money!?

For those of you who just want to know how much much they’ve made/saved us here is the simplified spreadsheet you want to look at:

A year of Solar PV Usage compared to our electricity bill

As you can see our electricity bill was £291.57 for the year while we received £566.05 in payments. So as well reducing and easily covering our electricity bill, we netted an extra £274.48 on top of that. Not bad!

 

calculating the ROI of solar panels

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anything is possible

Oct07
by TFS on October 7, 2015 at 9:21 am
Posted In: Financial Independence, Health & Fitness, Life Hacks, Philosophy, Psychology
anything is possible

A real sense of what might be possible (and a lovely fog) hangs in the air at the start of a half marathon

 

I’ve been reading a lot about self limiting beliefs recently, mainly from the third person perspective loving the escape artist, and I have to admit it’s really starting to ring a bell with me. A year or so ago I would have never thought I could run a sub 1:30 half marathon, or smash a 6 minute mile by over half a minute. I was held back by self limiting beliefs that I only had a certain level of fitness or speed in my genetic make up and that all those people faster than I was just got lucky in the gene lottery.

While this must be partially true; there is clearly some genetic advantage to certain people doing certain tasks; I think we give it way too much weighting in our minds with regards to what our personal capabilities are 1.

 

I think cultivating the opposite viewpoint that anything is possible is a much better attitude in life.

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Notes:

  1. And besides in the task at hand, running long distances, I am and always have been built like a long distance runner anyway, so I have no excuses on that front! ↩
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sensational september – income/expenses and “other” updates

Oct04
by TFS on October 4, 2015 at 12:31 pm
Posted In: Budgets, TFS Updates
Share save cheques

A tale of two cheques! The bank clerk was a bit surprised at the differing amounts as you might expect 🙂

 

Another month of 2015 down, only 3 to go. How mad does that sound?!

Quickly onto some figures for you. Would it surprise you if I said that this month our savings rate was… bum ba-ba-baaaaahhh:

70.31%!!!!

Wowza!

Let’s do the income breakdown this month first as that is where most of the action is…

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a little taste of freedom

Sep30
by TFS on September 30, 2015 at 8:06 am
Posted In: Random Thoughts, TFS Updates
Freeeeeeeedom!!!!!

Ye can tek ma tomatoes, but ye can never tek ma…. Well you know rest… 😉

I have officially made it! A finally have a little taste of my own freedom.

Spoiler alert: It’s fucking brilliant 🙂

Disclaimer: This post may come across as sickeningly smug, especially if you are at work while reading it. I truly apologise if so in advance but I am genuinely very excited to be off work and wanted to just do a bit of a brain dump on my thoughts!

Yes, after talking about it all that time ago, today is my first day off in my first 2 week period off work.

I am now working part time, or am semi-retired, or am just a layabout bum for 1/3 or my usual working life, however you would rather phrase it. I think semi-retired is way over the top so I will call it part time I think.

I guess I haven’t really got much to write on the experience so far as I am only ~1.5 hours into the whole thing but I am too excited not to write a post about it, so… here it is!

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investing in websites

Sep28
by TFS on September 28, 2015 at 7:21 pm
Posted In: How To, Investing, Lifestyle Design

Wired Investors

 

 

We have a guest post for you today from George at WiredInvestors. I’ve been interested in the idea of buying and monetising websites as part of the FI / side hustling strategy for a while now but haven’t had the time to research it further, let alone the balls to actually take the plunge and buy an asset class such as this! So it was with great interest when I read a guest post of George’s on such an esteemed FI website as the MadFIentist. Lo and behold a few weeks later he got in contact with me about a guest post here so I couldn’t refuse to get even more information about it all! Over to you George…

 

 

Hi TFS readers. I’m George, and I write about investing in websites on WiredInvestors. The TFS himself was kind enough to allow me a chance to guest post on the site. Today, I’m going to try and explain why (and why not) you might want to look into buying websites as a means of bolstering your income. I’ll also go over a little of my own background so you know where I’m coming from. Additionally, I’ll try to explain how website investing compares to traditional investing opportunities like stocks, bonds, and real estate.

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