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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:
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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:
Well I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a bit of a crazy month! We’ve been busy and have admittedly spent a lot of money, as you will see below. I also decided to cram a load of money last minute into my SIPP as this is probably going to be the last year for a while at least that I’ll be a 40% tax payer. SIPPs are bloody great and I wish I’d started to fill one up a few years ago, but I never really knew how good they were (or what they were at all). If you don’t know either then check out this great article from Monevator which explains all: SIPPs vs ISAs
Play around with this handy SIPP tax relief calculator from Hargreaves Lansdown. You have about 2 days left of the tax year to get some money in there so be quick if you haven’t done it yet and have spare cash laying around waiting to be invested! (You can put the cash into the SIPP and decide where to invest later on, by the way).
So the bottom line is that we had high expenses that were somewhat offset by the tax boost that was given to us by shoving a load of money into the SIPP, so still maintained an OK savings rate. We obviously can’t do that every month so really need to focus once again on keeping the outgoings down, which I am confident we can do for the next few months, until we incur some big expenses in summer when we come to do the Bathroom etc…
I hate corporate buzzwords more than anyone, so when my company decided to implement the agile workflow for our development team a couple of months ago I was naturally dubious. My main objection to it however was that our team was already very agile. In fact let’s have a quick look at the agile manifesto from the Wiki page:
Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
Working software over Comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
Responding to change over Following a plan
To me this sums up what our team was already doing, so why the hell we decided we need to piss everyone off by introducing idiotic terms such as:
Sprint – Basically just a 1 or 2 week chunk of work, usually followed by a code release. We were already doing this!!!
Stories – This just refers to a bug fix or particular project or part of a project you have to work on. In other words “a bit of work”. I don’t really know how any team would work if they didn’t already have some version of this!?
Scrums – Simply refers to teams (e.g. real and meaningful terms like “backend team” and “frontend team” now become meaningless, infantilised names like “red scrum” and “blue scrum” …*pukes in mouth*… and so on). Luckily no one has tried calling any of our teams a scrum yet, if they do it might tip me over the edge 🙂
Life-Hacking is a fun sport to take part in, and more importantly it saves you both time and money by running your life more efficiently. This tends to lead to better, improved and happier version of yourself, so why not give it a try?
Now there are many sites out there already dedicated to specific Life Hacks and while they are definitely worth keeping an eye of for good ideas, I have found that the most entertaining way of hacking your life is to look closely at your own situation and coming up with things yourself. This requires that tired old maxim “thinking outside of the box” 1, well it may be tired but it’s more relevant than ever nowadays with “groupthink” becoming more widespread due to t’internet and social media.
To show you my approach to customised life hacking 2 I’d like to present a few of my recent life hacks and the thinking behind them:
Let’s clear one important thing up before we get on with this, I am a total noob on the car maintenance front! This post is not meant as the final word on an introduction to car mechanics, it is simply what I have learned (mainly from mistakes) from attempting a few basic repairs myself, after our car went for it’s MOT in January. A more accurate description for the title would probably have been “Read about TFS’s mishaps in car repair while laughing and maybe learning a few basic tips along the way” but I don’t think many people would be googling those search terms, so I went with the rather more boring title you see above 🙂
If you are someone with car mechanics knowledge that is even only slightly above the basic then this post may not be of any use to you, barring any entertainment factor at my fundamental mistakes. Read, laugh, and possibly learn along with me!
Well I have to say I felt rather uninspired getting up at 5:30am to finish off this post about my goals for this year, but a beautiful dawn (see pic above) has done much to alleviate this issue! I nearly forgot to write this post, but inspired by other bloggers such as FFBF who has some rather ambitious goals for 2015, along with The Finance Zombie who is keeping it a bit more simple, and TheresValue who has some great long and short term goals, I though I better pull my finger out and get some inked up.
My 2014 goals took a bit of a back seat for the latter part of the year as buying and moving house seemed to become an all consuming time suck, but without that and with starting to get a lot more of my time back from July 1st onwards, I am looking forward to attacking these goals with gusto this time around. I also think I made a mistake of being too specific in the goals last year by giving them months. Life doesn’t normally work out like that and predicting what is achievable in each month, up to a year in advance, was always going to be quite tricky! So this year I am breaking things down by category, and giving a deadline in brackets where appropriate rather than a specific month I’ll be doing it in. You will notice that a few of the goals have rolled over from last year due to reasons already stated, but I’m far more confident of knocking most of these babies out this year!
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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!
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