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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 🙂
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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:
Hello readers! It’s January so it seems like a good time to air some dirty financial laundry and put up our expenses for the last 6 months of 2014. I only started tracking everything using Money Dashboard in May, which is why I am not putting up the full year, but hopefully by this time in June I will have a much better idea of what a full years worth of expenses are for us. A word of warning… it ain’t pretty 🙂
2014 Q3/4 Spending Overview
June
3114
July
4396
August
3462
September
4373
October
3175
November
2845
December
3370
Total
24735
As you can see we’ve spent quite a lot of money of the last 6 months! In fact this is over double the spending rate that I originally discussed would be possible to spend in a whole year when I first started up the blog. Oh dear. We had some expensive months though, with holidays in August and October, and also a house move in October! God knows what we were playing at in September and July, I guess that is when we paid for said holidays!? Let’s find out and break it down into categories…
I’ve spoken briefly about Top CashBack before in my post on Moneydashboard (because they were offering £8 cashback just for using the free service! Read the article for more details), but it’s such a good website I think it deserves a post all of it’s own. I noticed yesterday that they are doing a special January Health Kick offer of a free 1KG bag of MyProtein Whey powder for free, so it kicked me into action to write about TopCashback and spread the word about the offer, which is perfectly timed for anyone hitting the gym hard this January!
Was it really a whole year ago I embarked on my first Mega Detox Challenge? I guess it must be!
Those of you reading since last January will know I don’t really like making New Years Resolutions as they tend to be rather wishy washy, but I do like a good shorter term challenge with well-defined (-ish) parameters. They are great because you know they have a set end date, so if what you are doing turns out not to be worthwhile, you can still plough through to the end and then give it up without feeling like a failure. Conversely if it turns out to give you some positive life changing revelations, then hopefully some of that good shit will stick with you. So in the spirit of joining everyone in the country after having eaten and drunk far too much over the festive period, I will submit to another Detox Challenge!
Meet G-Duck, he’s in the closet, but he is still cool!
It’s reader question time today! But before we go any further, I just want to clarify that (if this post ever gets to page one for the google search “are you out of the closet”, for example!) if there are any young persons confused about their sexuality reading this, we are unfortunately talking about whether your interest in pursuing early Financial Independence (FI) is “out of the closet” here. Please try google again, but not before having a quick look around the blog of course! You see on the bright side, you most have probably never heard of such a thing as early retirement is possible for mere mortal non-CEO/Rockstar/Premier League Football Players, but if you take a look around here, soak up the information available on how to save money and how to plan for FI, you could be well on your way! Hey, I’ll even throw in a few philosophical and psychological pointers on how to live the good life as well.
We’re going back to basics in this post and having a look at the one of the most pervasive, yet somehow strangely overlooked “money sucks” your poor old current account has to deal with: Regular Monthly Bills. You all know how it goes, £40 a month here for the mobile phone bill, £90 a month there for the premium TV package, it all adds up horrendously quickly! Yes it’s sad but true, high cost recurring bills are a surprisingly popular sure fire way to ruin your personal finances.
The good news – if we can make many small or medium reductions on each bill, this can add up very quickly to tangible savings.
So pay attention gang: here are five of my best tips for destroying your household bills! 🙂
1. Open your bills and read them!
According to this handy infographic below (click for full size picture), over 1 million people don’t even bother opening their bills in the first place.
Talk about falling at the first hurdle!!! I would have thought that it goes without saying but given that stat, this has to be the first and most important tip: Open your bills and read them properly. There was a feature on watch dog just the other night in fact where a certain energy company was dishing out bills of ridiculous proportions; I’m talking in the region of £1000 and even up to £10,000!!!
Imagine if those people had not been checking their bills! If they had the money in their account the payment would have come out, not only would they be losing out on current account interest, it also might have left them short to buy their basic essentials until they managed to sort it out! In the case of the £10,000 bill, the payment may not have gone through and they could have ended up with extra bank charges which would have been even harder to claim back. Nightmare!
By opening and reading their bills they had extra time to ring up and get it sorted before any payment had been taken.
These are obviously extreme cases but hopefully you get the point, if you pay attention to your bills each month it will become very easy to spot an outlier of a higher bill than normal very quickly, and then you can take action to remedy the issue as soon as possible.
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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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