Jun ’18 Performance

So a chance to take a look back at the performance across the board for June.

As I covered in my “How I measure performance” – basically I take the value of the portfolio at the end of last month, add on any contributions for the month, and that was my starting value. End value is the value at the end of the reporting period. Simples 🙂

‘folio	Perf.	Notes
Company Pension	0.38%	No income generated as all funds are in growth or reinvested
Personal Pension	-0.31%	No income generated as all funds are in growth or reinvested
ISA 1	0.07%	No income generated as all funds are in growth or reinvested
ISA 2	-0.41%	The performance does not include the income that was paid out into my account
ISA 3	0.16%	Although dividends are paid out, they remain in the ISA wrapper, and will get reinvested for growth. The performance figure includes both the Capital growth, and also income received which will get reinvested.
ISA 4	-0.32%	Go T’ Pub ISA
FTSE-100	-0.54%	This excludes any dividends
FTSE-250	-0.07%	This excludes any dividends
FTSE-All	-0.47%	This excludes any dividends
S&P500	0.09%	This excludes any dividends
Dow Jones	-0.86%	This excludes any dividends
VWRL	-0.26%
VHYL	-1.02%
GBP/USD	-0.63%	This was taken on the spot rate on the close of the last day of the month. Going forwards I will pick up the exchange rate from www.xe.comfor consistency and real life 🙂

So, really a completely uneventful month. There really isn’t much to say other than continuing to tick along, with money dropping in to the investments, and off we go!

Really a very boring month!

Note: If you are in London this week there is another FI Meetup on Thursday evening, if you are interested, head over to the FB site and find us!

June ’18 Income and Expenses

So I won’t repeat myself in apologising for the delay in getting this post out, but I guess better late than never. I can remember some of June – some weekends away, a week away on work, some days out, all in all a very very full on month…. so without further ado lets look at what that did….

Income

So the final reduced salary hit the bank account – thank god.

To date I have been continually dipping into my cash reserves and they are starting to look rather threadbare. I am sure most people don’t count a company share scheme as being an emergency, but there you go!

My other half’s ISA kicked out more money again which is always nice – a bit of tax free income, yes please! This was a fantastic amount of cash starting to come in and is really helping make it through the reduced income.

Expenses

Item	Notes	Amount
Things I choose not to avoid*	Mortgage, Insurance, shared bills etc. – yes, we could move somewhere cheaper, not have insurance, reduce our bills a bit and so on, but we are where we are.	41%
Groceries	All the food and other stuff needed for home	3%
Alcohol for home	Home alcohol consumption only	11%
Bicycles / Car related	Any costs related to either the bikes or the car	2%
Alcohol Out	Generally, its the pub….	1%
Eating Out	I include purchased lunches in this as well as meals out etc.	3%
Other	My catch all for anything I may have missed….	19%
Holidays	Any spending related to holidays, flights etc.	7%
Savings	Anything left over! This includes money into ISAs, mortgage payments and non relief pension contributions. My company pension comes out before it hits my bank account so isn’t included, nor do I include the “top up” of money when my money goes into my personal pension (i.e. I put in £100, I register it as £100, not the £125 that gets credited in my pension)	13%

* This covers a number of things that I would class as essential for me. Yes, I could move to somewhere cheaper to reduce the mortgage (which in turn would reduce the insurance I have to pay), yes I could reduce my bills by switching energy supplier etc. but it comes down to what I am happy with. There are a few other things in there that are classified as essential that others may object, and so I have just lumped it into there.

Day to day “Things I choose not to do anything about” is up slightly, reflecting my reduced income and also I paid a one off hit on one of the standards – a story for another day.

So, food for home was up a little on normal but still relatively small amount as I continue to work through the freezer – this was driven up by buying some stuff at a fair…

Alcohol at home. Whooops. So I happened to bump into my favourite Vintners at the above mentioned fair – should last a little while, although not that much… they did have some very nice wine!

Holiday – this was up a bit as we paid the last of the deposit for a friends wedding in August…

Other. Erm. Oh. Bother. I think this may be my inner spendypants person braking out after such a lean 5 months. To be fair some of this was new clothes (long over due), a self breathalyser (legal requirement in France), some new glasses, all sorts of stuff.

Savings rate. Ok this is a disgrace, but I have still left the money going into the investments…. further depleting my cash reserves… almost to empty which is not a great place to be in!

Oh well – onwards and upwards!

A wider (and quicker) look back on the 2017/2018 Tax Year

So you may have read my post on last tax years performance, this post is more about reflecting on how it was overall.

So first of all, the numbers and where this puts me. So overall a very good year and a large increase in my total retirement pots – with growth and contribution, it went up more than my net income (but not gross). This really does give me hope and should not be sniffed at.

The increase and forecast in my ISA pots also make me start to think quite positively about where I am getting towards. Whilst this won’t be enough for me to stop working in 2025 without selling down some of the pots, it is still going to be a good healthy balance. Given when I started this blog I thought this was completely impossible, it shows what the regular saving and investing can do for you.

The mortgage continues to go down, but never as fast as I would like. We have just remortgaged – a new 5 year fix at 1.74% – a fair rate, and a lot lower than our last fix. We are going to leave our payments as they were which means if everything were to remain constant then we will have knocked almost 4 years off the mortgage – I won’t complain at that!

The amount of tax I paid last year was, whilst still obscene (in my opinion of course!), lower than the year before, a reflection of my tax rebate for putting my bonus into my pension.

So, from a financial point of view I am pretty happy.

What about outside of just the ££?

So, first up work. A real rollercoaster of a year if I am honest. I took on about 4 different roles over the course of the year culminating in the one I am still in now which is keeping me very busy (as an example, one Friday I was already on conference calls before 7am), but I am enjoying it. From the potential and career it is one I couldn’t say no to so I will continue to plug away at it.

I got a pay rise, which was good – although never as much as I would like or want, it was better than I had feared given the company targets. The bonus was lower than ideal, but we failed to meet our key target, so I can understand that.

Needless to say the whole bonus went into my pension so it didn’t feel real, but means my pension continues to head upwards.

And finally, the personal side. Overall yet another tough year (for reasons I will not be sharing on here). I don’t expect this to change over the next few years, although it is starting to highlight just how run down I am getting and the need for some quiet time out. To help this we have started a direct debit into a holiday fund for the first time – not a lot but it means we should be able to cover a break once a year!

I had Christmas off but was unwell, before then it was October. I definitely need a break!

 

What on earth….

Has been going on here?! It’s been over a month since my last post, which I can only apologise for – I am way behind despite having mostly created the posts ready, I need to get myself in some form of order!

This really is only a short post to demonstrate I am still alive!

The last month has flown by faster than I could have ever imagined – a week away with work meant some very long days, then playing catch up on my return and combining with mid-year means things tend to get away from me.

I’ve been catching up with people (face to face would you believe) which also involved a rather large volume of various beers (including a fantastically named “Arrogant Bastard Ale” and an Ice Cream ale – bloody delicious on a hot day!). Coupled with a bit of entertaining at home, a weekend away, this is probably the first time I have had chance to properly sit down and pen something.

Added to the slight distraction of the Tour de France on the background also uses up some of my time!

Have I got bored of posting and talking about finances? Not at all although if I am being critical I probably could have posted sooner, so I will have to try harder on this.

I can’t believe I haven’t done June’s data yet, never mind my year look back.

I could do it today, however having been up since 6am (I have a huge long list of things I have done) and been non stop until 2pm, so now a nice glass of white wine, enjoy the breeze and plonk myself in front of the Tour and, a little later, some nice cold meat, salad and cheese.

Cheers!