August 2024 Update
Living Life
This month has been great - making use of the end of summer sun!
I had a trip to Edinburgh to see the fringe and visited my parents back home in Scotland.
The Mrs and I then took a trip to London (travelling First Class - ohhh fancy!) for the Bank Holiday. I worked Tuesday and Wednesday and she did some sight seeing. I met her on the evenings and we had dinner together. It was cool having her around because I normally do not make the most of being in London when I am down there.
It felt strange basically going from Scotland to London - the change in temperature felt massive. People were walking around with woolly hats in Scotland whereas it was 28degrees in London!
P.S. Just in case you have missed it, I started an Instagram page where I am sharing all sorts of my travelling snaps in black and white - find it here.
Spending
This month we have got back to underspending - yesss! It feels strange because when I was tallying up the numbers it felt like we had spent loads. I sort of feel as if we are a bit too relaxed at times with our spending and that we could really tighten our belt if we really wanted to.
This month we spent £2,642.41 which is 27% under our budget. Boom!
FI Fund
The markets have recovered a little this month with announcements that the US central bank plans to cut interest rates in September.
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £485,016.11 which is £7,733.05 (or 1.62%) higher than when compared to the last update.
We are creeping towards the £500k mark which is nice to see!
Inspired by the Mad Fientist, we track our net worth slightly differently. This helps us visualise the trajectory towards FIRE based on current monthly spending and investing habits.
The graph has the following assumptions:
Income from investments (post-FIRE) = 4%
Monthly savings / investments = £3,000 per month
Return on investments (pre-FIRE) = 7%
Also, as another way of looking at it, we break our FI milestone (an arbitrary £800,000) into 12 equal bars to track our progress against that. Each bar indicatively represents achieving financial freedom for each representative month of the year. Therefore, we are currently sitting at 7.3 months of financial independence each year.
