February 2023 Update
Hello everyone! Welcome back. I am so glad January and February are behind us - the longer days are already starting to bring a smile to my face.
Living Life
February was a quiet month for us. We did this kind of purposefully as we wanted to save a little money (especially with blowing the budget last month). You will soon find out how successful we were in keeping our costs down.
Probably the most excitement came from some nights out with friends and the celebration of our engagement anniversary. For our engagement anniversary, we went out for dinner in Newcastle and had a few drinks in one of the roof top bars - it was pretty cool!
Otherwise, my Mum came to visit at the end of the month and we went for our wedding breakfast tasting session. It was great to see my Mum but the tasting session was a bit of a disappointment - we have a meeting tomorrow with the wedding venue to let them know about our concerns (fingers crossed we can sort something out).
Spending
February was a less spendy month than January which was a relief to see. However, we did have to do some spending. One cost was the replacement of some windows - we have been meaning to replace our bathroom window and the Mrs wanted some of the windows replaced in the spare bedroom she works from. Overall, this was about £600.
So we were slightly over budget but we would otherwise have been under budget if we didn’t have to spend on the windows. So overall we spent £2,965.94 which was 3% over our target daily budget.
And, drum roll… The re-start of the jazzy graphical format below.
FI Fund
February has been relatively flat with our net worth increasing slightly this month.
In terms of investing, this month I actually only added to government bonds. My outlook on the equity market gets less and less optimistic. I am still of the opinion that government bonds will start to perform well once inflation starts dropping decisively and the economy starts to slow. I think once we see the unemployment rate start to accelerate this may be the catalyst. Apologies for all the doom and gloom!
The FI fund includes our full net worth as usual. At the moment, this is sitting at £340,579.68 which is up £4,922.73 (or 1.47%) from last month. Again, we are making new all time highs!
Again, we have looked at our net worth in a slightly different way - this was inspired by the Mad Fientist.
This helps us visualise the trajectory towards FIRE based on current monthly spending and investing habits. Let’s hope FIRE is achievable at some point in 2027 / 2028.
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%
If you have read my blog post updates before, you will know we normally track our FI target against a milestone of £800,000.
We track the £800,000 number by splitting it out into equal bars where each bar represents achieving financial freedom for each representative month of the year. Therefore, this month suggests we have reached just over 5.1 months of financial independence each year.
