January 2023 Update
Hello everyone! The start of the new year - are you ready? Happy January to you all.
Living Life
This month has been less January-like than other years. What do I mean when I say that? Well, January is a pretty grim month isn’t it?! Cold, dark, miserable. Well, this year we put a halt to that at the end of the month - we decided to go on holiday for a week to Turkey. A bit of a last minute thing as we wanted to get some sunshine. The weather was great - around 15 to 20 degrees. I even managed to go for a swim in the sea! We had a great time, eating a lot of kebabs and seeing the sites of the old town in Antalya along with some of the attractions outside of Antalya - ancient ruins and canyons.
Other than our holiday, we celebrated my Mums 60th which was great. We had cocktails in the house (with one of these home cocktail making kits) and went out for a lovely meal / drinks back in my home town. I also managed to get my kilt sorted out for our wedding - I will be renting a Flower of Scotland kilt - similar to this one. We also bought our rings!
In other news, our lodger has decided to leave us so will be moving out at the end of February. This is sad as she has been great but life happens. On a more positive note, we managed to find someone else who seems really nice and we also managed to increase the rent.
So overall a busy month with lots going on. It was great to start January on a high but this also means the budget was hurt a little too. I suppose you need to live your life sometimes too right?!
Spending
As I said, January was a spendy month!
Lots of spending on gifts, drinking, eating out and holidays. Compared to January last year, we are a world away. We also paid for a professional damp specialist to give us some advice on a minor damp problem in our bedroom and bought a dehumidifier based on his advice.
This month we have had our worst spend month yet. We spent a whopping £4,619.38. This was 46% over our newly calculated target budget (based on the results from last year).
I will re-start my snazzy graphical outputs when I get some more monthly data coming in.
FI Fund
January has started a bit better than a lot of people would have expected. Year to date, the following assets are up by the following amounts: SPY (+6.04%), FTSE 100 (+2.88%), TLT (+5.06%), BTC (+39.14%).
So similarly to the markets, our net worth has floated upwards also.
In terms of investing, I have continued my strategy of drip feeding 50% global equity and 50% government bonds. Again, this is due to the yield curve being inverted and my feeling that equity is still risky at the moment - I will move back to 100% equity once I feel the time is right. For now, government bonds are providing a good return with a hedge against a further equity drawdown.
The FI fund includes our full net worth as usual. At the moment, this is sitting at £335,656.96 which is up £13,994.49 (or +4.35%) from last month. This month is actually a new all time high for our net worth - YEEHA! Hopefully there are many more to come.
Similar to last month, 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 months of financial independence each year.
