January 2025 Update
Living Life
We have had a pretty quiet start to the year. Mainly spent trying to download all of the Indian cooking skills from our lodger who leaves us in February - we are going to miss him a lot!
I had a trip to London for work and I saw a few friends for a beer. Otherwise, the Mrs and I took a trip to Scotland to take a look around some areas. We are considering whether to sell our home in Newcastle and move back across the border to be closer to family. We had a bit of a reality check once we started checking how much it will likely cost us if we send our little one to nursery!
Spending
Since we had quite a quiet month, we have done pretty well budget wise again.
This month we spent £2,863.21 which is 11% under our budget.
FI Fund
The markets have had quite a good start to the year - the S&P500 is up 1.91% and the FTSE100 is up 5.45%!
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £554,876.68 which is £20,602.15 (or 3.86%) higher than when compared to the last update. Great 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 8.3 months of financial independence each year.
