July 2024 Update
Living Life
This month I have been a little hectic with work but also some fun trips away.
We had a lovely trip to York with a few friends for the day. We walked around the city walls, went to a Van Gogh immersive experience and ate some great food!
We then had a amazing trip away to Bristol and Bath for our wedding anniversary (a year already!). I really enjoyed both. Again doing a lot of walking which was great and seeing some lovely sights such as the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
BTW! How good has the weather been at times?! I have really been enjoying it and hope it doesn’t end!
The only thing I hope stops is these riots in the UK that have started this month. I know it is heart breaking that young girls have lost their lives but I am not sure trashing the country is going to solve it. I heard one of the Lords from the House of Commons suggest that Covid-style lockdowns may be a way to solve the issue. I really hope it doesn’t come to that (would people listen anyway?!).
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 broken the low spending streak - boo! Oh well, it was a good run. We try to not beat ourselves up too much as we do save quite a bit. It is also good not to restrict ourselves too much as we like to enjoy living now too! That said, I have kept my alcohol intake low again this month so at least that isn’t contributing too much.
This month we spent £4,226.93 which is 16% over our budget.
FI Fund
Just last week the markets looked to start to get a little wobbly. The Bank of England also followed the Bank of Canada and European Central Bank by cutting interest rates for the first time. The US looks to be close also with the first cut looking highly likely in September. You wonder if cuts will need to come earlier if the stock market does crack.
Personally, although I have been very early (probably too early) with calling the recession and investing in government bonds, I feel we are very close to seeing a lot more chaos in the markets. Let’s hope not but I have to admit, my portfolio does have a big allocation to government bonds for the time being. At the right point in time, I will transition back to a 100% stocks allocation (with the majority of which being a globally diversified index fund). Warren Buffett sold 50% of his stake in Apple to increase his already inflated cash pile - that tells you something…
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £477,283.07 which is £2,428.73 (or 0.51%) higher than when compared to the last update.
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 7.17 months of financial independence each year.
