May 2024 Update
Hello and welcome back. Hope everyone is doing well and chasing after their FIRE dreams! I am sitting writing this on a “cat sitting” weekend.
Living Life
This month has been a busy one for us. Firstly, we have been doing some decorating in our bedroom - adding panelling and painting. We are really pleased with it. We painted it a charcoal colour which just gives the room that bit of character.
We then took a day trip to Whitby to walk around in the sunshine - being good and staying away from the fish and chip joints! It was lovely and the first time I had been there.
I then had my last day at my old job and had a great night celebrating it with my colleagues. Very sad to leave them all.
Then we finished off the month in epic style - a weekend trip to Paris and a Bruce Springsteen concert (“the Boss” still has it).
In Paris we stayed in 18th arrondissement (around the Montmartre area). It is a former artists village where Picasso and Dali once lived. We loved it here. It was full of character with lots of great shops. We did a free walking tour here and then the other days we wandered into the big city to see all the tourist hot spots.
And, lastly, my curry cooking skills continue to develop! My amazing lodger keeps teaching me the Southern Indian tricks of the trade.
Spending
We are on a roll! This month we are again under budget. It may be because I have significantly cut back my alcohol intake (still trying to convince the Mrs to do the same). However, it is still surprising that we are under budget since we did do a lot this month.
This month we spent £2,841.65 which is 22% under our budget.
FI Fund
The markets have stabilised a bit this month following the little wobble last month. So we have managed to get back to new all time highs!
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £463,142.12 which is £7,520.92 (or 1.65%) 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 6.95 months of financial independence each year.
