October 2022 Update
Happy Halloween everyone! Instead of carving pumpkins, we have been making soup out of their cousins the butternut squash. We even put some ginger in it this time - along with garlic and chillies - to give it an extra kick. Tasty stuff!
Living Life
This month has been another good one. Plenty stuff going on as usual.
We have picked out wedding venue so that was exciting (and scary). It is actually getting real and it has hit us how much we need to organise now. I now actually have so much more appreciation for the people who have invited me to weddings in the past - it is so expensive! I think given that we are naturally frugal and like to get good deals we should hopefully keep the costs down a little. Although I have to say it is going to be difficult. The plan is that I will not include wedding spend in my monthly update but I can do a blog post specifically covering the wedding spend.
In other news, I got a promotion and increased my salary by approx. 16%. This will come with quite a bit more responsibility as I will be less focussed on projects but more on oversight and development of the team, etc. It is a new challenge for me but something I am quite looking forward to. Plus the salary increase means I can step closer to my FIRE goals.
I also had a work trip to Oslo in Norway for a couple of days. I had to present to a room full of industry experts - this was nerve-racking but exciting. I think I did OK. It was also great to be in Norway (it was the first time I had been) and for it to be on company expenses was even better - Norway is an expensive place! A pint of beer equated to about £10 (I know, as a Scotsman, we like to compare expensiveness by price of beer).
Lastly, I went to the Newcastle v Brentford game with the Mrs and the parents. I am not a Newcastle fan but I have to say the atmosphere was electric and they won 5-2 so you can’t really complain. I even celebrated by having a Newcastle Brown Ale!
Spending
As is becoming a bit of a regular occurrence, we have overspent again this month. I think we will need to re-baseline our budget for next year which is a little depressing.
We did do quite a bit again this month. Eating out to celebrate, drinks with friends, paying for one of my friends’ stags next year, the list goes on…
The tables below show the spending for the month. As you can see, we were 12% over our target budget.
The budget is also shown in graphical format just to make it easier to visualise. The gap continues to widen (sigh). At least it is slightly better reading than last month.
FI Fund
Similar to last month, the portfolio continues to be impacted by the market volatility. So again, we are slightly down. But no pain, no gain as they say!
The FI fund includes our full net worth. At the moment, it is sitting at £318,775.59 which is down £2,114.72 from last month (or 0.7%).
As usual, we track the FI fund against our FI target of £800,000. We track it by splitting our FI number into equal bars where each bar represents achieving financial freedom for each respective month of the year. Therefore, this months suggests we have reached just less than 4.8 months of financial independence each year.
