October 2024 Update
Living Life
Big milestone this month - we broke through the £500k level. Woo hoo! I celebrated by cooking a lovely curry and had a glass of wine with the wife. I started tracking our net worth in 2020 and I would never have believed that we would be in this position back then. Just shows that perseverance works and I will be using this as motivation for the next £500k.
I spent 3 weeks in London this month with work so I spent most of the weekends recovering from that. I don’t know if it is just me but I am exhausted after a week of being in the office and travelling back and forth from Newcastle (3hr train journey).
We did go for one fancy meal out and went to see some family but apart from that it was pretty relaxed. As a result of it being relatively non eventful and me being in London for a lot of it (my work pays expenses) we managed to keep the budget down this month.
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 is our lowest spend month ever - I wasn’t expecting that! What is funny is that we opened a joint account a few months ago and it seems that it might be keeping our food budget down for some reason - maybe something in this?! Although we have really cut back on our alcohol drinking too.
This month we spent £2,354.26 which is 35% under our budget.
FI Fund
Following the UK budget announcement last week, the FTSE 100 is down 1.37% this month with the S&P500 being slightly up by 0.38%. Next week is the US election so it will be interesting to see if markets react to that.
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £507,321.77 which is £11,644.26 (or 2.35%) higher than when compared to the last update.
As I said above, we have broken through the £500k mark. What a moment. It is crazy how much the portfolio has been increasing in recent months.
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 7.6 months of financial independence each year.
