September 2024 Update
Living Life
Wowza - a jam packed month which started with lovely 30degree heat in Poland and has ended with the autumn tones with the log burner being started up for the first time!
So yes, we started the month with a great week or so in Poland. We visited Wroclaw, Torun and Gdansk. I was able to completely switch off from work which was great. It is the second time I have been to Poland and I was impressed again. The cities are so clean and I love the little independent food places and colourful architecture. It also helps that it is really cheap over there. We regularly had a meal for two of us for less than £20 and we were not trying to scrimp. Definitely a place that we will see as a strong contender for geo-arbitrage in our FIRE years to come.
I then had a trip to London to visit one of my friends and watch the Joshua vs Dubois boxing match. I really enjoyed this - Wembley is such a great stadium and it felt like we were in hospitality (even though we were not) with all of the bars and restaurants inside. That said, it was not cheap - £8 a pint!
At the end of the month, we have had a few local trips to do some wholesome walks in the countryside. This week we visited Alnwick. I really enjoyed it - the autumn colours were in full flow and the medieval-like town of Alnwick was beautiful.
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 managed to stay under budget again (woohoo)! Again, I felt as if we spent a lot so maybe our target budget is too high. Either way, it is good that we did not go overboard even with how busy a month it was.
This month we spent £2,907.80 which is 17% under our budget.
P.S. I know I am posting this one day before the end of the month but we plan on keeping tomorrow as a “no spend day”. If we do spend, I will add it to next month.
FI Fund
The markets are slightly up again this month. The Federal Reserve finally pulled the trigger on interest rate cuts this month too with a “bumper” 0.5% cut!
As many of you know, my portfolio has a heavy Government Bonds tilt just now. Typically when yield curves dis-invert and central banks cut interest rates, this is a risky time for the stock market. So I am sticking by my guns (as doom and gloom as it is).
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £495,677.52 which is £10,661.40 (or 2.20%) higher than when compared to the last update.
We are sooo close to the £500k mark!
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 7.4 months of financial independence each year.
