January 2016 Income/Expenses
It was payday yesterday which means time for this month’s Income/Expenses!
I think it’s important to keep track of your income/expenses every month as it allows you to spot trends and areas for improvement. I find it really useful to track the spending changes each month, and really motivating to see the networth improvements. Sometimes it can seem like financial independence is so far away, but by watching your networth steadily increasing you’ll know you will reach that point eventually. I’ve created a new page to keep track of total networth, you can find it here.
January 2016 has been a total manic start to the year. Work has been gruelling with some long commutes (didn’t get home till 10pm yesterday) and constant switching between projects is throwing me somewhat. I’ve also been hitting the matched-betting hard and continuing to produce and optimise Kindle content.
My two main side incomes at the moment are Matched-Betting and Kindle Publishing (under the helpful guidance of Huw). So, how did they do in January?
Matched Betting returned me £885.29 in January. All of this was doing repeatable offers and with variable amounts of time each week. Unfortunately it seems most of the bookies went all-out in December’s offers and so have withdrawn some this month. I’ve also been unable to increase my betting in the way I had hoped due to currently going through a re-mortgage and the potential effect on credit score. Still; that’s almost £900 of tax free earnings!
Kindle Publishing has been growing at a steady rate. I have 15 short books out in various combinations and am currently working with a cover designer to get my first full book finished. I’m really excited to finally get this first book complete and have lots of ideas on how to both promote and expand within the particular niche. Amazon has a 2 month delay on Kindle earnings so I won’t see any money back from it for awhile yet, but I did get my first Createspace payment from December: £8.44! Onwards and upwards!
Google Analytics tells me we’ve had 5,700 pageviews from 1,615 users. I’ve also joined the cool kids and started a Twitter account to post updates and a few random thoughts. Please feel free to ‘add me’ or whatever the Twitter equivalent is. I’m @EarlyRetireGuy
On to the report:
Income
Salary: £1799.38
Pension Contributions: £506
Share Save: £250
Total: £2555.38 (-15.3%)
Expenses
Mortgage/Bills: £718.4
Groceries: £74
Petrol (Gas): £36.31
Maintainance/DIY: £0
Eating out: £77.89
Healthcare: £0
Entertainment: £28.19
Wedding: £505.5
Other: £356.62
Total: £1,796.91 (-9.58%)
A savings difference of £758.47 which is 29.68%.
Networth
House Equity: £34,591.48
Cash in bank: £3,031.09
ISA Investments: £6438.17
Sharesave: £500
Pension 1: £15,662.53
Pension 2: £4,909
Total Networth: £65,132.27 (-0.9%)
A drop in networth this month as both ISA and pension funds took a hit from the stock market declines.
7 thoughts on “January 2016 Income/Expenses”
Very inspiring Guy, especially the grocery bill, you must grow your own food?! My spending this month was within £30 of yours, I thought I was doing well until I saw the ‘wedding’ category. I don’t have a wedding coming up so I clearly still have some work to do to get the repetitive spending down.
Hi mate good work with the match betting! Would be interested to know what you are doing to earn £800 are you doing horse racing/football refunds or accas? Just started match betting and worked through most of the sign ups just weighing up what’s the best plan to make ongoing profits
Thanks Matt.
It’s a combination of football, horses and casino recourring offers. I’ve done a couple of Accas but not really productionised it yet. I’m in the process of writing a guide on the methods I use to generate a sustained return so if you’re interested please drop me a line (guy@earlyretirementguy.com) and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
How come you aren’t including the matched betting income into your… erm… income? And therefore savings rate?
Are you silo-ing it off into a different account or using it for some other purpose?
Just out of interest really!
I’ve not withdrawn much of it as I’ve instead kept it in the betting exchanges. This lets me have multiple matched bets running at once. On a typical Saturday I’ll have about £2000 matched with the betting exchanges.
What kind of investments are included in your pension fund and ISA?
Mostly index funds UK & US