2019 has been a very long year for me, filled with incredible highs and lows as we welcomed a new addition to the family and said goodbye to another. Personally it is a year I will never forget and one that has kept me very busy. Financially however the year was very boring, so much so that I’ve neglected to update this site for many months.  I maintain my view that good personal finance is boring as hell and I’m not sure anyone wants to keep reading monthly income/expense reports when nothing really changes month on month. Perhaps this past year I really took my eye off the financial ball, but I believe with good reason.

January

Back in 2018 we had the news that our lives would change dramatically in 2019, so we began the year ticking off a bucketlist item and going on our last holiday as a couple with a trip to New York. The city was equally stunning, busy and freezing for the week we spent doing everything very touristy and getting annoyed at how pedestrian unfriendly their jaywalking laws are.

We used our Avios points and the Companion Voucher earned through the AMEX BA Credit Card to experience the business class flights there and back. This reduced the cost of flights from several thousand right down to the hundreds as only the tax needed to be paid.

I enjoyed New York, having wanted to visit it for many years, but came home feeling like it was now done and I’ve no real desire or need to visit again. I’d much rather go back to Sydney if we were going to do another long-haul city visit.

February

In February I was finally organised enough to sit down and arrange a catchup call with my good friend Huw from Financially Free at 40.  I always enjoy our chats but it has become increasingly difficult to find the time required for what always seems to end up being chats lasting far longer than we initially planned. Huw has been a great mentor and motivator ever since we met at one of FIRE meetups several years ago. During the chat Huw finally managed to convince me to begin working on a paid-for matched betting service. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time but struggled to see where there was a real gap in the market. So with the introduction of various Minimum Bet Guarantee offers there was finally a gap I could fill as a ‘subject matter expert’ with a course. I made the commitment to get it done that year and admitted I’d be happy if even a single person bought it!

March

I took a 2 weeks off work in March in order to concentrate on the Cheltenham Festival and visit my parents over in France. Cheltenham is by far the busiest week of the year for matched betting and I often make more in 4 days from that than I do in most months. It’s 12+ hours a day of non-stop betting, turning over hundreds of thousands of pounds and getting my bank cards blocked numerous times as Barclays throws a fit from the £20k I’m trying to deposit into Smarkets.

After Cheltenham week I flew over to France to help my parents out. They live in a large property with gites and a swimming pool in the rural Charente area which means quite a lot of work is needed to get everything cleared up and prepared for guests after each winter. My other was diagnosed with cancer back in 2018 and her condition had continued to deteriorate meaning my father has far less time to work on the essential upkeep of the property. As a result; when I arrived in March the place was quite literally falling apart with holes in the roof and overgrown moss all over the back garden. I worked through as much as I could in the week I was there but couldnt stay any longer as I had to get back to support my by then heavily pregnant wife.

April

Surgery was scheduled in April for a minor procedure which didn’t go exactly to plan. I ended up having several weeks off work recovering while being unable to walk around much. During this time my wife and I were trying to get the house ready for our new arrival. We had the upstairs re-carpeted and cleared out the spare room to turn it into a nursery. We also replaced all the internal doors with ones a bit more study and fire resistant.

May

Due to the risk of a medical complication it was agreed with our midwife that my wife be induced a couple of week early. We were offered some dates and picked May 3rd as I was hoping it could be a May the 4th baby which we’d name Luke (wife had not yet agreed to this). It’s strange setting a date for something like this because it totally lulls you into a false sense of security. On May 1st we were busy running around doing errands and beginning to tidy the house knowing we would be going into hospital in 2 days time, but it seems fate had other ideas. My wife went into labour and it ended up being a midnight dash to the hospital with our son born the next day, May 2nd.

As he made an early arrival it didnt seem right to go with Luke so instead we opted for a combination of our grand-dad’s names.

June

Despite all the late nights, early mornings and complete whirlwind of never-ending tasks that comes with a new baby; I managed to get my Minimum Bet Guarantee Course released in mid-june, just in time for Ascot racing festival. Things started out a bit bumpy as one of my announcement posts immediately began getting swamped with a coordinated attack from a rival matched betting affiliate group.  It was clear none of them were familiar with the course or the offer in general but were trying to discredit me anyway for their own gains. In the end I blocked all the staff from the other group and course sales started coming in far quicker than I had expected. Feedback was also excellent with members posting their new profits within a couple of days.

Putting together the course was a massive milestone for me as it represented my first true ‘passive’ side income. The ongoing costs are incredibly low and only 2 sales a year would be enough to sustain it. I’m not sure what I was originally predicting for sales but by the end of 2019 it had reached about £10,000 and returned many more times that in profits to members.

July

My main memories for July were spending far too much time in our local doctors and hospital. I was still having issues from the surgery back in April and had been to the doctor multiple times until eventually referred back to the hospital who did eventually sort things out. Around this time our son became ill with bronchitis and was struggling to breath properly. We called 101 who directed us to the out of hours doctors who then sent us straight to A&E. We were eventually discharged at 1am. You can imagine my disgust when we went to leave the almost empty carpark in the middle of the night and the machine charged us £9 for parking. I was so annoyed I ended up meeting with the hospital CEO who was shocked by the parking prices at that time of night and acknowledged that the situation was unacceptable. He made a commitment to reduce the charges and made a commitment to improve the parking situation in the trust AGM a couple of months later.

August/September

The rest of the summer was thankfully fairly uneventful. I enjoyed seeing my son become more aware of his surroundings, smiling when he saw us in the morning and after work. Course sales continued to trickle in and matched betting income remained strong despite more long-running offers coming to an end.

 

October

I started October by attending a mini-FIRE meetup in London attended by TheFireStarter, Saving Ninja, Dan@Pursue Fire amongst others. It was great to meet a lot of them for the first time and spend the evening drinking far too much while discussing betting, property, investing and finances in an open setting. I know some other finance bloggers despise the thought of meetups but I’ve always found them friendly and interesting to hear new ideas in person and meeting people behind the blogs. As part of this meetup I also began speaking to another FIRE chaser who lives in my hometown and has almost finished his journey to FI. He doesn’t have a blog but it was great to hear a bit of his wisdom and plans for the future. It did make me laugh to hear that one of the group had seen my blog listed as “discontinued” on another site. Opps!

In mid-October my wife and I took our son over to France for the first time to visit my parents and introduce him to their friends. Initially we wern’t going to go as my parents were coming over for Christmas but at the last minute decided it would be nice to fly over. The weather wasn’t great but I still braved the swimming pool while my wife remained firmly in the dry. Our son was a big hit with all the locals who had apparently heard so much about him and been indulged with lots of photos from his grandmother. At the end of the flight we were last off so couldn’t resist asking the pilot for a photo in the cockpit.

We arrived back home and started planning for Christmas where we would be hosting the family for the first time. Late on Tuesday October 29th I received a phone call from my father who was on his was to the hospital in France and said I needed to get there as soon as possible. I drove to stay with one of my sisters near Gatwick and we flew over on the first flight to France that morning.  We got to my mother’s hospital room at mid-day and were there beside her when she passed away later that afternoon, October 30th.

It was a very tough time for the whole family but I was just so glad we had gone on that visit a couple of weeks earlier. My father handled it all with a level of dignity I’m not sure I could have matched and we are all glad it was so peaceful and she can rest at last after a long hard fight with cancer.

November

I took some much needed time off in November to help my dad in France and then spend time with my wife and son back in the UK. I attended several of the baby classes where I felt very out of place as the only male there!

December

December was particularly busy in 2019 as I had agreed to have the family over for Christmas which involved cooking a whole 3 course Christmas dinner despite never having done a roast before. I also volunteered with a local charity group to cycle round the villages in a santa suit to raise money for the Air Ambulance. I used to cycle a lot as a teenager so didn’t think much of the ~10 mile route beforehand.. what a mistake! By the halfway point I was exhausted, lost and cycling out in the woods alone wearing a santa outfit in the quickly fading light. I decided it best to take a detour home and had the wife give me a lift to the finishing point of a local pub!

We had a quiet Christmas morning spent with my son opening his mountain of gifts before a very hectic afternoon and evening with the family coming round for festivities.

2019

A year I’ll never forget.