Another month, another car bill 🙁
This month it was a replacement tyre as the front nearside wall got sliced on something as I was on my way to pick up my daughter from a nearby village. Fortunately I wasn’t going fast when it happened but I knew straight away it wasn’t good.
With my previous Volvo, I had a puncture which I could seal using the provided temporary repair kit but this time round there was no chance of it working. I was able to phone my dad who drove out to pick up my daughter and her friends while I waited with the car.
The emergency call out and new budget tyre came to £200 which was a nasty unplanned expense but it was manageable. Fingers crossed for an incident-free July!
Additional Income Streams
- Matched Betting £25 (May £28)
- Surveys/studies £1.42 (May £0.24)
- Amazon FBA/eBay £22.44 (May £487)
- TopCashBack £7.08 (May £30.96)
Bit quieter this month across the income streams; just clearing out a few more items on eBay – I had a few buyers from overseas who pulled out as they hadn’t checked the amount of import tax they would have to pay. Not very helpful as it loses me time in running the auction for another week plus potential buyers who may have found an alternative in the mean time.
I use a service called Odds Monkey to help with my matched betting, I’ve been using them for several months now and find the tools they provide to be essential in making a profit. If you are interested then drop me a message or you can sign-up via my affiliate link – OddsMonkey. The great thing is you can do as much or as little as you like and it fits around your life.
How did I do in June?
Assets
- Emergency Fund £2,680.41 (May £2,441.91)
- ISA, Freetrade £3260.25 (May £3,155.58)
- ISA, Hargreaves Lansdown £3207.80 (May £2,985.23)
- Pensions £116,113.19 (May £112,741.54)
- SAYE £600.00 (May £570.00)
- House £375,000 (£360,099) *Nationwide HPI 2020 Q4
Liabilities
- Student Loan -£2,613.17 (May -£2,803.43)
- Mortgage -£188,013.56 (May -£188,430.57)
Total Assets (excluding house) – Total Liabilities = Net Worth
£125861.65 – £190627.26 = -£64765.61 (May -£69,339.74)
Mostly the same as May, just a touch down on the payments to the Emergency Fund.
Not much too say on the month-on-month figures. Guess that is kind of good as it indicates stability and consistency?
Future Fund
Woohoo! Blew past the £120k mark this month with a total of £123,711.65 – happy days! 🙂
Dividends
Best month yet in terms of dividends, this month’s £15.87 has dwarfed the amount (£0.95) from this time last year. It’s so nice to see improvements in the dividend payments, hopefully I’ll be able to reach the goal of £50 this year.
Goals
I can’t remember having shared my goals for this year before but I’ll mention a few of them here:
Read more – hardly a SMART goal but I do want to spend more time reading and less time on Netflix. So far it isn’t going too badly, I am currently reading “How Goolge Works” as well as listening to “Work Rules” which is another book about how Google works. Bit of a trend there eh?
In earlier months I have relistened (for the third time) to “Your Money or Your Life” by Vicki Robin, I like this book a lot and have gleaned useful pointers from it each time. “Unshakeable” by Tony Robbins which is on my list to go over again.
I also listened to “The Automatic Millionaire” which, contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t rate all that highly.
Exercise more – I set a base line of three times a week for this. I’m hitting the target most weeks, only when I’m not feeling well do I miss my sessions. My typical week would look like:
- Monday – RPM 45 minutes
- Tuesday – Arms session
- Wednesday – BodyCombat 60 minutes
- Thursday – Back & shoulders
- Saturday – BodyAttack 45 minutes
- Sunday – Legs
I do sometimes give the weights a miss, or do a weights & cardio session in the same day, really depends on how I feel. Comabt & Attack give me between a 900 and 1200 calorie burn, the weights sessions are lower but still a good workout. With that in mind, you’d think my weight would be going down but no, it has other ideas and has been on an upward trajectory 🙁
Learn more – Over the past few months I have really picked up the pace on PluralSight (online training) and I’ve been looking at Google SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), C#, and management videos. With all of those I find it easy enough to dip in to the course for anywhere from 30 minutes upward each day as they are usually pretty easy to leave & pick-up.
Earn more – My target for passive income from dividends is £50 this year, not a big number at all but it is in keeping with the size of portfolio I have right now. I have received a pay rise earlier in the year which was great and it staves off the desrire to look elsewhere for a better paid job which I am more than happy about.
Guest Post
If you are interested in writing a guest post for my blog, you can reach out to me via the contact page or by taking a look at the let’s work together page – it would be great to hear from you!