March 2024 Update
Hi everyone - hope all is well. March has been and gone - but it hasn’t stopped raining yet! Really looking forward to the spring bringing some much needed sunshine in the UK.
Living Life
February has been a bit of a quieter month and I did not take too many pictures unfortunately. I did go to a football game with my family but apart from that it has mainly been pretty quiet - playing squash and honing in my curry cooking skills!
Spending
Eventually we have had a month where we were under budget. I have to say, I am actually quite surprised because we did go out for an expensive dinner and I bought quite a few gifts this month. Maybe we have just been extremely “spendy” the last few months.
This month we spent £3,054.36 which is 16% under our budget.
FI Fund
We are crushing it again this month - again very surprised. Although I suppose stocks have continued to rise and we continue to be able to add aggressively to our portfolio. Some notable performance stats for the last month:
S&P 500 = +2.04%
FTSE 100 = +3.52%
Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust = +10.51%
Bitcoin = +12.36%
Although, as normal I have just been adding to my government bond position. Still expecting the recession to have a major impact this year - noting:
10 year minus 2 year = -0.38% (once this passes through 0% again, I would expect a market crash)
The FI fund includes our full net worth. This month the portfolio is sitting at £458,381.24 which is £15,456.45 (or 3.49%) higher than when compared to the last update.
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 6.9 months of financial independence each year.
