Summary This month was slightly over our ‘normal’ spending of ~£2,000. We had an annual membership fee to pay, as well as a couple of big outlays for our Africa trip added to the total. See below for more detail! We break our main expenses down into broad categories starting with the big 3; housing, food …
Category: Money
Monthly Spending – May 2019
Summary This month’s spending is a little different because the balance for our Africa trip was due. As you can see, this meant we shelled out over £6,000 on this alone! We’ll go into more detail on this below. Ignoring these payments for a moment we actually had a fairly normal month, spending £1,942. We …
Why We Keep Our Finances Separate
Society Expects This is another one of those aspects of life where we have challenged the ‘norms’ of society. We decided to forge our own way of doing things by keeping our finances separate. The accepted norm for couples is to merge finances, particularly when you own a house together as we do. In our …
Monthly Spending – April 2019
In March we produced our first ever monthly spending report. Here is our second! Despite going away this month we have managed to stay very close to our March spending amount. We’re really happy with this and hope we can keep up the £2000 per month average! We break our main expenses down into broad …
In Defence of the 4% Rule
What is the 4% Rule? The 4% rule was created based on historical market returns data. Simply put, it showed that a typical retiree could withdraw 4% of their portfolio while keeping the initial pot intact. The withdrawn amount would increase by inflation each year. The rule came about from work by Bengen and later, …
My Money Journey
The Beginning It all started normally enough. I grew up in a comfortable lower middle-class household. We never really discussed money. My parents weren’t flashy by any means, but they saw it as a matter of personal pride that we never went without. Looking back, it’s fairly clear that there wasn’t any significant money being …
How Do You Save for ‘FIRE’ in the UK?
As somewhat of a personal finance geek, I (Mr Way) have learnt a fair amount over the last few years. As a result, I wanted to share my specific take on saving for FIRE in the UK with you. I am not a qualified financial advisor and nothing in this article should be considered financial …
Monthly Spending – March 2019
While developing ‘our way’ and learning about financial independence, we found reviewing other people’s spending really helpful. We can all learn something from each other because there's so many ways of doing things! To this end, we aim to regularly summarise our spending for comparison. It will also act as an accountability test for us, …
A Way to Less……. Spending! (Frugality)
Our Thoughts on Frugality Frugality is a term that gets thrown around quite a lot. But in our experience it can mean very different things to different people! Typing the word into Google generates this definition and example: The quality of being economical with money or food; thriftiness. "He scorned the finer things in life and valued frugality …
A FIRE Trial Run
Africa Series - Part 1 The world is always open, waiting to be discoveredDejan Stojanovic For quite a while now we have been deciding what the next step in our lives looks like. After much discussion, including options such as working abroad, travel, starting a family etc (see Our Version of FIRE for more), we …