Income & Expenses - April 2015



I'm a little behind on getting these Income & Expenses reports out. Thank you for staying with me. The write ups will be a little briefer, as I'm having to test the memory bank on why I bought things and what happened, but crucially I want to get the numbers out there. 

My lack of Blogging has not impacted on my lack of tracking expenses. I continue to track everything! My challenge has been finding time to write up my expenses on top of my ongoing Kindle Publishing. 

Here we go folks:

I started tracking my Income & Expenses in March 2014. By committing to tracking these numbers and sharing them with you all on a monthly basis, I benefited from questioning every single penny I spent. For the rest of 2014, I managed to keep my expenses under £10,000 a year or £833 per month.

I will continue to record my income and expenses for 2015, but I don't intend on setting a goal for a specific saving % or an amount for keeping expenses below. I noticed that in 2014 my goals were effective in keeping my costs down, but they also influenced me not to spend money on certain things. That might sound good, but it impacted everything, including charitable donations and personal development, which are usually really important to me. 

My priority for 2015 is making money. I want to challenge myself to earn a lot more. I'm hoping that by having more disposable income, I'll have more money to invest with. This should then speed up the process to becoming FI. Easy right! I want to call Tom Cruise at the end of the year and shout "Show me the money!"

Here's a quick breakdown as to what goes into numbers below:

Income

I will rarely have the same wage each month as I have a commission based job. I might also be eligible for bonuses at certain times of the year, which will impact on the total of my wage. My wage figure will be the net sum I'm paid after tax, national insurance, company pension, salary sacrifice for pension, and student loan. I will only include one figure for my wage but I will mention if my commission is high or low and I will also let you know if I've triggered a performance based bonus.


Expenses

The first two expenses are fixed amounts. 'Mortgage/House Bills' is an account where Miss FFBF and I pay into each month (£440 each) to cover mortgage payments, council tax, water, TV licence, telephone, electricity, and broadband. 'Food Account' is another joint account we use to contribute a fixed amount (£70 per month) for food shopping. 



Here's a breakdown of my Income and Expenses for the previous month:


Income from April 2015
Wage£2,377.78
Dividends£101.80
Interest from Savings£2.03
Kindle£51.47
P2P Lending£22.94
Total Income£2,556.02
Expenses from April 2015
Mortgage/House Bills£440.00
Food Account£70.00
Mobile£8.22
Petrol£0.00
Birthdays£1.00
Groceries£26.43
Alcohol£29.15
Eating Out£0.00
Fast Food£4.70
Coffee Shop£9.10
Charitable donations£34.00
Glasses£35.00
Protein Powder (8.8kg)£68.00
Writing course£45.00
Poker£15.00
Total Expenses£785.60


Income

Aprils wage excellent for me. I hit my half-way annual target which triggered a nice bonus. This with my regular commission contributed to a solid month. 

My dividends were around my current average. A lovely £100 for doing very little!

Kindle sales were significant considering it was my second ever monthly payment. This payment was from the book sales I made in February. It took me just over 14 months and £20,000 of investments to get that consistently in dividends. I'm not knocking dividends as I will continue to invest in them as I increase my income, their passive nature and growth potential is most certainly worth the effort. I really like the balance of both Kindle and Dividends as forms of investments. My kindle books might make me £0 in 30+ years, but I can guarantee that my dividends will be making me a very handsome sum at that stage!

I'm hoping that Kindle and Dividends payments are going to provide more than enough money to cover my expenses in time to come. I have a goal to increase the Kindle Income to £1,000 per month by December, which I'm now very confident of reaching. My new 'unofficial goal' is to bring in enough income from Kindle to cover my income from my current employer. I'm not sure if I'll achieve this goal but I'll give it a bloody good go! 


Dividend & Kindle Income - 2015
KindleCreateSpaceACXDividendsTotal
January---£83.47£83.47
February---£56.22£56.22
March£9.50--£172.36£181.86
April£51.47--£101.80£153.27
May-----
June-----
July-----
August-----
September-----
October-----
November-----
December-----
2015 Total£60.97£0.00£0.00£413.85£474.82
2015 Average£30.49£0.00£0.00£103.46£133.95


To finish up my income, I had a nice sum of money from my P2P lending. 

To summarise, my income overall was the highest it's been all year, so overall I'm delighted! I wish I could have more months like this, and I'm hoping in the near future I will!


Expenses

Now that I've proven to myself that it's possible to live on less than £10,000 a year, I feel like I can challenge myself in other areas. This doesn't mean that I'm going to go on a mass spending spree, but I'm not going to decline Personal Development opportunities to keep my expenses below a set figure this year. 

April was much more in line with what people will be used to seeing on this Blog. It won't be like this for a lot of the year. 



Income/Expense Average

I don't have an expense goal for 2015, but I receive a lot of questions about my expenses, perhaps more than most other things I write about. I thought I would keep tracking them as people are interested, as am I. Whilst I was tracking the average for that, I thought it would be worth doing the same thing for Income, as it's an important goal for me this year.


2015ExpensesIncome
January£728.45£2,030.19
February£725.03£1,793.69
March£1,181.06£1,747.98
April£785.60£2,556.02
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
2015 Total£3,420.14£8,127.88
2015 Average£855.04£2,031.97


My average spend at the end of March was £878.18. After a tight April, I've dropped the average spend  to £855.04

My income average was £1,857.29 at the end of last month. It's now up to £2,031.97. 

I'm not always going to find a nice increase income and a decrease in expenses, so I'll certainly take that!


Saving Rate Average

Saving Rate 2015 - %
January67.3
February62.8
March65.5
April74.6
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
2014 Average67.6%




I managed to save/invest £1,907.82 in April which was 74.6% of my income. My saving percentage for 2015 is currently 67.6%. I think this figure represents a solid average for me at the moment. In the next few months, my dividend and Kindle income should increase this figure above the 70% mark on a more regular basis.

Thank you all once again for your continued support. It means a lot!

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