Only freedom will do

smallholdingsister

Get well soon both!

edinburgher

Thanks SHS, all 3 of us had it in the end, memorable Christmas for all the wrong reasons!

Watty1

Hope you 3 are all much recovered now

edinburgher

Proper update coming, but I was horrified to see that I have recorded spends of £48,518.32 in 2016 :eek:

As that's about £13,000 more than we earned after tax, I can only assume that the victims have been our home equity and the accumulation of some unsecured CC debt.

2017 can only get better

smallholdingsister

You have had a lot on, Ed.
Are you still doing matched betting?

edinburgher

smallholdingsister wrote: »

You have had a lot on, Ed.
Are you still doing matched betting?

Matched betting has fallen by the wayside, no money to be made there for me any more. I get the odd P2P referral, that and sporadic internet sales are my only secondary income these days. I may consider a good New Year's clear out and try to generate a decent wodge of money to either pay down the CCs or add to the SIPP.

AlexLK

At least you know what the shortfall is. However, you need to address this before it gets out of hand. Work out if the spends are one-off or if you're simply spending more than you earn.

Get the cards paid off ASAP. If you're planning to do more work to the house, save the money rather than financing the work unless it is absolutely essential to the safety of you and your family.

edinburgher

Thanks Alex, I'll take a look tonight at whether general overspending is an issue. I don't mind using a little 0% debt to improve our home, thanks to leverage we're doing very well in terms of returns

edinburgher

Happy Hogmany all! :dance: :beer: _party_

No crazy resolutions, particular plans or overly ambitious designs here, we'll be trying to take things a bit easier in 2017!

1.25? bedrooms left to decorate and sorting out the garden is about all we have planned, maybe some new gutters.

Despite spending more than we earned in 2016, the year has been very kind to us, with an average increase in our NW of about £2,000/month. That's not nearly ambitious enough to meet our zanier long term FI goal, but it's very good for a 'bad' year :money:

We'll hope to continue growing our wealth in 2017, but it will be more about the basics and less about wacky ideas. The main idea is to put our pension contributions up to 25%, which sound like a huge amount, but is actually less than we averaged in 2016. We may as well make use of salary sacrifice while we still have it and it allows us to avoid student loan repayments as well

In terms of things that aren't about money, I'm hoping to start studying again in 2017, we'll be setting aside more quality couple time and I'll be making sure that we try and give back as much as we can, we are very grateful for what we have.

Happy New Year to all the MFWers and your families

Kahra

Happy New Year Ed - hope 2017 is a good one for you and yours _party_

That's a fantastic NW increase for a year of expensive renovations: congrats!