Only freedom will do

AlexLK

There are times I'll find nature programmes to watch with my son. Sometimes my energy is running a bit low and after covering Maths / English / Music with him I (and he) often want to have time to relax. He doesn't really watch any other TV but there are some brilliant documentaries.

The year before he went to school I spend the days covering around 30 hours of planned lessons over the week. Looking back it created a bit of an unrealistic idea of what is required of a boy his age which did result in him struggling to settle in at school. Now we have planned 15-20 minute slots of English - reading and writing, Maths and Music - piano, violin and theory each night and on Saturdays we get up early to cover other areas of the curriculum related to the topic he is looking at during school time. I think that is enough at the moment.

Many of the children is his class don't have anything structured beyond school. They've had a bit of a shock when they've come here after school for dinner. On those days music is done in the morning but they have English and Maths, break to do as they wish, dinner then dog walking before going home. A few parents have commented their children are very tired after an evening here! :rotfl:

edinburgher

May 2017 Financial Update

Net Worth £161,528.11 (+£3,263.59)

Well that was a pleasant surprise

I've wrapped up the figures for May and we have had a massive bump from our old friend imaginary house price inflation... Starting to feel a bit less pessimistic about this in fact. When we bought, the sticker shock was horrendous. Fast forward a couple of years and prices in our area remain very robust, with all the nice renovated houses for sale being very much in the style that we're aiming for. I still find the mortgage to be a bit of a millstone, but I'm not as stressed about it as I have been.

Our pensions have also clawed back some of last month's losses and I'm optimistic that the scheduled increase in contributions to 30% taking place during June will help this trend.

I remain not worried, but cautious around lowish cash reserves. There is, however a good reason for that, I have started stoozing again! As a result, every penny we can lay our hands on has been getting dumped into P2P, investments and cash accounts paying 4%+ I have gone all in this time and should be able to BT and stooze £35k+ by the end of June. This will help to stop the cash bleed and while I'm not entirely happy that it's leveraged, I'll be reducing risk over the next 2 years by allowing the cash percentage of the portfolio to grow. Targeting 5%+ real growth, allowing for £250/month of income until May 2019.

I hope that everybody else has had a productive month?

Karmacat

Ed, thats brilliant! I tracked official Net Worth (excluding house price) for the first time month to month, after sending my sister her money that I'd been looking after, so a lot more clarity - in spite of the fact that I'm living on savings now, NW went up (a little bit, £400 odd, v pleased!).

Glad you're pleased about your house.

edinburgher

Thanks KC

Glasgow has amazing weather today - it was 24 degrees when we were driving back from early morning swimming at 10:20!! DD had fun and we even got to go to the outdoors bit. D'oh! On reflection, I think I forgot her float Hey ho, was only a few quid...

Planning an afternoon in the back garden with her new toy (a little lawnmower that makes bubbles) and a new paddling pool provided by Gran :j

I had a huge finance admin session last night and now have almost all new accounts sorted (just a couple of DDs to switch and a H@lifax account to track down). Even managed to submit missing cashback claims for the couple of cards that didn't track.

Managed to BT approximately £2k this morning, with another money transfer for c. £4.5k. There is a cost to borrowing all this stoozed money (0.5%), but it's offset by cashback offers so that the real cost works out at something like 0.14% - at that rate I may as well be a central bank :rotfl: I'm also close to the free £30 from M&S for spending £100 on their card and they sent me a £5 voucher as well. Stooze pot now generates £113+/month in free money.

Now, off to tidy up, enjoy the sun and generally be wholesome.

earthgirl

£113 is very impressive, well done!

SuperSecretSquirrel

I echo earthgirl's comment - £113pm, nice!

I clearly need to up my stoozing game. Currently have about 8-9k on a 0% purchases card (slowly built up over a couple of years), spread across BoS accounts earning 3% (soon dropping to 2%). That's around £14pm free money from June, which of course is very welcome, but £113pm would be even more welcome!

I've avoided paying a fee for money transfers having seen numerous deals like 3% to money transfer, and having difficulty beating that on cash savings. Didn't consider cashback might cover the fees. Will take a closer look I think. Thanks for the tip

If you'd like to detail specific cards you've used, or even where you've stashed the cash to achieve 4%+ returns that would be a huge help

edinburgher

As I hopefully pointed out in previous post, this experiment is far from a risk free stooze, hence the heftier rate of return. As £900/month will rotate into cash investments, however, I am willing to shoulder the risk.

Details (oddly enough, there's a spreadsheet or two):

Cards: Barclaycard, Tesco, Virgin Money, TSB, Halifax, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland (BT cards) and M&S Money (slow stooze card). MBNA 4.9% card being used to 'mule' money into my current account (0.5% fee, daily interest waiting for balance transfers etc. is about 60p on £4.7k borrowed, have only paid £1 of interest to extract the first 3 transfers.

Savings: Ford RS ISA (£250/m @ 4%), Nationwide (£2.5k @ 5% and RS £500/m @ 5%), Santander RS (£200/m @ 5%), TSB (TSB), 3x Halifax Reward current accounts. Always on the lookout for 4%+ deposit accounts, but First Direct rejected me because my pension payments are too high (seriously) and HSBC are a shower...

Investments: Royal London Sterling Extra Yield Bond Fund, Funding Circle (2% or so), Secured investments (property/jewellery/cars) across Collateral, Lendy and Money Thing (about 60%, will drop over time)

Still a work in progress.

Karmacat

Wow! I'm in awe, Ed :rotfl:

The Ford RS rings a bell, I meant to open one of those ... wonder if they're still good?

SuperSecretSquirrel

Wow thanks Ed for all that detail!

Have you recently applied for all those cards, or has the prep work for this been going on for years?

My most recent card was opened fairly recently - a zero fee BT card at 0%, maxed out by transferring in old slow stooze balances, freeing up the credit limit on the active 0% on purchases card for further spending. I've always tried to leave at least a 12 month gap between credit applications. I have excellent credit, so maybe this is unnecessary.

Looks like I'll be needing a mule card that offers low cost money transfers to current account, and a high credit limit low balance transfer fee 0% interest rate card at the very minimum. Plus of course somewhere to stash the cash Slow stoozing is great, better than nothing, but unsurprisingly, it's a bit slow!

gallygirl

Karmacat wrote: »

The Ford RS rings a bell, I meant to open one of those ... wonder if they're still good?

You've missed the boat I'm afraid KC - both the regular saver and regular saver ISA have been withdrawn - on the initial day I think.

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