This is a Saving Ninja savings report. Go to How To Track Your Savings to check out the Saving Ninja Super Spreadsheet. Please note that I split my expenses equally with my partner and the savings rate, house equity and house value represent my share only. The spreadsheet calculates my savings rate based off £12,000 worth of expenses per year, even though my expenses are actually Less Than 10k Per Year . This is to create a buffer; I’m aiming for at least 12k to reach financial independence.

Wow, another huge loss this month.

A staggering negative £2,530 gone from my portfolio. This loss is even bigger than October’s loss of £1,685, wowee.

I feel sorry for the people with £1m invested right now -They would definitely be down by over 6 figures.

Although saying that, they are probably still up due to the high yielding preceding years.

People starting out on their saving journeys (who have less than £100k invested) should feel pretty lucky when corrections happen. Better now than later!

“To refer to a personal taste of mine, I’m going to buy hamburgers the rest of my life. When hamburgers go down in price, we sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the Buffett household. When hamburgers go up in price, we weep. For most people, it’s the same with everything in life they will be buying — except stocks. When stocks go down and you can get more for your money, people don’t like them anymore.” - Warren Buffett

VVLSRU [note]VVLSRU is an acronym for Vanguard Investment UK LT Lifestrategy 100 Percent Equity[/note] is currently trading at 19,535p which is as low as it was last April. A whole 1300p cheaper than what I bought VVLSRU for in November.

I’ll need this fund to go back up to 20,778p to reach my current average cost per share and break even with the book cost.

The loss this month has made my retirement date stay the same at 4 years and 8 months. I should hopefully be able to counter this when I invest more in 2019 after getting my bonus.

Other Thoughts

I had a pretty good Christmas. I managed to go on two 5k runs over the festive period, the last beating my 5k record getting a run time of 26 minutes and 45 seconds and the track had an elevation gain of 187 feet!

Along with this achievement, I also feel thoroughly stuffed and sufficiently unhealthy. After weighing myself when getting back home I seem to have put on nearly 4kg of weight. All that festive cheese and chocolate (and being at my parents who seem to serve 4X my portion sizes) really didn’t help.

Back to my normal routine now!

Matched Betting

Over the holidays I did manage to set up a completely fresh matched betting account, so I’ll be getting back onto this side-hustle in full swing after this weekend.

I may start off with lower bets to ensure that the account doesn’t get gubbed straight away, but hope to ramp up to £20 EW betting again soon (better to be safe than sorry).

Blogging

I did hope to write my 2018 review/2019 goals post whilst away but I found it incredibly difficult to get started due to not being in my normal environment.

I’ll be writing this over the following week and hope to release it soon! I’ve also got to add some snazzy charts, similar to the ones that I made for the budgeting spreadsheet to the savings spreadsheet as we’ve come to our first end of the year, so there’s data to be analysed! I’ll talk about those changes in the 2018 round-up post.

I’m going to post-pone the Thought Experiment series until next month due to the festive break. It may actually be better to do these every 2 months instead of every 1 month as there’s a whole ton of articles I’ve got planned for 2019 that I need to finish!

How was your Christmas?

Are you coping well with the current stock market correction?