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.

Hello, my dear readers! I’m back, although, I am completely out of whack.

I’m actually writing this at 4:57 am in the morning (on a Saturday) after literally not getting a wink of sleep. An 8 hour time difference will apparently do that to you!

I decided to stop trying to get some shut-eye and come and write this post instead. I recorded these figures whilst on my honeymoon on the 3rd of August, so it’s the real July report.

A post will be coming up about the wedding and honeymoon, so I won’t go into too much detail in this one.

Now, onto the figures!

Woah, Woah, Woah - party poppers, please - I’ve broken the 100k net worth barrier!!

By a bloody long shot at that, my net worth increased by almost 7k this month! What on earth?

Ah, £2138 was earned from stock growth.

That’s actually the second-highest monthly growth of 2019, and coming straight after the huge growth last month , it’s seen my portfolio go up from 90k to 104k in just 2 months, wowzers. Let’s hope the age-old saying, what goes up must come down, isn’t true, eh?

But, hold your horses, save the real party poppers for when I hit 100k invested (excluding my house equity), that’s when I can really start celebrating .

Don’t worry, I hear what you’re saying…

“Hey, SavingNinja, you normally only save about 3.9k per month and your interest has only gone up by £2k, where has that extra k come from?!”

AH, You got me. I only went and bought some Tesla stock!

Added for dramatic effect ;)

Yeah, I know - it’s not reallly how I should be investing. It’s not in the FIRE guidebook . I’m definitely being naughty, and when my passive investments are performing so well too.

But, if you’ve not realised by all the subtle hints in my blog posts so far, I’m a huge Elon fan-boy and I actually really believe in his vision.

And, although I know that there’s a much greater chance of losing it all picking single stocks, I wanted to hold at least a small stake in one of his companies, just so I can show my full Musk support! (I’ll only stake 1k, I promise).

I bought 5 stocks at £183.60 a piece, and they actually shot up by almost 10% within 3 days making my total Tesla stock value rise to £967 (don’t expect it to stay up though).

This bought my total saved in July figure to £4834, it also pushed up my average savings rate for 2019 to 80.38%.

Other Thoughts

The wedding went perfectly, better than I ever could have imagined. Which is strange, I thought at least something would go wrong. The whole day is a blur really, it all happened so fast. This is something that I and the Mrs have been planning for the last 4 years, so it’s actually kind of sad that it’s now all over.

I thought I was going to be wracked with nerves on my wedding day as I’m generally quite an anxious person, I was also obscenely nervous during the ceremony rehearsal 2 days prior to the big day.

I was nervous, on the wedding day morning, up until my bride walked through the church doors. After that, blur mode got engaged, it was just me, her, and the Priest. I don’t even remember the people sitting in the church after that point. My nerves vanished. All that remained was happiness.

The party afterward went just as well (even the speeches), we successfully executed our Rock dance routine which we’d been practicing for the last 3 months, the catering was some of the best I’d ever experienced (which is weird for a mass event), and all of our family and friends were happy with the day.

Honeymoon - Californian Road Trip

The honeymoon to California was a trip to remember. We visited so many different places and so many new experiences, it will definitely stay in our memory for a long time.

We’re both shattered though! We drove over 1400 miles, stayed in 8 different AirBnB’s and hiked over 150km.

As you guys know, this was one of the destinations that we wanted to scope out as a potential living destination . For this California did impress, but some of the mysticism around the dream has faded for me a little.

I was really impressed with San Fransisco. That city is like something plucked right out of a fantasy novel. Beautiful bridges, sea and mountains, clean and vibrant buildings and roads, it really was an awesome place. I could definitely see us working and living there for a prolonged period of time, which is great as a lot of H1B Visa sponsorships come out of San Fransisco for the tech industry.

A lot of the rest of California wasn’t my complete cup of tea. As you move south and in-land, 85% of the scenery is brown. It’s very dusty and hot, we went above 40 degrees Celcius at some points. As we quite like rain and cooler climates, we definitely wouldn’t be able to live indefinitely in that dry heat.

San Fransisco actually has a completely different climate, it’s normally 21 C or lower for most of the year and always has a bit of wind, it was perfect!

Yosemite national park was absolutely breathtaking. Never before have I seen such beauty! Check out these photos which I took on my Pixel 2.

They were taken at the top of Half Dome, the 12-hour hike which we DID manage to complete! It was bloody difficult though, definitely right up there with the three peaks challenge competing for the most-difficult-thing-ever-done award. The views were worth it though!

Mrs SavingNinja

Seattle to Canada road trip next on our ‘find-our-home’ mission, bring it on!

Matched Betting

Even though I missed the last week of July, and was planning a wedding, I still managed to make over £1k matched betting . This was almost all from arbing, I even lost £500+ on a single mistake (I didn’t lay the bet in time) on the 8th of July, so overall, pretty good profits.

I’ll be easing off the arbing for a while as I’ve got a lot to do now I’m a married man, notably, switch mortgages and begin freelancing. However, I can never normally stay away from the EW profits for long, so we’ll see.

Blogging

It’s going to take me a while to get back into the swing of things, so you guys will have to bear with me. These Savings Reports are easy to write but good quality posts take time and my heads all over the place at the mo :)

I have been contacted by a fellow blogger who wishes to do a guest post. As you guys know I’ve never had any guest posts before on TSN, but I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to fill a bit of a content void whilst I get back into the groove, so I’ve agreed. We’ll see how that pans out (if at all), I’ll make sure to let you guys know on Twitter if this is happening.

How was your month?