Click here to see all of my past Savings Reports and view my interactive net worth chart
Go to How To Track Your Savings to check out the Saving Ninja Super Spreadsheet.
Hello guys!
This is the latest I’ve posted a monthly update in almost 3 years. Sorry about that.
I’ve been experiencing some site outages due to going above 100% CPU on my free Google Cloud hosting tier. This started randomly happening so I was reluctant to upgrade to the standard tier. I also don’t yet have a desk set up at my new place so I don’t have access to my work station where I would normally manage this website. This somewhat delayed the update.
I seem to have got it under control now, but I’ll be leaving the 5 second delay to connect to the site switched on for the time being. When I have my workstation set up, I’ll be trying to migrate to a GeneratePress theme which is a lot more speedier and modern.
My long term plans are to build the website myself and switch to static hosting. This will mean comments will be gone eventually, but I think that Twitter is good enough for interaction.
Anyway, back to the Savings Report! Better late than never.
My companies stocks dipped very low this month and I know that they should be worth much more so I took my emergency fund and invested around £10,000 into them.
I know this goes against all conventional wisdom, but I’m genuinely excited about their future plans so I thought that if I hold long term, I should be fine. The stock increased by about 10% in a few days.
I have a little over 4 years left for my companies stock to grow by 100% for a big share scheme payout (this is different from the £10k I just bought personally) so I got a little disheartened when it dropped to lower than the price it was when I joined, but there’s still plenty of time left, so here’s to hoping!
I also increased my regular monthly investments to 36,000 kr (currently about £3100,) the Swedish government is paying me back around £6,500 in overpaid taxes in June so I’m going to use that to refill my emergency fund a little faster.
More Frivolous Spending
We spent around £1,850 on Kayaks this month!
As we live in the archipelago of Stockholm, we thought that we should enjoy our time in Sweden to the upmost and explore the islands via kayak. We even got some camping equipment so we can make the most out of Sweden’s ‘Freedom to Roam’ and go on some long kayak and camping trips.
As we don’t own a car, these babies are the next best thing.
Is Sweden turning us into spendy-pants? It could just be the change of scenery, or the fact that my net worth is now around a 1/4 of a million quid. Or maybe it’s because I’m not rushing to FIRE anymore? I enjoy my job and I don’t have a terrible 3 hour round-trip commute.
Who knows, but at least this was one of the goals that I wanted to achieve, to spend more money, remember the guest post I wrote for Mr1500 ?
But I should try to turn the tap down a little bit, since moving to our new place last April we have spent:
- £1080 - LG CX 55inch OLED TV
- £650 - Second hand Kawai ES8 electric piano
- £1850 - Two Kayaks and accompanying equipment
- £250+ - Wood and soil for multiple raised beds for growing vegetables
- £3000+ IKEA/other furniture for our new place (we had to get everything!)
That’s almost £7,000. But I have split this with Mrs SavingNinja so I guess you could call it £3,500.
It’s still an awful lot of money, more than we’ve ever spent, but we did have to buy literally everything here; in the UK we lived mostly with hand-me-down furniture from the in-laws. But this spending has led to a nice realisation: these purchases have not really affected my ability to invest.
Now that I’ve actually spent a fair whack of money and seen that the world isn’t falling down around me, I don’t think I’ll feel as bad when buying small things anymore, maybe I’ll even be able to buy one of those expensive motorway service station sandwiches eventually without feeling terrible.
If we ever did move back to England I know that I’ll feel like everything is an absolute bargain after being exposed to the 4 X prices of Sweden. There was no better place to move to forcefully increase my spending (although I didn’t think I’d buy more things in general!)
Monthly Round Up
- I’ve been looking into decentralised investing this month, or DeFi for short. It’s technology that uses the blockchain to create an investing platform that is not owned by anyone, but a collection of people on a decentralised platform - or so it should be!
- I actually invested around 1000 GBP into it to try out a technique called yield farming, this is where I’m effectively the lender to people wanting to borrow and I earn these weird coins as a reward for providing my liquidity to the platform.
- Not impressed so far, there are so many different skins of websites because there is zero regulation. Seems a bit like a Ponzi scheme backed by a decent idea. As everything is ‘decentralised’ how are people meant to choose the best platform? There are no regulations and no laws.
- Platforms I’m ‘invested’ in so far are Cream Finance, Shushicoin, and Bao
- I wouldn’t recommend this as to the cost to execute trades on the Etherium blockchain is ridiculous, my investment instantly dropped to around $700 just because of transaction fees, and it would be a similar cost to withdraw it.
- I found out about this awesome service this month when I wanted to host an email-bot server for Slack. Heroku lets you run tiny servers for free and you can set them up (or clone them) directly from GitHub. Whenever you push to GitHub, the server gets redeployed. It’s the easiest I’ve ever found setting up a server, and it’s free.
- I’ll be using this for mini projects like Slack bots going forward!
- The cool thing about it is even if you don’t know much about server development, you can find another Heroku server which does something similar to what you want to accomplish, fork and clone it in seconds, then just edit your project via git to change little bits. Super easy.
- I’ve been trying to buy a 30 series GPU to try out crypto mining. Due to the current shortages I needed something that monitored stock statuses. Someone at work recommended this nifty little app. You can load a website and click on any HTML element and it will refresh it every 5 seconds and let you know when it changes, it will even keep previous revisions, and it’s free. So cool!
- If I ever need to monitor stock or keep revisions of websites I’ll be sure to use this in the future, it’s been working really well so far. It’s really cool how your phone is the server too, so there is no cost to them to provide the app (unlike the other GPU stock tracking software which pings you and requires servers to run.)
Reddit Lore
- I stumbled upon a the concept of ‘Reddit Lore’ which led me to a huge old Reddit post titled: Throwaway time! What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out?
- This post is from 9 years ago and went down in Reddit history coined as the biggest and most disturbing Reddit post of all time.
- It took me weeks to read it all, but it was worth it. Some of the commenters revealed shocking secrets, but what makes the post cool is a lot of them came back to their posts and edited them years later with updates. A few even came back every couple of years to post an update. I’ve never read anything quite like it and it highlights how unique Reddit is.
Tuplas
- I fell down another Reddit rabbit hole describing ‘Tuplas.’
- These are completely separate entities a person can forcefully create for themselves who will behave completely independently from your own consciousness. Although it hasn’t been scientifically proven yet, people have argued that these are what imaginary friends are when you’re younger as it’s easier to create a ‘Tupla’ when your younger.
- Read through some posts on the Tupla subreddit if you dare or try searching through some wikis and YouTube.
- It’s all very interesting, I read one post that explained how God could be a Tupla for many religious people, when they have an epiphany or ‘holy experience’ where ‘god spoke to them,’ this could just be a Tupla that they’ve created in the form of their God. The ‘proven’ theory behind forcefully creating a Tupla shares many things with religious ceremonies (prayer which is like meditation, reaffirming the belief that he is real, continually giving attention to this figment of your imagination.)
- I don’t think I’ll be trying to make a Tupla any time soon to see if the theory deserves merit, interesting nevertheless.