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.

I increased my monthly savings by another £1,200 this month as I realised I’m probably keeping a little too much as an emergency fund at around £13k. After calculating our budget last month , this figure would cover 12 months of expenses for both me and my wife, and she has a few thousand pounds as an emergency fund too. These new monthly contributions should see my emergency fund drop slowly over the coming months until it’s at a more appropriate level.

Goodbye 20s

My wife turned 30 years old this month, I’ll be following suit in 3 months time. This also marks the time that we’ve been in a relationship: a decade. It only seems like yesterday when I met an excited 19 year old in freshers week of University, an exotic southerner to my Mancunian self - I’d never met one before!

The 10 years that proceeded have been filled with new things. I was shown that beautiful beaches do exist in England as I was bought out of my northern bubble. We’ve travelled all over the UK, lived in three different countries, lived in 7 different houses together and bought 2 of them; we’ve built careers and got married. What will the next decade bring?

Managerial Pursuits

One of my goals this year was to interview for an engineering management position at least twice, or get a role. I’ve already interviewed for one a number of months ago and even though my 4h of interviews went “really well” they decided they needed someone with more hands on experience.

I’ve since been focusing on becoming an EM within my existing product area. Last month I was given the role of Tech Lead of the product area and I’m now in the leadership groups and meetings with all of the other managers. I’m running my own ‘Tech Steering Group’ of 10 engineers (although without the line management,) and I’m gaining all of that invaluable leadership experience.

I have more interviews coming up to for a level 1 EM role, but I’m doubtful I’ll get this as they may need a higher level for this particular role too (I’ll find out before the next Savings Report.) But with my new TL role, I’m hoping that transitioning into an EM is only a matter of time. Hopefully sooner rather than later!

Monthly Round-Up

  • Framework laptop
    • A fully modular and repairable laptop that is as good as a MacBook? Yes please.
  • Ninte
    • A software manager for keeping your favourite utilities and programs up to date. Have you ever used CurseForge to manage Addons for games like World of Warcraft? This is like that but for your Windows software.
  • Glary Utilities
    • Ninte led me to a few other awesome utility software, including this one. It helps you clean up your PC, repair problems, update software, and tighten up your security! It got a little annoying as it kept prompting me to buy a license, but disabling it from launching at start up solved this.
  • TeraCopy
    • A safer and quicker way to copy or cut large amounts of data on your Windows PC. I used this to transfer around 50GB of wedding photos and was super impressed by the speed! I don’t know how they do this.
  • Amazing Pixelart
    • I started using my old personal Twitter account that I set up when I was a budding game developer. I fell in love with this account and their pixel art. Scroll through them for a while and see how amazing they are! They invoke a certain nostalgic and calm feeling.

How was your month?