Savings Report - July - First One!

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.

My first savings report! I’m hoping to do these once a month. These savings reports were actually the whole reason for me creating Saving Ninja; I wanted to document my progress and have something to motivate me to save. I’d also love to look back at my journey down the line and have something to remind me of how it went!

My investments (which are currently all in 100% equity world index funds) have done pretty well this past month. They grew by £576 combined! This is quite exciting for me as my pots haven’t been very big for long, so now that they’re both over 10k I’m thinking that 2019 is going to be a lot more exciting with regards to interest gains. This is the first month in which my savings has gone over £50,000! That’s quite an awesome goal reached. Although I’d love to get to that figure excluding my house equity (which are almost at the £25,000 checkpoint!). I’m going to get the house re-evaluated at the beginning of next year as I’m currently in the process of installing a new kitchen so hopefully this will boost my I contributed £1000 into my ISA and thanks to my employers 13% match, £1800 into my pension. I’ve actually raised my pension contributions, so next month, we should see a £2500 pension contribution going in. That would bring me to £30,000 pension contributions per year, so very close to that £40,000 limit! I’m hoping that with my end of year bonus I’ll be able to hit it. I will be sticking with £1000 per month in my ISA for now. I really would like to make hay whilst the sun shines with the generous tax relief the government is giving and I’m nowhere near the lifetime allowance yet. I may look to offload some more money into my ISA at the end of the tax year if my emergency pot has grown too large. My savings rate is sitting nicely at 75%. This figure should actually be a little higher due to my expenses actually being under 10k rather than the 12k which I’ve input into the excel sheet. I’m also not putting all of my income into investments as I’ve been trying to re-fill my emergency savings a little due to the recent kitchen renovation. With the pension contribution change next month we should see this go up to around 78%. The higher the savings rate is the harder it is to get the percentage up! I think I’m addicted! :-] My expected FI date is sitting at 5.8 years after inputting this months savings. I’d really like to see this coming down to under 5 years within the next few months. I’ll be posting about my investment approach soon so stay tuned for that. If you want access to this spreadsheet, go and read this post . I’ll be keeping the excel sheet updated each month if you want to follow along and interact with it. The spreadsheet features a ‘years to FI’ button, I’ve got a lot more features and graphs that I want to implement into the it, I’ll keep you guys posted!