Back From The Front

Yes I am back from the edge of the Empire - the old Roman empire that is, as Hadrian's Wall was just that. And I have to confess that I didn't complete the wall walk either. I completed three days, walking from Bowness-on-Solway to Steel Rigg and then did the final day walking from Heddon-on-the-Wall to Wallsend in Newcastle (I did that last day wearing jandels, aka flip-flops).

But for three days I had to give my feet a bit of a rest after getting blisters on the balls of my feet as well as my heels and (?) little toes too. This was very frustrating as I have spent three months breaking in my walking boots! But as someone pointed out I had been walking in mostly urban areas which for the most part were flat (most of London is very flat) and on footpaths. Then on top of that the longest I had worn them was about three hours so five hours of solid walking was going to be a bit of a shock to my feet.

But regardless of all that I had a great time I did walk about 61 miles and would like to go back and complete the part I didn't do but that is for another day.Looking back at where I had come from, with King Arthur's Turret and beyond that Walltown Farm.

Walking towards the highest point on the wall in the Northumberland National Park.

Months End

What happen to summer, we have had a horrid month weather wise here in London. What happened to global warming? Oh well.......
My saving plan for the month is completed but because my pay cheque wasn't banked until Tuesday (as Monday was a bank holiday), it will not clear until Friday so I will transfer another £250 into my Freedom Fund then.
September is going to be a half month as I have two weeks holiday but will still plan to save a minimum of £800.
So on Monday I am off up north to walk Hadrian's Wall, all 84 miles and am really looking forward to it. The weather should be terrible, wet and windy but I figure if that is my expectation all should be well and I may even get a nice day or not. After my walk I will be spending a few days with my god kids, so expect to spend a little money while with them.

August Catch Up

July has gone and the tax bill is paid for, for another six month. With the chaps from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs dealt with I feel very free to start planning my finances for the rest of the year.
But before I can get to excited I have to reveal that I have had to purchase a new computer as my last one died on me suddenly. I had had it for just over five years so it was to be unexpected I guess but none the least I hadn't plan to have to replace it just yet. Thankfully the local Curry's store was having a laptop sale on, so I was able to replace my computer for one that was more powerful but less than I had paid for my last one. (I always think that, that so great)
So my current finance plans are;

• The computer purchase has been paid for via my Emergency Fund so I will need to start building that Fund up again.
• Keep up planned saving, which are £500 into ISA and £300 into Regular Savings.
• Set aside 28% of income for taxes and national insurance.
• Share builder account depositing £100 per month.
  

I have decide my staycation will be in early September and did all the bookings at the end of July to keep the costs down. My travel is less than £40, that's for return train tickets to the north of England. Savings of about £100 for the travel and I also booked a night in a central London hotel for £49, which is also a very good price. For my trip I am going to walk Hadrian's Wall - all 84 miles of it!

Last month like June I did spend more than I should have on online purchases but ended the month on budget, which is always the main goal. Still debt free!

A Little Here, A Little There....

Spending - oh dear I have been spending this month, and I so didn't want to go over my budget but have well and truly stuffed my goals for this month, in fact the only goal I will accomplish is my payment to my Regular Saving Account. I am treating all my regular savings as if they were debit payments, I have the amount I want to have saved by the end of the year and am paying it off each month.
So my over spend amount is £289.71 of which;

• £49.95 on food items (incl. health food supplies, coffee's etc.)
  
• £38.69 books (7 online purchases)
  
• £6.89 vitamins etc.
• £83.46 clothes (incl. hiking boots, socks, court shoes etc.)
  
• £110.72 miscellaneous (incl. concert tickets for Oct.)

To meet my tax payment amount of £1,520 I will be £47.97 short of my budget and my spending had resulted in the demise of my current account buffer balance that I had built up over time. The one good thing I can say is that I do not have any debt (other than my tax bill), so it's a nuisance but not the end of the world.
My book purchases will not last me to the end of July - I am such a bookworm at the moment, keep finding great books to read and that's after I finished all the Lee Child books and thought I would never find anything I would like as much.
Was planning to take a stay-cation in August but have found out today that I will have to go either the end of July or wait till September. As my holiday will be an outdoor affair, weather is going to be a major factor and September can be very iffy in the UK. Also if I go in July I will have to use some credit (ie. go into debt) which I am not so keen to do.

Wow can you believe it
it's been 4 years since I first started
blogging

May Review

My three goals for the month of May were as follows:

• Totally fund my Emergency Fund with £1k Done
• Set aside £500 for my rates Done
• Set aside £880 for my taxes Not completed

"Two out of three aren't bad" but it's not good either.

The good is that I have opened an e-ISA with £500 (that was meant for my taxes) and so it's not wasted just I have gotten ahead of myself in my savings goals. The remaining £380 however is mostly made up of unbudgeted spending for the month for things like my dental hygienist appointment, books, clothes, eating out as well as internet and mobile pay-as-you-go. The latter two items I really need to add to my monthly budget as they are reocurring costs. Next week I have another visit to the dentist, which is hopefully my last one for a while and I already know that it will be costing me £204. I am having an infulling and that comes in at the top banding for NHS dental chargers which is never more than £204. Thank goodness for the National Health Service (NHS) I guess?!

So at the end of May I have the following:

• £1k in an Emergency Fund
• £860 in a Regular Saving Account
• £500 in an e-ISA

My three goals for June will be as follows:

1. Set aside £1520 for taxes Done
   
2. Put £340 into my RSA Done
   
3. Keep my spending to my budgeted amount
   

Now just gotta do it.......

Beginning Investing

Investing has been my hot search topic on Google this week and I have been doing lots of reading up on Stocks and Shares ISA's, Tracker Funds, Investment Trust, Unit Trust and everything related. I have had a Share builder account with the Halifax for a few years but because of debt wasn't able to add to it. I haven't found a better share dealer so will stick with the Halifax, they only charge £1.50 commission for each purchase and I also have to pay government Stamp Duty of 0.5%.
I have a small amount of shares in a single company but am planning to switch to a FTSE All Shares Tracker and set up a monthly deposit that I can set and forget. I only have one friend who is investing and he has only invested in a single tracker and that was through a financial adviser so I don't have anyone around me with any real knowledge on the subject.
So far I not impressed with the online sites about investing - if your an absolute beginner with no family contact or history ever in the world of investing - all the information in the world about what funds to buy and what cost to avoid are pointless if you don't know how and where to buy shares, unit trusts etc. But all is not lost; Motley Fool have some great investment advise in articles and also their Discussion Board, with all the what, how and where questions that most sites just don't answer. Too many sites tell you what you should do but not how to do it.

"Yes you should invest" - great but unless you know how to go about it you are never going to invest are you!

Even now I am still not 100% sure on all the abbreviations used to name shares to understand what the share entails. I should go to the library and get one of those books out that explain the financial pages of the newspapers. They should have the break down on the abbreviations used.
Investing is for my long term goal which I should have started decades ago (well I sort of did then stopped a few times over the years) but now it the time to be very serious about it. I am only looking to put in £50 -£100 a month at this time but will increase this once I have sorted out my short and mid term goals.
Are you investing? Did you find it easy to start out?

May's Mid Month Update

My Emergency Fund is now fully funded, I know, I have done Dave Ramsey's steps in the wrong order but am now on to Baby Step three having completed the first two. Gosh I am so happy to get to this place in my finances. Not sure if I will be able to totally complete one of the goals I hope to achieve this month, that being putting aside £1k to pay towards my taxes. This amount I have to lowered to £800 which isn't to much of a problem as I have until the end of July to pay my next tax bill.
A few expenses have popped up so far this month which I needed to pay, like having to replace my ipod ear phones after dropping them into my coffee last Saturday week. Not a great day that one.
So far I haven't spent very much at all this month which I am happy about but I did order a book online which is the first of a series of seven books and I am really liking the first book!
Another book I purchased this month is 'I Will Teach You To Be Rich' by Ramit Sethi (UK edition) which I am finding very good reading. This is written as a six week programme and each chapter ends with action steps for each week. I have been following along with some of the recommendations, one being to check your credit rating which I did and my rating was 999. However some of the information from some banks was over a month old and it didn't show that I had paid off my Flexiloan. So I am very happy with that rate.
Other things that Ramit suggested were change your bank for better rates (did that last month) and automating monthly payments to avoid bank changes. He doesn't like to use the word 'budget' and instead calls it a 'conscious spending plan'.
All in all a great book if your starting out in your financial life - good basic steps to building your future, with not only good ideas but practical steps for you to do! I am up to chapter six and it deals with investing - that's something I had been planning to do next year but Ramit says start today. We will see.
How are your goals for May coming along? I'd love to hear from you......

Sorting out my new financial landscape....

May has been the start of my saving plan, last month after fifteen years, I changed banks and have opened a regular saving plan with my new bank which allows me to save up to £300 a month at 8% for twelve months only. I plan to start up an e-ISA account (if your in the USA think Roth IRA or 401k sort of) once I have fully funded my emergency fund of £1k.
Where to put my emergency fund has been a problem as I want to get some interest from the account if possible and it needs to be an account I can have easy access too should I need it.
After looking at some comparison web sites I have decided on a Santander online account as it offers a half decent interest rate. Okay it's not every ones favorite bank but as it is online I am hoping to avoid as much contact as possible with the physical bank and hope the cyber side of Santander is better to deal with.
In my online Santander saving account I plan to save my emergency fund and also my income tax payments so this account will probably be holding a running balance of about £3k.
Once that is done I will open an e-ISA account, this will be for my (Dave Ramsey) baby step 3 ie. saving up 3-6 months of expenses. I plan to save a further £4k in this account.
Finally my regular saving account is to build up a deposit for a house (or what ever I decide to do with my section once I make up my mind). The accounts high interest is only for a year and I will not have saved enough so will have to go looking of another account to put the balance in.
So the plan is so far:

• online saving account for (baby step 1.) Emergency Fund



• e-ISA account (baby step 2.) Saving up 3-6 months expenses



• regular saving account Saving up deposit for building plans

All of my plans so far just cover my financial plan for this current year and don't include any investing I would like to do in the future. Next year I would like to open an investment account, fund a second ISA account and also look at possibly opening a fixed term saving accounts. What do you think? Am I wrong and if so why?

Journey or Destination?

Saving is the journey to a destination or it it?

This is how I have always considered saving to be, I would have a goal or destination and then I would put aside money weekly, monthly etc until I had arrived at the goal amount. Always short term goals - usually saving for a trip or the latest gadget but there was a start and an end. I always had part time jobs when I was growing up - I was from a family of five kids and as a solo parent my Mum couldn't afford to give us pocket money. I paid for all my school stationary and school trips from aged about 12 years old onward. After leaving school at aged 16, I went straight into work and paid board to my Mum and was responsible for all my own finances from then on.

Is the journey about debt and not credit?

I got my first cheque account at aged 16 years but I didn't really do much in the way of saving at all. When did I get my first credit card, I really can't remember, I guess it didn't mean that much to open a credit card account. But I had one once I had started travelling around the world and good thing too as I had a couple of emergency's in my travels. But the bills were from then on always there waiting when I got back home. I would load my credit card before a trip, the idea being that the credit on the card was for emergency's but I always ended up spending my emergency money too.
From then on my 'saving' were going to pay off my credit cards and then my consolidation loans and then both my credit cards and consolidation loans. I had a destination or goal, the balance on my card and the journey to pay it off. Lots of journeys for lots of different accounts.

So where does the journey lead too, what is the destination?

Having just cleared all my debt I have just arrived (again) and it's a strange new world. Suddenly I have money in my current account with no where for it to go. Oh don't get me wrong I have a plan, a budget and goals but now I need to find places to put that money. I no longer have multiple credit card accounts to put my money in so there for I need to start looking for saving accounts with all the care I put into finding the best credit card deal.

The journey is over and now I must adjust to living in my new world, to learn the new customs and traditions that are practiced here. Already I am trying to fit in by opening a regular saving account but I know there is more to do and this week, for the first time in along time, there will be a credit balance left over after all my monthly expense have been taken out of my pay cheque.

I have ear marked this to be put towards my emergency fund but will need a new saving account to put this in as the regular saving account I have doesn't allow withdraws for the first twelve month. Should I have a saving account for only my emergency fund and a second saving account for other savings or just one account and save everything together?

I'm new here and am looking for advice!