Q3 2019 – Exposing myself

Quarterly return posts supplement my monthly Financial Dashboard, covering investments in detail and looking at my yearly targets. Here I track purchases and sales, document progress against my (in progress) investment strategy, and discuss re-balancing and changes over time.

I apologies for the title of this post. I am, at best, an overgrown manchild.

Q3 Returns:

• Cash Savings Accounts £4200 (+£1000)
• Investments £1550 (+£675)
• Property £34,450 (+£1150)
• Cars £2500 (-£500)

My net worth now sits at £40,350, an increase of £4.8k over the past three months, which is a pretty damn stonking (I’ll come onto this a bit more in Goal 3). This makes my rolling twelve month increase £18,000. Remaining strong. I’ve written down the worth of one of my cars for depreciation.
Yearly Targets:

Goal 1: Build an emergency fund

My first 2019 goal was to build an emergency fund, as per the r/UKpersonalfinance flow chart (1). My goal emergency fund is three months total household expenses (£6k) in my name, plus a further three months (£6k) held jointly. I now currently hold £3100 in my name, and £900 held jointly. I need to double down on this over the next few months to try and achieve the £6k figure by the end of the year.

Goal 2: Pay off short-term debts

This goal has been achieved. Done. Sorted. I dip into my credit card now only for purchases where I want the security of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. Moving on…

Goal 3: Save 25% of my earnings

I calculate my savings rate using this formula:

Savings rate as % = ((Income – spend) + Cash savings + Investments + Pension contributions) / (Income + Pension contributions)

Having paid off all my unsecured debt, I’ve been able to channel money into savings a bit better. My current mean savings rate for 2019 is 21.48%, still short of my goal but closing in.

The interesting aside here is my three month net worth gain does not marry up with my savings rate. Gaining £4.8k would suggest a £1.6k/month increase, and at a 35% savings rate (average over the last three months), I’d have to be earning £4.6k take home! I am not earning £4.6k take home. I am not earning £4.6k gross. Try half that.

So where’s it coming from? My investments have (aside from new holdings) mainly tread water, and the local house prices are holding firm. As ever I think this is a demonstration of how you can get numbers to show you anything you want. Here, the rise is due to my decreased student loan, increased property equity and increased joint holdings. It’s all noise.

Goal 4: Live more sustainably

Our drive to weekly healthy dinners has meant less packaging and more local or home grown food. We’ve also been enjoying the harvest glut, which means less imported food. An area to focus on next quarter.

Goal 5: Commence investing

I’ve been better at investing this quarter, but still not at the automated stage yet. Some subconscious barrier is preventing me, by telling myself that I need to hold it out for other positions not on my ISA platform. For the next three months I intend to invest in an automatic way each month into one of my current holdings. Because it’s now not just one.

In the past three months I did the bad thing, first by opening a couple of CrowdCube investments. I put a small amount of money into the second of the two Freetrade raises, having missed out on the first round due to the CrowdCube glitch. I like what Freetrade are doing, I think they have a good model which has worked previously overseas (RobinHood in the US for example), and I don’t think they’re particularly overvalued (2). I have gone into the psychology of crowdfunding platforms, but suffice to say I don’t think FreeTrade were there to exploit the psychological ploys. It’s also a company I would, and will, use.

If you’re interested in trying Freetrade and want a free share to boot, drop me an email.

The other crowdfunding investment I made was in a small mining company called Cornish Lithium ltd (3). They were exploiting the psychological ploys, and this investment was pure, emotional, domestic-market-biased speculation. Laugh if you choose, it was the cost of a fancy dinner out and it’s sitting as a leaden, illiquid lump in my active satellite picks. I’m hoping it was a better bet than Sirius Minerals (or Wolf for that matter) are turning out to be (I hold neither).

In the passive core of my investments, I opened an investment in Vanguards FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund (4). This supplements my current Developed World ex-UK holding, adding some emerging markets exposure and small cap. Is it worth bothering with? The Accumulator over at Monevator reflected last week on the 10 year returns across the market, and the little difference emerging market holdings have made (5). I was also torn between this and the Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF (6). Ultimately I decided to be a purist for the passive global argument; the All Cap is slightly cheaper (OCF 0.24% vs 0.25% for VWRL), and the concept is to capture the whole of the market. The All Cap Index Fund does just that, whereas the All-World lacks the small cap. The small cap gains probably won’t beat the dividend gains available through VWRL, making this a principled rather than pragmatic choice, but we’ll have to let history decide.

Until next time,

The Shrink

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/
2. https://www.crowdcube.com/companies/freetrade
3. https://www.crowdcube.com/companies/cornish-lithium-ltd
4. https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-ftse-global-all-cap-index-fund-gbp-accumulation-shares
5. https://monevator.com/10-year-retrospective-what-a-decade-of-returns-tells-us-about-passive-investing/
6. https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-ftse-all-world-ucits-etf-usd-distributing/overview