This month will just be remembered for the heatwaves and football.
The scheduling of the World Cup matches haven’t been great – I love the World Cup (but hate the corrupted FIFA) and have watched pretty all matches bar the ones in the wee early hours. For that late England match against Mexico, yes, I took a day off work to recover!
Tonight is the crunch match between England and Argentina so let’s hope the lads do us proud!
Anyway, how did I get on in June?
I saved 25% of my net salary. The above includes £11.71 from Prolific surveys and £100 from Nationwide, its ‘Fairer Share’ to all members.
Shares and Investment Trusts – Computer says ‘No!’
For quite a while, I have needed to do a full analysis of my income portfolio but I’ve not had time to go through it all.
So I asked AI (Microsoft Copilot) to analyse for me and it did so in seconds what would have taken me hours…
To cut a long story short, after a few prompts, it ‘recommended’ that I sell or trim 10 holdings as my portfolio was “heavily skewed towards REITS, infrastructure and specialist income trusts and underweight in core dividend equities“.
This got narrowed down to 5 offenders and after some research and consideration, I sold according to its recommendations and added some new investments (Edinburgh Investment trust, which was on my watch list; Rio Tinto and iShares UK Dividend ETF, both which I have held in the past).
I prompted AI to compare the before and after portfolios and its reply was:
“This is a meaningfully improved portfolio vs your previous version — you’ve reduced some clutter and strengthened the backbone.
There are still too many alternatives and “yield vehicles”, with some overlap and redundancy present.”
Yeah well, I am happy with that, glad that it’s an improvement.
Current share/IT portfolio can be found here.
(Entire portfolio here)
Future Fund
At the end of June, my FF was at £403,521.69, so the rocket is still flying high, though starting to level out a bit? Still feel a tad anxious that something is about to burst…
Dividends and Other Income
Another great month for dividends:
I received £1,690.97, of which £723.58 was from my ISAs, the rest from my SIPPs. All dividends were reinvested.
Goals Update
I finished a book right on the first day of this month so that will be in July’s update!
Other stuff
My only veggie success so far has been some potatoes – courgettes are slow, as are my tomatoes, so hopefully I will get some more harvests later on.
The weeds in my garden have been having a field day as it’s too hot to do the weeding but I will get the little suckers!
Anyway, hope you all had a glorious June and stayed hydrated during the heatwaves!
Thanks Weenie, interesting to read about your income review. I did a similar exercise recently, aiming for 90/10 rather than 100% equity, and built top-down rather than bottom-up. Sharing the end result for interest: Vanguard Global Equity Income Fund – 30%
JPMorgan Global Growth & Income (JGGI) – 15%
Murray International (MYI) – 15%
Vanguard UK Equity Income Fund – 10%
Franklin European Dividend ETF (FLXD) – 10%
Schroder Oriental Income (SOI) – 10%
Vanguard Global Strategic Bond – 10%
Hi Bathtub Life
Thanks for stopping by and that is interesting. Ignoring my income portfolio (which is pretty much all equity), I’m at around 30% bonds/cash-like in the rest of the portfolio. Most days, I’m comfortable with this, other days, I’m stressing a little!
Hey there! I’m a new reader (few months) and just wanted to leave a comment: I enjoy your blog and your link list, it’s inspirational. I hope to be in a similar position in ~15 years. Thanks for posting.
Hey Niemand
Thanks for stopping by and all the best with your journey!
IUKD, you say. I was bitten by that years ago. It wasn’t what I had thought, the Monevator comment link soon after was illuminating.
I’m not saying this is wrong for you or your portfolio, it’s more that it’s easy to jump to conclusions from what’s written on the tin, and I did just that. It’s procyclical too. It’s possible your AI is making the same assumption as I did… All the usual, DYOR
Hi ermine
Sorry for delayed response – hear what you’re saying. I held a large wedge of IUKD in the past and it wasn’t quite what I thought. However, think I’m happy with just a small holding as just a few percent of the income portfolio.