A bit of a social-spendy month, from a few outings with friends, including another enjoyable FIRE meet up in the pub.

Work has been really busy but I’m managing to not let myself get overwhelmed and am making sure I’m making it to the gym as usual and not having late nights.

However, thoughts of not having to do the stuff I don’t like doing when I retire seem to cross my mind a lot more often these days.

The company I’m working for wants to continue growing via acquisitions so I’ve been dragged into due diligence projects.  I had thought last year’s acquisition would have satisfied the big dogs at the top for a while but evidently not.

There was a time in my career when I would have been the first to volunteer for such projects, just to do something different, to get some recognition perhaps; now, I just want to get on with my day to day job and I find these distractions annoying.

Anyway, how did my numbers look in April?

I saved 23% of my net salary.  The above includes £23.44 from doing Prolific surveys, plus a rare payment of £67.67 from Google ads.

I got a small pay rise (the max available from the business) – I shall split the extra pay  across my investments and my mortgage overpayments but this will be from June as I used some of the extra already to buy some new home office furniture to replace old.

Shares and Investment Trusts

February wasn’t such a great month:

1 – I caught the lurgy that’s been going around. It dragged on for over 2 weeks, not quite bad enough for me to be bed-ridden or take time off work but bad enough that I didn’t feel like leaving the house at all as the cold weather just made me feel worse.

2 – My fridge-freezer broke down. Fortunately it was when I was feeling better so I was able to drop food off at my sister’s and had a big enough appetite to eat a lot of food! The cold weather came in handy as milk etc was fine in my shed but I was sad to have to throw some food away.

Still, it wasn’t all bad:

1 – my new fridge freezer arrived quickly and is a lot quieter than the old one (I hadn’t noticed before). It’s still half empty however, I’ve not gotten around to refilling it so need to get going with my batched cooking again! Rather than dip into my emergency fund for this purchase, I’ve gone for 3 affordable interest free payments with Klarna.

2 – I received one of the employee of the month awards so got £50 Amazon vouchers – yay! Sadly, I was not one of the lucky hard-working ones who won a trip to Vegas! Maybe next year!

3 – attended another enjoyable FIRE pub meet. It’s always good catching up with old friends and meeting new ones.

Anyway, how did my numbers look for Feb?

I saved 24.6% of my net salary.  The above includes £48.44 from doing Prolific surveys.

Shares and Investment Trusts

Dividends and Other Income