Firstly, should I mention it to my team mates? I don’t think these are commonplace. No one in my team has ever celebrated having one before. We regularly celebrate promotions, birthdays, babies etc etc with cakes. So, should I keep quiet about it, or buy them all cream cakes? If they are more common than I think, then no one celebrates them and I should definitely keep quiet. On the other hand, do people really want me to gloat if they’re quite rare?

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what should I do with the money? After tax and NI I reckon it’ll amount to about £300 (approx $600). To help you get some ideas of my financial position:

• I have no consumer debt (although I do need to rearrange some savings).
• I have a reasonable sized emergency fund (about 3 months income).
• I’m currently investing 16% of my gross salary towards the future (retirement and whatnot).
• I’m saving the money I get from adverts on plonkee money towards buying an oboe

I don’t think I’ll get the money until at least my next pay packet at the end of the July, so there’s some time to think about it. This is good as it helps to mitigate against the possibility that I’ll accidentally fritter it away.

Over to you, give your opinions in the comments.

Image by pasotrapaso

Of course, since I started blogging, I’ve become immeasurably richer just by interacting with all the people here. I’ve had similar results with some other things that I’ve done in 2007. My life is rich.

My financial situation is a little different. Although I’m theoretically happy to share the details of my net worth, since I bought a house, they’re a little more difficult to calculate. Basically, I can’t work out how to value my house because I don’t know whether the market is stagnant or falling.

Anyway, cashing up, board game style I have (rounding for laziness reasons):

• £5500 in savings accounts
• £12850 in investments
• £97000 in house
• -£9800 in student loans
• -£87000 in a mortgage

This leaves me with an approximate net worth of £18550 - I’ve assumed a stagnant housing market here so this figure is plus or minus £5k.

This is a serious amount more than my net worth in 2007, but I received a windfall last January and a couple of gifts - these formed the house deposit, and/or have been allocated towards improving the said house.

The plan for 2008 is to increase my net worth further by saving and investing 16% of my income (my arbitrary but achievable target).

How has your net worth changed over the last year and what’s on the cards for 2008?

Here’s what some of my blogging friends are saying:

• It’s Hard to Get Back to Zero - I’ve Paid For This Twice Already
• Net Worth for the New Year - Rocket Finance
• Net Worth Update - My Dollar Plan
• December Net Worth Review - Single Guy Money
• New Years Net Worth - Mrs. Micah
• How We Increased Our Net Worth By More Than 170% In Less Than A Year - Gather Little By Little
• Net Worth Goals for 2008 - Cash Money Life
• The M-Network + Annex NetWorthapalooza - Credit Withdrawal
• December 2007 Site and Net Worth Review (+0.72%) - Moolanomy
• Net Worth 2008? - Plonkee Money
• Trying to Figure Our Net Worth - DebtFREE-Revolution
• The M-Network Shares Their Net Worth - You Know You Want to Peek - My Two Dollars
• Net Worth or Net Worthless?  - Brip Blap
• I’m in the Black @ Being Frugal

However, I’ve been inspired by Chief Family Officer’s boycott of chocolate and I resolve to not buy another piece of un-fairly traded chocolate.

I was in the pub the other day…

I was in the pub the other day with a friend, when he asked me what my realistic dream life would look like. I think he was looking for reassurance since his dream life is apparently nothing like his actual life. He didn’t get any. My dream life is pretty much the same as my life now, except that I work four days a week instead of five, my blog is more successful, my house is in better condition and location and I take more trips abroad. Possibly I’d be living in the Netherlands. It did get me thinking though. It was pretty easy for me to enunciate my dream life and I’m part of the way there already, it seems silly not to make my dream life part of my goals.

working four days a week

Working four days a week, rather than five would mean earning less money. I’ve calculated that if I could do it right away, I’d be taking home £250 less a month, with a reduction of about £350 in retirement contributions as well. I can’t afford this at the moment, but if I earned a bit more, and I was more frugal, this could become possible. My immediate goals are a promotion at work and maintaining my existing spending (incorporating some inflation) when I get a pay rise - almost certainly in April.

a more successful blog

What I mean by success for this blog, is in fact more commentators. I love getting feedback from people and interacting. I like both agreements and disagreements. My immediate goal is to double the number of comments that I receive on average per post.

my house in better condition

My house needs work doing to improve its condition, when I had the survey done the surveyor said that it was in typical condition for its age (it’s about 100) and gave a list of jobs that need doing. My ongoing goal is to complete these jobs (which include redecorating the interior and putting in a new bathroom and kitchen).

travelling

Travelling means happiness to me. There are so many countries that I want to go to, and so many things that I want to see. I’ve got a list of places to visit and my ongoing goal is going to be to travel to every single one.

Now that I’ve defined my goals, I need to work out next actions to be associated with pushing each one forward. That’ll require some brainstorming.

I get in on Wed Nov 28 at 14:10 and leaving at 21:55 0n Mon 3 Dec.

Ideally someone will suggest a DC pfblogger (plus me) meet up.

Or failing that give me some great ideas as to what to do.

I’m so second guessing this decision.

I’ve got a friend who is a few years older than me who has been in a long term relationship for about 10 years. Together they own the house that they live in and have another investment property. They have a sports car, which their selling to replace with a BMW. In the past year they’ve been on four foreign holidays.

There are a few key reasons why my friends can afford so much more than me. Because they are a few years older, they purchased their first house prior to the recent housing boom. They have friends who work for airlines and so they can get discounted travel. They earn on half as much again as I do, each. There are two of them, and this gives savings. They also carry credit card debt and have a car loan.

I’ve been deeply envious of my friend since we met. I want a nice house, a relationship, foreign holidays, and all the trappings of success. Its a good job that my fear of debt has meant that I haven’t acted on my jealous feelings, I reckon I’d be owing the credit card companies thousands and thousands.

On the other hand, I’m still allowing my envy to affect my own life. When I don’t look at their lifestyle, I am actually happy with mine. I don’t really want their house (because mine is beautiful) or car (driving kills the planet). I’d love to go on holiday a lot, but I genuinely prefer - and can afford - budget travel. I may not have a boyfriend, but I have my much valued independence and many wonderful friends. I’d rather be young, on balance.

I vow that from this day on I will no longer look at their lifestyle with envy. Instead I will remind myself that I am living my dreams. It might be in a small way, but they’re still being realised.

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I speak as a person that doesn’t really want to scale the ranks of management. I certainly derive part of my status from my job, but its more a case of reputation in my field that I seek, rather than a better job title. I’m not really motivated by pay either. It would be nice to earn more money, but if that was a major goal of mine, I should have taken a different job. On the other hand, I’m relatively young, so I’ve got quite a lot of working life left in me, and I’m certainly unlikely to be able to retire for a lot more than twenty years. Is working without a plan for that long destined to end in, if not failure, some kind of boring misery?

To what extent is career planning useful anyway? I’ve certainly grown and improved in relation to my work since I left university but without any great plan, and its been organic and enjoyable. In fact whenever I have a performance review, I have things to improve but no sense that an end goal is conceivable let alone necessary. One of the key questions on our previous preparation for review documents was ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’. I have never, ever had any answer to this. In practice, I’m probably doing now what I hoped to be doing when asked five years ago, the same stuff but better and more of it. When I pointed this out to my line manager, he said that it doesn’t make a very professional sounding personal development plan.

Stephen Covey is very popular amongst some managers at my workplace, and one of his tenets is to ’start with the end in mind’. What do I do, when I don’t have an end goal at all?

I particularly like the food on Fridays because at work on a Friday we have a breakfast sandwich round. I often (but not always) partake of these because I am very fond of bacon sandwiches and it feels quite decadent to order out for food and have it delivered to work. Its actually not very expensive either. It costs around £1.50 - £2 for a buttie (about $3-$4) which, for something that makes me feel great (and replaces a more expensive lunch) is pretty much a bargain.

Although being frugal is important, there’s a lot to be said for indulging in small pleasures, as long as the pleasure you get outweighs the money you spend. For me, having a bacon buttie once or twice a month brings a lot of pleasure for little cost. However, the half litre of diet coke that I buy and drink every workday morning doesn’t. I need to cut it out. There’s no point in spending money on things that you don’t need, that don’t make you feel good.

Almost all of my semi-regular treats revolve around food (yes, I am aware that’s not good from a health perspective) and I need to start making sure that they are treats, and not just ordinary purchases.

This got me thinking. To what extent should I refrain from stating my opinions on taboo subjects like religion and politics in my personal finance blog? To what extent is it even possible for me to do so?

My non-believing paradigm colours many aspects of my life and is certainly a prime factor in my values - I notice this the most when I am reading posts on personal finance from someone from whose strong believer’s paradigm becomes evident (like rocket finance or free money finance).

My political views also impact on the way IÂ see the world - and the world includes personal finance. I know that my political views are coloured by the country that I live in - which differs from most other personal finance bloggers - but I’m not sure whether I inadvertently subject people to my way of thinking as if its the only possible way, or whether my politics detract from my writing.

What do you think? Are my views on religion and politics too evident? Does it even matter? Should personal finance blogs be more or less neutral?

Thats a lot of money, especially as I only used 40 of my inclusive minutes. I’ve been forgetting that the inclusive minutes are only for off-peak any network calls, and also that they don’t include my telephone banking number.

I’m switching to a T-Mobile package that is more flexible - the key thing being that the cross-network minutes are any time. It also has cheaper line rental, which is good considering that actually I don’t use my phone all that much. In addition I signed up through a cashback site so that if I  can remember to send all the bills in on time, it could cost me nothing for the whole year. Even if I forget, its still a stonking great deal.