The start of July marks the end of June, the end of Q2, the end of H1! After half a year, I’m tallying up the results so far to see how I’m doing compared to the goals I set for the year. So sit back and enjoy the read. This monthly overview is going to be a bit more than usual!

June 2019 Finances

My finances this month were pretty good I’d say. Even though my savings rate was below average and below target, my investments and net worth have risen again to record heights.

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June 2019 Income and Expenses

In June, I made my regular salary of 2,624 euros and nothing more. My spending was a bit higher than usual, totalling 1,779 euros. This resulted in 845 euros saved.

The savings rate, therefore, came down to 31.1% which isn’t bad, considering this was an expensive month with a concert and eating out. Year to date my savings rate is still above target, comfortably at 45.4%. There’s nothing to worry about there!

Besides the concert, I bought some new clothes, which I budgeted for of course. Because I don’t buy clothes every month it affects my savings rate a bit both up and down depending on the month.

June 2019 Investments and Net Worth

Even though I only put in slightly over 800 euros into my savings, my net worth went up by an amazing 10,629 euros. This means a new record high net worth of 115,124 euros! At this pace, I’ll be FI in 5 years. I know, I know, it won’t be forever. But let me enjoy ok?

12 Month Net Worth Progression

My stock portfolio showed a nice gain again. These very volatile first six months of the year have been down-up-down-up but last month was up. My stocks consisting of VWRL and IUSN increased by about 3.1% this month.

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On top of that, I started investing in peer to peer lending via Mintos and Grupeer to deploy some of my excess cash. For now, I’ve made about 35 euros in interest there. Nothing crazy, but things will come I’m sure!

Last but definitely not least, the crypto world exploded a week ago! Where last month my cryptocurrencies went up by 7,300 euros, this month they’ve grown by 8,500 euros! Granted, some of that gain came from swing trades I perform between bitcoin and litecoin, but still. It’s amazing (and scary) how volatile these assets are.

For that reason alone, I’m divesting out of crypto now. I’ve set my sell orders in advance (because otherwise I get greedy and don’t sell). The first order triggered last week, executing a 3,500 euro sell. I have withdrawn this cash to my bank account to be deployed in other, more stable investments.

All in all, this made my net worth rise to 115,125 euros, or almost a 10% increase over last month.

June 2019 Blogging

Fire The Boss performed even better than bitcoin last month! I got 9,383 views (+ 2,251) from 3,886 unique visitors (+ 1,125). Those results are great! Maybe I can reach my (stretchy) goal of 20,000 monthly pageviews by December?

Fire The Boss visitors and views

It’s nice to see that Google is sending me more and more visitors every month. 1,215 views last month came from search engines, which is significantly more than the 993 in March.

The best read posts this month where:

2019 So Far vs Budget

Then, after the June 2019 update, it’s time to look at how I’ve done in the first half of the year! I have budgeted the following.

Income

On the income side, I have budgeted to earn between 30,600 and 32,400 after tax from my regular salary in 2019. This means until now I would have had to earn between 15,300 and 16,200. I made a total of 15,760 so that’s perfectly on target!

From bonuses I expected to make 1,500 to 2,500 this year. I made 2,194 so far and there is still one major bonus round to be paid out. I’m clearly going to make this goal this year. The reason is our travel bonus. When the year started I didn’t know yet I would have been staffed on a project abroad. In the first few months of the year, I’ve received quite some of this travel bonus. But I don’t complain!

My tax return was estimated at about 1,500 and came in at 1,986 euros, so that’s nice as well.

From side hustles, I want to earn a net income of between 1,500 and 3,000 this year. So far, I’ve made 200. Yup, there’s work to do there!

Anyway, in total the income side of the equation is going pretty well. I’ve made a net income of 20,151 in the first six months so I’m well on my way reaching my budgeted total of 34,600-39,400.

Expenses

I expected to spend 20,400 euros this year. So far, my YNAB and Power BI powered dashboards show me I have spent 10,999 euros. This is slightly more than the 10,200 that I could have spent in these first six months, so I’m spending more than I thought.

I also have planned a holiday in August and September that is paid for already for some bits and pieces, but I expect some major expenses in that area for the next two months. But as long as my income keeps going up too I’m not unhappy! Because we all know, it’s all in the savings rate!

Saving Rate

My savings rate in the first half year was 45.4% which is well above my 41% goal for the year. With the detailed breakdown of my income and expenses above, there’s nothing much to say about this.

First Half Year Net Worth and Investments

In January this year, my net worth was 81,000 euros. Today, it’s slightly over 115,000 euros. That’s an increase of 34,000 euros! Obviously, my investments have been nice to me, since we saw above that I only put 9,000 towards my savings these months.

I have to mention, included in my spending is the mortgage principal payment I make every month. So even though I record it as a spending event, it is neutral from a net worth perspective. That’s a free 450 euros in equity I’m buying back every month. I’m still thinking of adding this number to my savings rate, but whatever.

Investment-wise I started at roughly 38,000 euros and today the balance is just over 68,000 euros. This increase of 30,000 euros was partly the 9,000 going into savings, and partly the returns on my investments. The biggest performers obviously were cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and the like increased from a low point to somewhere in the order of late 2017 again. I am in the process of selling off these assets to diversify them properly into my stocks portfolio.

How was your month and first half year?