It’s time to review how the month of December went for me. I’ll have a look at my net worth figures and how I did on working towards my goals. December is always a funny month; more to do with having fun than achieving goals. Of course 2020 was a bit different to a normal year, but Christmas was still part of the equation. Let’s have a look first of all at the money side of things.

As usual I’ve got last month’s figures in brackets for comparison. I’ve got my Defined Benefits Pension in there based on twenty years worth of money if I start drawing it at 60. I’ve also got my Net Worth not including the DB Pension or the house equity, which seems barmy, but is really just to represent how close I’m getting to mortgage neutrality.

Debts

Mortgage £95,330.62 (£95,822.50)

Assets

Cash £34,503.66 (£34,304.08)

Defined Benefits Pension £130,653.60 (£130,653.60)

AVC’s £9,826.32 (£9,139.84)

Shares £49,278.21 (£50,102.75)

House £250,000 (£250,000)

Total Assets £474,261.79 (£474,200.27)

Net Worth including house equity

£474,261.79 – £95,330.62 = £378,931.17 (£378,377.77)

Net Worth excluding house equity and Defined Benefits Pension

£93,608.19 – £95,330.62 = –£1,722.43 (–£2,275.83)

I’m fairly happy with those figures. The work share price dropped again, but with my Vanguard Index trackers going up it doesn’t look quite as bad as it could do. A bit frustrating to dip under the £50k mark for my shares, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not the end of the world. My AVC’s are doing well, and with a bit of rounding I’m now 20% towards my target for that particular part of my investments. That will allow me to take the cash lump sum option of £50k at 60 without reducing the amount of pension that I receive. The extra money I’m putting towards that side of things came from a reduction in the overpayments I was making towards my mortgage. Psychologically I would prefer to see my mortgage coming down more quickly, but from a purely numbers point of view it’s definitely been the right decision.

My mortgage neutrality is edging down ever closer to zero. Not that much of a change this month, but it is at least going in the right direction. It’s great to see there’s less than two thousand to go until I’m mortgage neutral. That’s such an important target for me. It’s one I reached a long time ago in my last house, so it will be great to achieve it in this home. It’s quite likely that will fluctuate a bit as I use some of my savings to do work to the house. What I’ll probably do is have a bit of time where I can enjoy being mortgage neutral before I dip into my savings. I guess I could wait until I’m in a sufficiently positive financial position whereby even by spending on the house I would still be mortgage neutral. We’ll see.

My cash amount has increased ever so slightly. This really shouldn’t be the case. With the reduction in the maintenance that I receive once number one son started uni last year I don’t have enough coming in to cover the amount I am paying out. I would worry about this more, but it’s only because I’m throwing so much towards investments. I’ve got plenty of cash savings, so in reality all I’m really doing is drip feeding some of these cash savings towards investments. Although at the moment I’m not even needing to use the savings. Not being able to do anything does have an advantage from the financial point of view.

What I am actually doing though is virtually moving budgets around to put towards saving for getting my en suite sorted. Every month that I don’t spend my petrol, hair cut, entertainment etc budget I put it towards my house budget. I’m definitely getting there, and it shouldn’t be too much longer until I have enough to get the work done. Not that I’m actually planning on getting it done yet. I think I’ll wait until the vaccine is fully rolled out before I have people in my house doing non essential work.

I realise this is a bit of a bonkers way to work my finances. It works for me though and keeps me accountable to myself. I have cut some of my budgets to try and keep within what I earn, but there’s a limit to how low I can go. I’m not going to worry too much. With the latest lockdown my eldest is likely to be studying from home for the foreseeable, which naturally is putting my expenses back up. It’s lovely having him home again, so the extra costs are something I’m more than happy to deal with.

I have decided to spend a little bit more money to try and have some things in the diary to look forward to. I’ve booked a trip away to the Highlands for myself and my parents. This got cancelled last year, so I was keen to get it organised again. It’s a night away in Fort William and then going on the Jacobite Express, or as it’s better known, the Harry Potter train. It looks absolutely amazing, so I’m really looking forward to that. The scenery you pass through is out of this world, so it should be an incredible experience. It’s booked for early May, so I’m not entirely confident it will go ahead, but I thought it was important to be optimistic and get it booked in. I don’t have to pay for the hotel until the day itself, and I can cancel at any time, so I won’t be out of pocket if it does get cancelled. And the train tickets themselves were already paid for last year, so there’s no added expense there.

I’ve also started to organise tickets for events at the local theatre. I’ve got a dance show booked for June, which might be a touch optimistic, but here’s hoping! And there’s some comedy for 2022 that I really want to go to, so I’m currently organising friends to see who wants to go and see that with me. I think if I just try and book one or two things a month for later in the year it will spread the cost and give me something to look forward to. This not spending any money has been great, but I’m not sure how good it is for your soul to do nothing. There’s plenty of free things I love to do, but if there’s things that do cost money but which need paid for then I think it’s ok to do some of those things too.

Let’s move on now and have a look at how I got on with my goals for December. Here’s a quick reminder of what I wanted to achieve.

• Get under 10 and a half stone. I don’t need to stay there for the rest of the month, but I would like to at least know that I’ve managed it at least once during the month. PASS My lowest weight for the month was when I weighed myself on Christmas morning and I weighed 10 stone 3.2 pounds. I’m absolutely delighted with this.
• Don’t start the Christmas eating until the week of the 21^st December. PASS Remarkably I didn’t really start what I would class as Christmas eating until boxing day night. I had the full Christmas dinner, Christmas pudding and then another Christmas dinner as leftovers on Christmas night, so I did eat a lot on Christmas day itself. What I didn’t do though was eat just for the sake of it. There was probably no need for the leftovers on the night time, but it wasn’t a horrendous amount of food that I had. It did all go a little bit wrong after that. I got stuck into the chocolate on the 26^th. Considering this was my first lot of chocolate since the end of October, I’m surprised I didn’t crack earlier.
• Weigh less than 11 stone on the 1^st January. PASS I weighed 10 stone 7.2 pounds on the morning of New Year. This is a lot less than I would normally weigh after Christmas, so I am very pleased with that. I’ve had a few slips where I’ve gone into “eat everything in the house” mode, but I’ve mainly gone back to being healthy.

I set myself some fairly straightforward goals for December. Straightforward but not necessarily easy. I didn’t want to undo all the good work that I’d done on losing weight and eating healthily. There was a point where I thought I might just not go back to eating chocolate. When it got to boxing day night and I still hadn’t had any chocolate I did think I might have accidentally given up eating chocolate. When it came down to it though that was just a step too far for me.

Time now to set myself some goals for January. I’m not quite sure how motivated I’m feeling. I know it’s the start of a new year, but I’m really just not feeling it. I’m enjoying feeling healthy and want to keep working on that, but otherwise I might be quite easy on myself. I’m feeling a bit conflicted at the moment as I’ve read the James Clear book Atomic Habits. He talks about not setting goals, but rather establishing habits that move you in the right direction. That makes perfect sense to me, but I do love a good goal to work towards. Thinking about it though, some of my most successful goals have been where I’ve been establishing good habits as part of the goal achievement process. When I set myself sleep targets earlier in the year this established good habits about going to bed that I have continued long after I’m setting myself sleep goals.

Here goes then. Let’s see what I’m going to be working on this month.

• Get under ten stone. This should be achievable, although getting there by the end of the month might be a bit tough. This will be as low as I want my weight to go. My clothes fit brilliantly at this weight, but often people will comment that they think I look a bit too thin. My face and wrists tend to get quite thin, even though I still have a sizeable belly. It’s very frustrating!
• Weigh less than ten and a half stone on the first of February. I’ve learned my lesson on this one. If I just set a goal for a target weight then I tend to go off the rails once I’ve hit it. This should deal with that.
• Exercise four times a week. This shouldn’t really be a goal I need to set for myself. I’m absolutely loving my running and am getting out four times a week without fail. The issue I’ve got is that I’m injured. I’ve been ignoring it and have kept running, but I am going to have to take some time off. I need to make sure this doesn’t morph into doing no exercise at all as I’m sulking because I can’t run. Even just getting out for a walk will be good. Especially with working from home, I need to make sure I get out of the house for some exercise.
• Finish cien días. I was really enjoying this, so I don’t quite know why I’ve stopped watching it. I’ve only got about ten episodes left to go, so this shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. I’m still not managing to understand all the Spanish, but I’m not going to improve if I don’t stick in.
• Pick another Spanish series to watch. When I finished the last one I was watching I got out of the habit of putting a Spanish programme on. If I have another one picked out I can go seamlessly from one to the other.

That’s all I’m setting for myself this month. As I say, I’m not feeling particularly motivated. Work is always crazy busy in January, so sometimes just slumping after work is the order of the day. If I can keep working on my weight, get some non running exercise whilst I’m injured and get back into the swing of watching Spanish TV then I think that’s probably enough for January. Hope you all have a great January and are doing some great work on achieving your goals. Let me know how you’re getting on.