May 2020 will, as the other months of lockdown, remain a scar on my psyche. I lost my job, and have been on furlough for 3 weeks. On the positive side, I have applied for dozens of jobs, set up a new website, and read a great deal.

I was also featured twice on FIREhub.eu and even made their monthly featured post. I am very proud of this!

I have also started running again and have got up to 5km fairly quickly. I’m still slow compared to my old days of running but it’s progress.

Now for the numbers.

Spending

Spending has been low again. I had to make a large expenditure to start the process of renewing my lease which involved an outlay of around £750 (under general). I also spent about £350 on setting up my new website (business). Time will tell if that is a good investment!!

My income is down due to being furloughed from 12 May 2020. You can see I spent slightly more than I earned. I did manage to put some into my pension however, I don’t have the figures right now so I haven’t shared and can’t work out my savings rate. Without them, it’s about 28%.

Savings/Investments

I have revamped my investment tracker for your viewing pleasure. All I have done is listed it horizontally rather than vertically which makes it easier to post the data here.

I have also updated the NW graph to show 5 categories which are Debt, Property (equity in my house), Pension, Physical (car), and Financial (ISA, savings, current account) assets. I back dated all this data so my complete ‘journey’ is shown.

The big change which made a fair difference was I was assuming the market value of my apartment remained constant in the old graph. Now I am using a value I know and adjusting monthly according to the UK house price data for my London Borough. It’s knocked a bit off the total NW but it’s now accurate so I’m ok with that. It will lag as the data comes out a few months after, but I can back date it.

I also included the physical asset of my car which I never included before. I had finance on it but it seems it meant I was usually about -£1-2k. The debt level is less than the true level due to this math.

Conclusion

The astounding news is that since the lows in March, my pensions have recovered by a staggering amount. Going from £92k to £112K (including contributions) in 2 months is amazing and surprising. I’m very glad I held on for dear life during the market crashes. These are long term investments which I can’t touch for another 20 years so there is no point in selling.

My networth is now at it’s highest level ever. Which is crazy considering I’ve taken a pay cut and lost my job. It really is an example of the power of compound interest.

Also I clearly have too much time on my hands, but at least my spreadsheet is getting better!!