May 2019 update: Things are pretty good

Hello everyone.  I’m a bit late with my update for May. Sorry about that.  I had a few other posts that I wanted to get out first, two of which had a ‘deadline’ of the 15^th of June so I popped them out first.

Overall though I had a pretty good month in May.  The highlight of the month was the wedding of a good, old, friend.  I’m a sucker for a good wedding me

Having waited so long though I’m not going to editorialise too much at this point, I’ll just jump in.  As always, please just jump over to whichever bits you’re interested in.

Money update

Money wise May was a bit of a catch up from April. I put in my annual Lifetime ISA allowance as well as putting in the contributions for this tax year for my kids’ Junior ISAs and SIPPs. I explained my logic for that in the past. As part of my plan for rethinking what I do in the future it may be that I don’t end up putting anything into their ISA’s or SIPPs in the future. However, I’m happy that I’ve managed to do it for a couple of years. Even if I can’t put more in the magic of compounding will mean that even that modest amount should be helpful to them in the future.

Otherwise everything has continued to tick through nicely. I don’t think that there were any annual bills to renegotiate so it was otherwise nice and steady.

Health update

It’s been another up and down month with the weight. I’m OK with that as it’s not unexpected. Last month I had hoped to get back to where I had been before I went on the stag weekend and the family holiday. I managed that…but then went to the wedding that the stag do had been foreshadowing. The net result of that was that I ended the month at 216 pounds.  I was down a couple of pounds from April but not quite back to the 215 pounds that I had hoped for. On the upside I’ve got a pretty clear run looking forward through June and July where there are no multi-day social events in the diary and only a few work trips. That should allow me to make some decent progress.

 

 

Exercise update

Shout it from the rooftops I WENT TO THE GYM. Not just once, but twice.

To give a bit more context I have been paying for, but not using, my gym membership for maybe six months or so. It’s a budget gym so it’s not a ridiculous amount of money but if I’m not going then it’s literally throwing money down the drain. (Alright, not literally, but you know what I mean).

I realise that this is the most unfrugal thing that anyone in this space can imagine. I also realise that it’s exactly the business model that many gyms are built on so I am falling into their trap. But it’s been deliberate.

Going to the gym needs to be frictionless for me. I enjoy it when I go, but it’s very easy for me to find an excuse not to turn up. If I cancelled my membership that would give me another reason to stall. When I build it back into a habit I know I’ll be fine, but I just need to get there. It may well be a sporadic but I’m delighted to have got re-started.

Otherwise it was a great months steps wise. A few of us FIRE peeps on Twitter along with some others that have Fitbits have got together a little challenge group.  The idea being to see who can walk the most steps either during the workweek or over the weekend.  I’ve found it surprisingly motivational!

The net result is that I averaged 15,735 steps per day.  That’s comfortably above what I need to hit my target of 4,500,000 steps in 2019, in my head I think that I’m now shooting for 5,000,000 steps. It would have been 5,500,000 but my April holiday dip combined with other work trips and a natural decline in the winter makes me think that 5,000,000 will be stretching enough.

Naturally I also continued with my sword fighting in May.

Sleep update

May wasn’t a bad month sleepwise. My target is to average at least six and a half hours every night. I managed to meet that average across one week in May, but I also didn’t have any weeks where I averaged less than six hours. By contrast in April I had one week where I averaged less than six hours a night and no weeks where I averaged six and a half hours or more.

It’s still not quite enough but it’s better than it was. I think that this is something that I’m going to have to keep working at. It’s definitely worth it when I get it right.

Books update

I only read two books in May but they were both awesome. The first was The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris. Basically blew my mind. The underlying idea in this book is around the idea of Minimum Effective Dose which is the idea that you only do/take what you need to get the outcome that you want. His argument is that in all sorts of areas from weight-loss to strength to running and more you can get some stella outcomes by doing a lot less than you think. You just need to work smarter rather than harder.

In many ways I think that he is way out there, but there seems to be  logic and, apparently science, behind what he does. I wouldn’t go so far as to endorse or recommend what he says you should do, but I would definitely recommend reading the book to see what you think. For my part there are a few things from the book that I want to incorporate into life over time. Not often that a book does that for me.

The second was Nevernight by Jay Kristoff which is a fantasy novel about an assassin…but it’s so much more. If you want to know how much I enjoyed it let me just say that I got it out of the library and tucked in straight away. I loved it so much that as soon as I finished I went straight onto Amazon to buy the second book, Godsgrave, on Kindle so that I could download it immediately. I’m now impatiently waiting for the final volume to come out in September. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a series as much. It’s not perfect by any means but I loved the world and the characters. If you haven’t read it, and you like fantasy, you’re in for a treat when you do discover it.

Film and theatre update

Film wise it was an action movie kind of month. I watched Captain America: The First Avenger and Insurgent, the second film in the Divergent series. Both jolly good fun. But that wasn’t what got me excited in May.

Being the cultured kind of chap that I am I went to a concert by one of the big London Orchestras. I listen to a bit of classical music on the radio/Spotify, but whenever I go to a live concert I’m reminded of what an amazing experience it is. If you’ve never been to an orchestral concert in a proper concert venue think about adding it to your bucket list. There are often really cheap tickets available.

When I was a student I would queue up for standing tickets for the summer Prom series at the Royal Albert Hall, they were £5 then and now, more than two decades later they are £6. You get to hear some of the best musicians in the world playing some of the most feted music in history at a legendary concert venue for peanuts. That’s on my list of things to do again when I’m FI.

The most fun thing that I did though was go to a stand-up comedy gig in a pub.  I used to go to stand-up gigs quite a lot but I haven’t been to one for 15 years. A combination of the stars aligning and a bit of spontaneity meant that when I found out about this gig I jumped at it. So much fun. An audience of like 20 people in the downstairs room in a pub. It was genuinely laugh out loud funny stuff. I’m very glad that I went.

Friends and family update

As I said at the start my big social event for May was the wedding that the stag weekend in March had been pointing towards. It was absolutely fabulous. I’m now at the age where we aren’t going to multiple weddings every year.  That means going to this one and being able to catch up with so many friends at once was fantastic. I will say however that it turns out that we have all forgotten how to dance. Not me, of course, I’m still a cross between John Travolta, and Nureyev on the dancefloor. No it’s everyone else that looks odd…

Otherwise it was mostly catching up with family in May which was great.

Blog and social media update

In the end I only published four posts in May. I try to put something up once a week but a combination of life and work meant that I didn’t publish anything in the last week of May. If you were expecting something, sorry about that. I have snuck in an extra post for May though so I hope you’ll forgive me. In addition to my April update I wrote about why I would love to lose my job, my beef with investing in rental property and (as a counterpoint to my earlier post) a piece on why we should all love our jobs!

At the end of last month I set up a little tease as I’d just been featured on Rockstar Finance and my traffic was spiking.  If you’re interested in these things, being featured led to me getting 1,036 views that day and I was still getting referrals from it up to a week afterwards. To put that into context, up until that point my maximum pageviews on any one day was I think around 170 pageviews.  Even that was another unusual spike. Put another way my total pageviews in April had been 2,345.  So, in one day I had got almost a third of my total pageviews from the previous month.

That all meant that, unsurprisingly, I had my best month on this blog. I had 3,847 pageviews from 1,815 visitors. Acknowledging that it makes me sound churlish it’s almost a bit annoying to have had that spike. I can’t tell if May was actually a good month on my blog or not as that spike is masking any underlying rise or fall. Let’s see what happens in June.

Twitter

Well that was a terrible idea. I flagged in my April update that I was trying something a bit different. As an experiment in May I set up a bunch of tweets to automatically go out. I think it was around four or five tweets a day at regular intervals. They were basically a bunch of my favourite quotes from a few of my favourite writes that I had picked up over time. My thinking was that if I like them then other people would as well. It would also help people to remember I existed if I wasn’t logging into twitter for a period of time.

That was sort of true and, if my goal was to get likes and followers that worked a little. But, I absolutely hated it. It felt deeply inauthentic and spammy. Once or twice I’d be in  a conversation with someone on Twitter and a scheduled tweet would appear. I’m sure that it didn’t bother them but it bothered me. Net result, I’m glad that I tried, but I’m not going to do that again. I still schedule tweets but for the most part I’m just going to interact with people when I’m on.

In terms of numbers I ended May with 729 followers on Twitter. That was an increase of 60 from April.

Concluding comments

Overall I’m feeling pretty good about May. Lots of good things happened, in particular I got on back on track with my health. A good end to Spring and I’m looking forward to what the Summer will bring!

Thoughts?

It’s a bit late to ask I guess, but how was your May?