July Update: A Travel-Heavy Month and a Return to Arbitrage Betting
July was close to flat. Total net worth was down about £6k (−0.3%) to £1.72m, and the liquid side was down £4k (−1%) to £394k. Some more details below.
Here is the move by category, same grouping as the chart on the homepage:
| Category | June | July | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current | £12k | £17k | +£5k |
| Savings | £25k | £4k | −£21k |
| ISA | £284k | £303k | +£19k |
| GIA | £76k | £70k | −£7k |
| Pension | £189k | £187k | −£2k |
| Illiquid | £1.13m | £1.13m | flat |
| Total | £1.72m | £1.72m | −£6k |
| Liquid | £398k | £394k | −£4k |
Before reading anything into Savings and the ISA: most of that is the same money changing seats. I decided to move my liquid savings to fill my ISA back up after having drained it to pay for some tax. Over the coming months I will fill the liquid savings back up with my salary.
Inflows
Mostly salary, same as June. One small difference is that I started arbitrage betting again. I did it for some time at university but now I found more opportunities to do so, so I dedicated a small pool of money for it.
Let's wait and see how quickly I am blocked/limited by the bookies.
The rest of the movement is either regular market movements or money shuffling between accounts.
Outflows
This was an expensive month for the calendar rather than for any one purchase. Three things stacked up:
- A wedding trip, with all the usual travel, hotel and gift costs that come with it.
- A run of birthday parties. Individually small, but there were enough of them that they show up in the total.
- An impromptu trip back to my home country to deal with bureaucracy. Booking flights on short notice is never the cheap way to fly, and this was purely admin, so there is not even a holiday to show for it.
None of it is recurring, so I expect day-to-day spending to settle back down in August. Stripping out the new betting float, the everyday current accounts are down about £5k on the month, which is roughly what all that travel cost.
Elsewhere, GIA is down £7k on a mix of market moves and cash I pulled out during the month, the pension gave back £2k of June's gain, and the illiquid bucket barely moved: the equity position is still held at its last mark and gold was flat.