Congratulations, it’s been impressive to watch you breach £1M! I’m interested to know what funds you keep most of your money in if you are willing to share? I assume it’s passive index trackers?

Thank you :)

It's a bit of a hodge-podge now as I've lived in three different countries. I try to invest solely in passive index funds. About 55% is in VTI, an american-only index tracker (Mr Money Mustache's favorite fund,) but it's only available to people in the USA, it has a very low cost basis.

The rest is in the standard 100% equity passive index funds, I don't have a home bias though as I think the UK is going to underperform the rest of the world and I don't intend to stay here.

In the UK I'm invested in VWRP in SIPPs as it's accumulation. VWRL (LSEETF) in my general investment account as it pays the dividend so taxes are easier to calculate, and a bit of VUAG in my ISA for more risk.

If I were to introduce some safer assets like bonds, I'd do so in the general investment account to try and lower the compounding as the tax bill is getting massive.

Congratulations both on the 1m milestone and the baby.

How do you honestly keep your expenses so low? I remember reading when you had to move from USA back to UK you flew into Paris, and then were picked up from there. I figured the reason you flew into France and not the UK was a financial decision, which seems kind of wild to me given your personal finance circumstances, but then .. I guess that's part of how you keep your expenses so low!

Congrats on the £1m milestone! That must feel surreal.

I'd love to hear more about any dreams you have about publishing on Steam if you have the time or inclination.

Thanks!

We flew to France as the UK doesn't allow pets to travel in the cabin with you. It was partly due to cost but mainly due to wellbeing of our cat. We read a lot of horror stories of them being in the hold and it losing pressure.

Haha, well, being a tight git helps. But I've actually been trying to increase our expenses for a while as I think we were too extreme, I wrote about it here .

Me and my wife cook all of our own food from scratch and have done for 13 years, we enjoy it and prefer eating home cooked meals. We bulk cook so we have meals when we don't have as much time. We enjoy playing video games together so we splurged on gaming PCs, we enjoy hiking.

Our main cost is housing costs which is pretty low - but higher now than when our goals were £300k as we are renting. We pay for WiFi, all other services I run on our personal home lab, even this blog is free other than the domain name as I built the infrastructure myself and host it on my own server (including the mail server!) We pay £6 per month for a SIM only deal on idmobile, we don't need much phone internet as you can connect to WiFi in most places and we work from home. We don't pay for a TV license as we don't watch live TV.

Holidays we splurge sometimes, but in the USA we did a lot of car camping, but we did do 2 weeks in Italy as well (flew from Boston).

All of my gadgets, desk, chair, monitors, get expensed by work. We cut out on gift giving a long time ago other than a £10 fun spending budget and home made gifts. Our exercise is hiking and yoga.

We just don't really have the need to spend money outside of rent, council tax, electric, and WiFi. I did also splurge on a car this year, so there is servicing for that - I do most of the maintenance myself though as I enjoy the physical work, changing filters, oil, break pads, etc. Saves a ton of money!