Normally I start off with an update on finances but given the biggest thing of May has been our 10-day holiday, travelling our way around Bavaria, I thought I'd swap it around. Normal service might be resumed next month, but I feel that since passing the - completely arbitrary - £1m net worth number, then the numbers kinda take a bit of a backseat now. 'Saving intentionally' is now safely on autopilot and 'spending intentionally' now comes into the frame, whether that is buying more of our time (by dialling back work or taking unpaid time off) or through buying experiences such as holidays.
Non-finance update
Holidays
Germany - We've just come back from 9 days out in Germany on a DIY adventure holidays for us all. Massive shout out to my wife who I want to say did most of the planning, but in reality she did all of the planning!
I've been asked by a few people on social media for a rundown of what we did, so hear goes:
- Friday - flew out to Munich, landed early evening, stayed in our 1st hotel just south of the city near to the TSV 1860 Munich stadium. Had tea in a biergarten obv!
- Saturday - day in Munich. Had a walk down the Isen and around the southern part of the city with friends who live there. Had tea at their house in the East part of the city and back to the 1st hotel.
- Sunday - picked up our rental car and drove to Ayinger. Had a lovely walk around this small town and a quick beer and play in the biergarten! Then a short drive to the wonderful BergTierPark Blindham, a wildlife park with loads of outdoor (and indoor!) activities for the kids. Highlight was seeing deer and the castle playground where to get in you have to crawl through a pipe and "invade it"! Drove to Sauerlach to our 2nd hotel and had tea in a Biergarten (seeing a trend?!) :D Schnitzel all round apart from the Mrs who had the biggest salad I've ever seen!
- Monday - Drove from Sauerlach to Tegernsee. Walked up Neureut, a mountain to the north of the lake with the kids. Feasted on paprika crisps and a celebratory radler at the summit. Not that I had needed to carry the radler with me as there was a beer vending machine at the top!! Went back down and headed to a playground with a picnic lunch and then went on a boat trip around Tegernsee. Drove to our (3rd) hotel in Grainau on the Austrian border, at the base of Zugspitze (tallest mountain in Germany). The hotel was something out of a fairytale! Hand painted pictures and animal skin everywhere with a great view of the mountain from our bedroom.
- Tuesday - Had a bit of rain overnight and it was a bit overcast. We had pencilled in going up Zugspitze this day however we figured it wouldn't be worth it as we wouldn't be able to see anything from the top anyway. So instead we went to Partnachklamm gorge given the extra rain would make the waterfalls extra impressive! Checked into the 4th hotel in Garmish-Partenkirchen and walked up a mountain to have tea at another biergarten (Tannenhütte) with an impressive view overlooking the town and a good playground for the kids. Also, the suspension bridge on the way back down was great!
- Wednesday - A nice clear morning meant that we headed 3000 metres up to the summit of Zugspitze. Fairly pricey for a day trip but well worth the cost (£150) given the experience that we all had. It has the longest freespan cable car in the world and you can see 5 countries from the top. We took a secondary cable car down to the glacier where there was people sledging on the snow, and we had lunch in the hut there (weisswurst, bretzel and bier!). Spent a good few hours up there and headed back down mid-afternoon. From the car park at the bottom it was a short walk to Eibsee, a beautiful lake with path around it. Kids (and me!) had a quick paddle.
- Thursday - After an adventurous few days near the Austrian border we took a drive a couple of hours north to Ulm (birthplace of Einstein), and to Legoland. Getting there just after midday we spend the rest of the day there and crashed at a hotel just down the autobahn.
- Friday/Saturday/Sunday - Friday was the second day on the theme park, but the weather was a bit worse than the previous day. Despite this we spent the full day there, left early evening to return back to Munich and dodged a bit of a bullet as there were some subsequent flooding in this region of Germany later on that day. Checked the car back in and headed to the hotel in the East of the city. The weather was still a bit drizzly on the Saturday but we managed to do some sightseeing around the city as well as taking cover in both the Lego shop (getting a few 'make & take' freebies!) and then spent a few hours in a brauhaus! Hoffbrauhaus was absolutely rammed (given the weather) but thankfully my wife found the excellent Weisses Bräuhaus, tied to the Schneider Weiss brewery. Finally had some schweinshaxe! (pork knuckle) with potato dumpling, beer gravy and a couple of Weissbiers to wash it down!
Some takeaways:
- Kids - Germany, especially Bavaria is fantastic for kids. Even in Munich there are playgrounds everywhere, and everywhere welcomes kids.
- Respect - we noticed that there seems to be a lot more respect for people. There's no anti-social behaviour. Also, despite there being a lot of graffiti about, all of it stuck to the street furniture rather than the buildings adorned in hand-painted frescos.
- Practicality rules - Germany is such a practical nation. In the bit of rain that we had, everyone had an umbrella, was sensibly dressed and I even felt in the minority as we didn't have a raincover for our backpack! One of my favourite quotes of the holiday is when my son turned to me and asked for some walking poles for his birthday! (Grounded child achievement unlocked!). Also, no one bats an eyelid if you bring your own food to a biergarten (in the self serve area), we saw one person rock up, order a beer and some food and proceeded to gets some peppers out of a zip-locked bag to go with it.
- Driving - The roads are excellent, no traffic, no tolls, not potholes, and of course as fast as you like on the autobahns! I only came across a few dummkopfs racing down in the fast lane, but given the above 'practicality factor', everyone else seemed very sensible.
- Hedonic treadmill doesn't seem prevalent - We found this a lot travelling around but there doesn't seem to be the all-pervasive one-upmanshit going on that the vast majority of Brits seem to be suffering from. Probably linked to the "practicality" point above where this is maybe valued over style but I can't help but think this is also heavily linked to the fact that German licence plates don't show the age of the car and it is all but impossible to personalise your number plate. IMHO this mitigates the use of a new plated car as a vanity badge which is a major outlet of how people display their wealth in modern society, made even more obvious when it has a new year licence plate on.
- Beer - There was beer everywhere, and it was ridiculously cheap for a Western European country. You could pick up a bottle of local beer in a supermarket for £1, or even cans of Paulaner in Aldi/Lidl for 60-odd pence! There was pubs pretty much on every mountain for thirsty hikers, and even if the place is closed there will be a beer vending machine next to it! (see here). The beer is strong but it's just done a different way, it is savoured as opposed to it being a challenge on how fast you can drink/get drunk which again is a big negative of the UK culture. Now safely towards the end of my 30's I am much more used to drinking 1/2 and savouring them rather than going on full on drinking sessions. Saying that, there seems to be a growing movement and demand for non-alcoholic beer in the country with Munich's largest brewery announcing this year that they were releasing a non-alcoholic version.
All in all, this was an absolutely amazing holiday, and my organic memory box overfloweth with awesome memories. I found myself not worrying about money at all, and spending very freely on experiences and food/drink consciously reminding myself of the benefits that the 'memory dividend' (see 'Die With Zero') will bring to me, my wife and our kids. We are very keen on doing similar holidays in other areas in the near future, as well as returning back to Bavaria one day.
Given this is predominantly a money blog it would be remiss of me not to at least mention the high level cost. I won't go into granular detail as to be honest I didn't really watch the pennies that much, which is very unlike me! In total we spent just over £1000 on hotels (9 nights), rental car for an SUV with full protection over 5 days was £350, fuel was £50, flights were £500, then with all the experiences (including Zugspitze and Legoland) we probably spent the best part of another £1000. As mentioned above we ate out a fair bit, normally a big breakfast at the hotel and then a large meal early evening, tending to picnic our way around for lunch, so probably another £500 for food. So in all, with U-Bahn tickets/airport parking/insurance etc, roughly £4k which I think is a bargain for the experience we had.
Finance update
Net worth back on track this month after the small loss in April, up roughly £23k.
Breakdown is as follows:
- ISA was up £8k. £6k of which were new contributions, the rest was from stock gains.
- Pension was up £6.5k, only £666 of new contributions, the rest from gains
- Other investments, up over £8.5k. The vast majority of this was down to Bitcoin and Ethereum shooting up in price from April to March
That taken into consideration, the current tax year gain/loss looks like this, roughly up £20k. With crypto dropping from the start of April>start of June being the only loss here.
The current tax year targets now look like this.
ISA:
My ISA allowance for this tax year is now full, and is the quickest I've ever managed to fill it! Normally I fill it by around Christmas time, but what with the tax rebate in April as well as liquidating my Premium Bonds, I managed to front-load it at the start of the tax year this time.
All being well, I should be able to do the same next April, moving the GIA amount in the ISA wrapper. Obviously dependent on whether the next Government do anything around the ISA/allowances.
GIA:
With the above news that my ISA is filled, the next target is the GIA holdings. This is the first tax year I've been able to contribute meaningfully to a GIA, and with my June payslip I was able to contribute £1k to my GIA on the same platform as my ISA (Interactive Investor) given I get it fee free. Message me if you want a referral for the same fee-free deal, I have a couple of referrals left!
In other news...
Books
I've read a couple of books in May, carrying on my challenge to read 24 by the end of the year.
- Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien) - As mentioned in my April update I try and re-read this trilogy every couple of years. It's amazing how many new details you pick up!
- Letter to the Father (Franz Kafka) - I got recommended this by Ryan Holiday from The Daily Dad / The Daily Stoic. The book is basically a long letter that Kafka wrote to his Father about how ill-treated he was as a child at the hands of his father. I like to think of myself as a hands on Dad, who treats their kids with respect and kindness, thus I have treated this book as a way-marker for 'bad', basically "this is what bad parenting looks like and it has this effect on the child....carry on doing the opposite of this"
Board Games
Until next time!
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