September 2024 update

Bang on time this month for a change!

Finance update

Breakdown for September:

• After being £15k down in August, the portfolio ended up bouncing back with +£28k in September!
• ISA up £8.8k
• Pension up £7.3k
• I contributed £3.2k to my GIA/easy access savings, and this was also up £1.4k
• After my Crypto holdings last month being down £12k, it bounced back £6.5k in September

2024/25 tax year:

Overall in the tax year I'm looking at +£57k. Crypto is still down overall from April to now, however this was due to the ATH for Bitcoin being hit in April. I am continuing to purchase both Bitcoin and Ethereum on a weekly basis, and have done since January.

A few additional charts in this update, here's a look at the historical monthly difference in Net Worth. The past could of years has been very consistent, and despite the sizable drop last month, the dotted blue line is sitting nicely between £10-20k a month increase.

And this chart shows the Net Worth progress, currently at £1.08m which I still have to pinch myself at! For the past few months the pension amount has been above the house equity amount.

Finally, this chart shows the proportion of each element within the portfolio. House and pension are a third each, with ISA at 20% and the rest being GIA/Savings accounts (8%) and Crypto (6%). I'm fairly comfortable with this split and don't see it changing much in the future. The fully paid off house, as well as a portion of my pension being DB is the safety net. The rest of the Pension, the ISA and GIA are the growth power house, and the Crypto is the wild-card.  

Non-Finance update

The kids went back to school at the start of September but we still managed to squeeze in one last trip! Helped by the fact that their school had their first day back as an inset day, we decided to go glamping on the North Yorkshire/Cleveland border just past Whitby. We've done loads of camping over the years but this would be our first time glamping. We stayed at a lovely small campsite where they had about half a dozen bell tents. Ours had a double bed, two fold out beds, a small log burner and a BBQ/fire pit....luxury!

We stayed there for 2 nights, and visited Whitby, Saltburn, Staithes and Runswick bay. The kids have been learning about James Cook at school so it was great to see his house in Staithes. On the way back we drove the scenic route though Goathland (made famous by the filming of 'Heartbeat'), and we did a short walk to see the waterfall 'Mallyan Spout'. Filling up our cups from the waterfall!

The rest of September has gone by in a flash, between school, work, and a few busy weekends involving Cubs camps away / Rainbows trips out. We've done a few more local walks and although my allotment hasn't produced the best this year, it is still looking very colourful with chard and cavolo nero kale looking good.

I've smashed out 5 books in September, getting closer to my 24 book target for the year!

• The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place - Andy Crouch (⭐⭐⭐⭐☆)
• The Great Taking - David Rogers Webb (⭐⭐⭐⭐☆)
• The Trading Game: A Confession - Gary Stevenson (⭐⭐⭐☆☆)
• Greenlights - Matthew McConaughey (⭐⭐⭐☆☆)
• The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness - Jonathan Haidt  (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)

The last book on this list was particularly good and I can not recommend this book enough, for parents, for those in the care of children, for those that plan on having children, and for anyone else that is worried about the use of smartphones and social media by younger and younger children.

Haidt's central tenet of the book is that over the years we have overprotected children in the real world and under protected them in the virtual world. With an absolute tonne of scientific studies he explores the link between what he called the "great rewiring of childhood" aka the wholesale adoption of smartphones and social media amongst children roughly between 2010-2015 and the impact on them, most notably their mental health. In this period "depression became roughly two and a half times more prevalent", and this is backed up to a point where Haidt not only shows that social media does not just correlate with an exponential increase in mental illness, it causes it. This is not ok.

"Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be okay." A worrying amount of parents I see seem fairly happy to chuck a smartphone to a toddler as a way of pacifying them. This is not ok.

The sections of the book are broken down extremely well, and focuses on the issue separately for girls and boys. Girls seem to have been adversely affected more than boys, especially around social media and image based apps such as Instagram and Tiktok, for boys it is less an issue for social media but more so for pornography on a wide proportion and video games amongst a small percentage:

"the companies had done little or no research on the mental health effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns. Companies that strive to maximize “engagement” by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys"

Haidt also outlines what we can do about it in 4 steps:

-No smartphones before high school 

-No social media before 16 

-Phone-free schools 

-Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

Given the ramifications outlined in the book, I find it very hard to disagree that any of the above is overkill.

I can honestly say that this is one of the best books I've read. I've always been sceptical of giving young children effectively the worlds most powerful drug, most adults I know have issues with overuse of smartphones so what chance does a small child have! Regardless, It will hopefully change the futures of my children and through advocating the best practices outlined in the book via the charity work with children that I do will hopefully change other children's lives for the better as well.

If anyone is interested in signing up to "Smartphone Free Childhood", which is a UK movement to get momentum and awareness amongst parents, then the link is below. They have local Whatsapp groups and a tonne of resources on their website.

https://smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/

That's it, that's the update.

Until next time!