February 2025 update

 

Finance update

A terrible month for portfolio returns! Down £37k, my worst month on record. Previous to this month, my worst month was January 2022, down £26k. 

I mentioned in my last monthly update that February wasn't looking great, in the first few days my portfolio was down £20k, and after a brief recovery, it then sunk again towards the end of the month.

Breakdown for February:

• ISA down £9k
• Pension down £13k
• GIA/easy access savings down £300
• Crypto down £12.5k
• House price up £4k

• Total: down £37k

The bulk of the loss has come from my Crypto holdings, which having been involved in Crypto for 10 years is something that I'm not a stranger to! You see from the graph that I've only contributed to my pension and my GIA/savings this month, all of this has been in cash / Premium Bonds rather than being invested and I'm waiting until the start of the new tax year to move over to my ISA.

2024/25 tax year:

Total change for the financial year is now a gain of £146k

Side hustle update:

Almost £2k in passive side hustle income for February. 9x Interactive Investor referrals and 1x Octopus referral. Total for the year has now passed £10k!

Non-Finance update

• Unpaid Parental Leave
• In February, I've taken my first week of Unpaid Parental Leave having applied for 8 weeks in total for 2025. I've taken this over Half Term and we went to Rotterdam and to Warwick Castle with the kids.
• I've written up about Unpaid Parental Leave in a separate blog post here

• Trips
• Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (work)
• At work I got the opportunity to go across to Saudi Arabia, to progress the establishment of a new office as well as to attend the LEAP exhibition
• The exhibition itself was around 60km North of Riyadh, had 250k attendees, and no public transport to get there. Luckily we had people helping us with lifts, but even then the traffic was insane! It took roughly a 4 hour round trip every day to get there and back. The size of the car parks and the sheer number of cars on the road was off the scale.
• I also wasn't a massive fan of the food over there. It was all greasy fast food, and the only national dishes we had were loaded with cardamom and cloves, bleurgh! Saying that, I had a really nice kabsa (like a Middle-Eastern Biryani) and some very tasty camel sambosas
• The lowlight of the trip was the connection at Istanbul airport. The place was grim. It was heaving with people (even at crazy o clock in the morning!), it absolutely stank of smoke (the smoking area just blowed back into the departure lounge!), you had to fight for a seat, and the prices were gobsmacking! The price of beer/wine at a coffee shop was €20-24! After a bit of digging I've found out that a recent study has Istanbul Airport down as the priciest in Europe for eating/drinking, a croissant at €16.50, a coffee for €10, ham and cheese sandwich for €16.50, bottle of water for €6! Ouch!

• Rotterdam (family)
• As mentioned above, during half term we went to Rotterdam with the kids. This was on a P&O mini cruise from Hull>Rotterdam. It was a short break that seemed much bigger than it actually was, the kids really enjoyed the novelty of sleeping on a boat in a cabin all together, and boarding/disembarking. We slept overnight on the way there, had a short coach transfer into the city, then had about 6/7 hours in the city to explore.
• We decided to go to the Maritime Museum which had a great interactive exhibition about work on an oil rig, although if it didn't have this exhibition I probably wouldn't go back as the rest of the museum was fairly meh.
• We also ate our way around the marketplace, including the purchase of mountains of cheese, stroopwafels, raw herring sandwiches and chips with pindasaus (peanut butter sauce!)

• Warwick Castle(family)
• The other trip during half term was to Warwick Castle. I've not been here since I was little, but we spotted some decent ticket and hotel offers a few months ago so decided to give it a go, and visit some family in the area at the same time.
• We all had a great time, and especially enjoyed the birds of prey show, the knowledge of the person doing it as well as the display the birds put on had us coming back for the second showing as well! Highly recommended!

• Allotment
• After poor results last year, and a winter full of ignoring my plot, I finally spent a few hours sorting it out during February.
• I pulled up the cavolo nero kale that was overwintering, and surprisingly was really good considering I've ignored it for 3 months!
• I weeded the entire plot and plonked about 10 barrows of compost onto them. Before and after shots below!

 

That's it, that's the update,

See you next time!