Every year Katie and I sit down and do an annual review of our finances. We want to know, what happened! Did our net-worth grow? Or shrink? Are we still on target for a prosperous future?

Ever since 2015 we have been doing monthly finance meetings and the annual one is a bigger, more in depth version of this, with more charts and discussion! We love that we have 9 years of data to look at now!

We started with an amazing breakfast and nice coffee (obviously!) and then broke out the laptops to do our numbers. Here is what we look at:

1. Net-worth – we update the numbers on all our accounts and work out the year on year changes
2. Spending – we track our spending for the year and where the money has gone. Then we work out if we got value or not from our purchases.
3. Gap – what’s the difference between what we spent and what we earnt and how much of that money went into investments. On our way to FI this was the critical number for us. Read on but this is the first year we have had a negative gap!
4. Charts – Katie produces some mega charts to show what has happened.
5. Questions and thoughts – just going through the accounts and numbers sparks thoughts and questions which we make a list of. This then inspires…
6. Actions – what the heck are we going to do about all this? Every year this conversation helps us improve things for the next year. We move things around, work on reducing fees, check we are happy with the funds we’re in etc.

This article is going to focus on net-worth, it will tell you the story of our year, what we focused on and our results. My hope is that it will give you plenty to think about and inspire you to do an annual review of your finances too!

We are planning a spending review article soon if we get time! We have bitten off a lot with the book, platform review and world’s first Financial Independence music album coming out in March!

If you get confused with any of the terms we use in this article and don’t know your ISAs from your SIPPs, check out Rebel Finance School, in particular week 8. It’s our free online course that we run each year which explains all about investing and investing in a tax-efficient way.

The story of our financial year…

2024 started for us in Bogota, Colombia. This is us doing our annual finance review for 2023, on the last working day of the year. Sat at Bacu Café in Bogota, coffee and breakfast (can you see a theme?)

You can read about 2023’s annual finance review here which also gives you more details about how exactly we run our annual review.

Katie’s birthday is in February and she turned 40 in 2024. The annual review made us think about Lifetime ISAs, which you can only open before you are 40! This inspired us to open a LISA for Katie and create an entire video series of us doing it. If you aren’t 40 yet then LISAs are the most tax efficient account we have in the UK and you should look at getting one. Check out the LISA series here.

We managed to get in before the deadline (just!) and filled Katie’s new LISA with £4,000 of VHVG, the FTSE Developed World ETF from Vanguard.

Why did we choose VHVG?
VHVG is an ETF. With Hargreaves Lansdown (the platform we chose) the platform fees are capped at £45 for ETFs but they’re not capped for index funds which is what we usually invest in. Curious where else our money is invested? Read on for a chart!

Every year 5th April sparks big discussions in the Donegan household! This is the end of the tax year in the UK and is a key part of making sure you’re invested in a tax efficient way. What does this mean for us and for you?

1. Check if you’ve got any tax advantaged account allowances remaining and if so, if you’re in a position to use up some more of it. We’re talking about SIPP, ISA and LISA in the UK. If you don’t use your ISA or LISA allowance each year you lose it. (With SIPPs you get a bit of grace and can invest some of previous years’ allowances.)
2. Get ready to use your tax advantaged account allowances for the coming tax year. New year, new allowances to use.
3. Do you have a taxable account? If so, you need to think about using your tax free capital gains allowance (£3,000 each year per individual for the 2024/2025 tax year). You can have a £3,000 capital gain on selling stocks and shares without paying any tax. You want to make sure you take advantage of this each year. This is only relevant if you have taxable accounts which most people won’t have because of the extremely generous allowances we have in the UK for our ISAs and SIPPs. You don’t have to pay any capital gains in SIPPs, ISAs or LISAs. A lot of people get confused about the tax on taxable accounts so we did a segment on this for you in the latest Rebel Finance School.

We aren’t earning as much any more so for us this is about selling off investments we have in our taxable accounts and moving them over to our tax advantaged accounts (ISAs and SIPPs).

The sooner you get your money invested into tax advantaged accounts and working for you the better. Get your money working for you as early as possible.

Katie and I have some money in taxable accounts (also called general accounts) which is the least tax efficient way to hold money.

So why do we have money in taxable accounts?

Two reasons.

1. Because at one stage we were earning really good money and we used up our ISA allowances and Alan’s SIPP allowance which leads me onto reason 2…

2. We actually stopped paying into Katie’s SIPP a while ago because there was a lifetime allowance (since removed) on SIPPs which we thought we might exceed so we put our money in a taxable account instead. You play the tax game at hand and as best as you can!

Now we’re working to get our money into the tax advantaged accounts as quickly as possible.

Bed and ISA is a strategy in the UK where you sell off investments in your taxable account, get the money into your ISA asap and rebuy the same investments. This protects any future capital gains from tax since it’s in your ISA. YAY

We sold off £38,055 of investments in general accounts and took that money, plus a little bit of cash and put it into our ISAs and Katie’s Lifetime ISA and used up both our annual allowances!

This means we were done for 2024 and don’t have to think about ISA allowances again until Feb/Mar 2025!

Do you have any money in general accounts that you need to Bed and ISA or Bed and SIPP this year? Are you planning how you can fill up your ISAs for the next tax year? Have you used up this year’s allowances as much as you can?

Some of our numbers have got really big. As I write this I am worried that some of you might be thinking “wow those numbers are huge, I will never have that much money!” You may be tempted to compare our situation with your own.

I just wanted to tell you that when we started this journey our first investments were £100 a month. We started small and invested as quickly as we could.

Through the power of compounding and focused work our numbers are now staggering. Yes we are astonished too.

When we ran Rebel Finance School this year we talked about compounding and how it can be confusing! It’s confusing at the beginning as it feels like nothing is happening and it’s even more confusing at the end when you think, how are the numbers this big!? We made a video all about compounding for you.

We hope that you take our numbers as inspiration for what might happen for you if you just keep going and invest as much as you can as often as you can.

And even if you will never have numbers like ours you can take our way of thinking, our approach to money, our strategies and apply it to your finances. This will help you make massive progress over time.

Remember never compare your pineapples. Start where you are.

Your job is just to work on improving your own situation and using all the tools, tips and ideas to create a phenomenal 2025!

This is a tree map chart of where our money is invested. We did some clean up in 2023 of some legacy investments. What do I mean by that?

When we started out we didn’t know what we were doing. We read an investment book and just took action. We bought some USA total market, we bought a UK index fund and bonds. Yes we even owned bonds as 30 year olds!

We fell into the trap of home country bias that we tell everyone to avoid. Why do you think we are so passionate about helping other people avoid it? Because our naivety cost us a lot of money!

Now things are a lot simpler but I still hold some USA total market which I bought in the very early days that I haven’t swapped to a global fund. Maybe I will in the future but at the moment it is not a huge percentage of our net-worth, so I don’t think it is worth changing.

Hover over or click on each box to see the amount we have invested and what percentage that is of our investments.

The size of the box in the chart represents the size of that fund in our personal investment portfolio. You might be thinking “Donegans! Come on, you tell everyone else to pick one fund and move on with it, why do you have more than one!?”

You would be right to ask us this! The reason we have more than one is that we have bought different things at different times. We have slowly reversed past mistakes, we used to own UK and Emerging markets but they have been sold and put into Developed World Ex UK.

Are we happy with the split?

Katie was surprised by how much the USA fund is now at 9% of our portfolio. Alan is very happy with the spilt as nearly all of our money is now in the Vanguard FTSE Developed World Ex UK.

Either the Developed World ex UK or Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap are great funds. They are mostly the same (78% at last count) so I don’t think it really matters which we have. I am in no rush to sell off one and put it in the other.

If I was starting again I would pick one fund and stick to that but for now I am super happy with our split.

Do you know what split you have between funds in your portfolio? Do you have one fund? Do you have legacy funds in old pensions that need changing? These things are worth taking control of!

Want to know what the difference between the FTSE Developed World ex UK and the FTSE Global All Cap are? Katie created some amazing charts and we did a quick video to explain.  You can watch it here.

We thought it would be fun to show how are fund split has changed over time since we started investing! So Katie went off and create a race chart to show it from 2015 onwards! Press the reset button in the bottom left hand corner to get it to play again!

You will notice a huge jump in our Developed World fund in November 2016. That is when we got the courage to invest all our cash after meeting JL Collins, Mr Money Mustache and the Mad Fientist. Yes we were scarred of lump sum investing at that time so we know how it feels, with guidance we also overcame this fear and went all in!

We still had emerging markets up until August 2023 when we sold it all off and consolidated into the FTSE Developed World ex UK.

What happened to our net-worth over the year. If you’ve been doing your monthly finance meeting you will have a good idea of what this has been for you as you have been watching the market roar on upwards this year! But how much did it go up by for us and for you?

Before we get to 2024, let’s add some context about what happened in the previous 2 calendar years. 2022 was a super rocky year, inflation hit hard after covid, the Ukraine war kicked off and it showed in the markets with a roller coaster ride. We aren’t really investing as much any more because we aren’t earning as much. Our investing used to smooth out some of the ups and downs but now you can really see the ups and downs of the market in our net-worth. We got used to £50,000 plus swings each month and more!

Katie and I were hopeful that 2023 would be a better year. The market on average goes up 10-12% a year. Some years it is down and some years it shoots up! So after a down 2022 we were hopeful that things would look up. The first few months weren’t great. We lost £40,000 from our portfolio in March. We didn’t actually lose anything because we didn’t sell, we still had the same number of units, but it is a shock when you see your portfolio go down.

As your portfolio grows in size you will have to become numb to market fluctuations. If you react when you see your portfolio drop by a big number and panic sell you are going to be in BIG trouble. So just get used to the ups and downs and learn to enjoy the roller coaster on the way!

After a slow start the market shot up for pretty much the rest of the year! 2023 rocked it.

So what happened in 2024? Here is the chart:

It was a pretty incredible year. The market roared up and up and when Trump was elected in November it went mental! There was a slight correction in December but over all the increase this year for us all have been AMAZING.

If you are invested in the same fund as us you would have got exactly the same returns as us as a percentage. That is what we love about the stock market, it doesn’t care if you are a single mum, black, white, gay, straight or from Basingstoke. We all get the same results!

Donegan key stats

• 18% increase in net-worth this year
• £342,453 total value increase even having spent more than ever. Isn’t compounding inspiring?
• Negative Gap: we spent more than we earnt this year. FYI this is the purpose of doing all this. You get to live off your portfolio and enjoy the money you invested.

Asset Allocation:

• 99.7% Stocks and Shares

• 0% Property (they are all gone! Yay. No more toilets.)

• 0.3% cash – £6,194 – this is a little low for Alan’s liking! We spent a lot this year celebrating Katie’s birthday and living full out.

This is a cool chart Katie created. It shows you the monthly increases or losses in our net-worth. My purpose in showing you this graph is to show you that even though the stock market went up this year there will still be down months!

You have to just get used to volatility (completely different to risk) in this game if you are to be successful long term.

You will see that in April our net-worth went down by £28,000, in July it went down again by £40,000 and then by £35,000 in December.

Even in a good year it is a bumpy ride which is why we say stay away from the news, avoid all the bullshit predictions and media and just track once a month.

Just keep on investing over time and ignore the noise, which gets bigger the bigger your portfolio gets! What did you get from this chart? What does it make you think? Please write it in the comments below.

The more you get used to looking at the numbers and understanding them the deeper your financial knowledge will become.

We have been doing this for 9 years now and every single time we do this, chat to you and run the course we get better. Just have fun figuring out the numbers and analysing them. Discuss them with a friend, another Rebel your partner and always be learning!

To put 2024 into a bigger picture here is the chart of our all time net-worth since we started tracking 9 years ago. Things to note:

1. Can you see the pandemic stock market crash? Doesn’t time put things into perspective?
2. Can you see the rocky 2022 year? This tested everyone’s nerves but we didn’t panic and we carried on investing.
3. Over time the the stock market just goes up, as seen through our net-worth!

Hover over or click on any of the points on the chart to see our net-worth at that point.

Creating all the charts, tracking the numbers was a lot of fun but without action what does it matter! Here are the highlights from our discussion this year:

1. Pension Platform Fees – Katie has a Standard Life Pension from when she worked at Deloitte. We both have SIPPs with Halifax and I have a Vanguard SIPP with a small amount in it that I have so we could do some videos to show you how to set up at Vanguard SIPP! We have realised that we are paying fees on all these platforms and need to consolidate. It will take us a few days to do this and coincides nicely with doing the platform review for all of you. Stay tuned for what we actually do but we will be reshuffling our platforms.
2. Cash is Critically Low – This year we have spent more than ever but we have avoided selling any of our assets to live off until right at the last moment. The longer you leave your money in the market the more it grows. So I am super happy we did this but we are going to have to sell something to live off in the next month or so. Someone has to pay for Katie’s jigsaws and my fancy breakfast out habit!
3. State pensions – None of these numbers include our state pension. I have 6 more years of stamp to contribute to get my full state pension. This gives us increased security in the future knowing that we have the state pension coming.
4. Vanguard fees – This month we noticed £47 come out of our account for Vanguard. Katie and I started wondering what this was for. I checked my account and Vanguard said they hadn’t taken anything extra. After some scratching of heads we realised that we had breakfast at the Vanguard Kitchen in Newark Airport and that is what the bill was for. Vanguard the investment platform was off the hook for that one! We did write an update about Vanguard’s new monthly fees here if you want to know more about them.
5. Market Growth – The market roared up by 20% this year which is just awesome! It won’t always be this way as you saw in the 2022 chart above. Who knows what 2025 has in store for us. Katie and I are quietly confident that AI, continued tech growth and many other factors will continue to grow the market. No matter what happens we just remember that on average it goes up by 10-12% a year. Even if we thought the market was going to go down we would just leave our money where it is because NOONE, yes I said NOONE can successfully time that.
6. Tax is the biggest expense you will ever have – keep your eyes on taxes, use your tax free allowances and don’t pay more tax than you have to. We will be doing a Bed and ISA again come March/April and will continue to focus on paying the right amount of taxes. We love contributing to the tax system as we want to be able to use the services, police, NHS and more just like everyone else. It is also important that we ALL take advantage of the tax breaks that the government give us to inspire us to save for our future. This is good for us all as they don’t have to look after us as much in retirement as we can afford to look after ourselves!

Donegan Thoughts

2024 was an amazing year in the market. Did you see your investments grow? Were you doing your monthly finance meetings?

Katie and I were so inspired seeing our investments grow as we worked to spend more freely and use the freedom we had bought through our investment and saving in early years.

We are so excited to see what happens next year!

Gets improved!

You can not know if you are heading in the right direction unless you measure. Your spending, your net-worth, how much you are investing (gap). If there is one thing that will keep you on track and continuously inspire you to take action it is the monthly finance meeting and the annual finance meeting!

If you are in the phase of life where you are building up your money and you aren’t tracking, how do you know if you are building wealth or not? How do you know if you will have enough for retirement? How do you know if you are spending more than you earn?

Use the spreadsheets the amazing Katie “Data” Donegan creates and track your finances. Future you will thank you for it. You can find links to all the spreadsheets on the resources page.

Current Katie and Alan are SO GRATEFUL for the work that past us did to get us here. We now have 9 years of data from our tracking and we love looking at it and seeing the progress.

If you have never done it before, start today, the quicker you start the quicker the data builds and the progress you make!

Do something today that future you will be grateful you did.

Comments

Katie and I want to know what you think. Please write your thoughts, comments, ideas for us to improve our work or just whether you are pleased with your 2024 results down below. We want to know. It is your comments and engagement that keeps us going on this content creation and community building journey!

Happy New Year

Sending you huge love. Happy New Year.

May your 2025 be your best year yet!

Katie and Alan

Disclaimer!

We are not financial advisers, nor do we claim to be. This is not financial advise. We are just a couple that has figured out the money game and wants to help you. Make you own decisions! You can read the full disclaimer here.