Financial Planning - 2018 Annual Review

We're now exactly halfway into our 10-year Grand Plan, which would be cause for celebration if it wasn't so bloody depressing that five years seem to have come and gone in the blink of an eye ...

Anyway, here's the usual two graphs.

SAVINGS POT to Mar-18

SIPP POT to Mar-18

There's been decent progress again in both the Savings and SIPP pots.  The SIPP pot target has almost been reached, five years early, because I've been adding substantially more to the SIPP in the last three years than I'd planned to at the outset.   

The Savings pot was always much larger than the SIPP pot, deliberately so because at the time the SIPP money was tied-up and inaccessible, but I'm now of an age where drawdown would be possible and therefore there's less reason to discriminate between ISA and SIPP savings.

As reported last year, I'm now also monitoring the progress against the combined portfolio spreadsheet, and the target sum I calculated back in 2013 will be met when the total portfolio growth reaches 225%.

Based on the current trend line, and given reasonably fair winds going forward, we would hope to reach the target perhaps a couple of years earlier than initially planned.  

However, to achieve this there's still some heavy lifting work to be done, in the form of further substantial additions to the pot over the next few years - investment growth and compounding etc will not be enough by themselves.

Barring disasters, we should be able to continue with a reasonable savings rate for a while longer - see this post from 2014.   

Although the flow of paid work has been very intermittent over the last few years, for which I'm not complaining because it gives me a lot of free time, we've still managed to bank enough cash in the company for it to maintain our current salaries and meet all its other financial commitments for at least the next couple of years.

So we remain cautiously optimistic as we enter the sixth year of the plan ...