Love and attention is always the answer

After my last post on stuff I took some more time for myself and putting things in perspective (and I sold one of the MacBooks, which of course gave a little more breathing room). The thing is, we human people are pretty decent hardwired by default, yet the programming part (or conditioning or whatever you call it) can sometimes contain bugs. Most of those bugs are created in our youth in reaction on receiving (or needing) love and care of our parents. And no matter how hard they try, there will always be deficiencies that you want to be made up for in one way or another. This making up for might grow out into behavior that might not be of best interest to one other.

Why I hate stuff

The other day I noticed a beautiful quote.

And man, did I need to get myself into some things-chasing behavior before finally noticing what's going on.

Q2 recap

Okido, another quarter gone, another recap to be made. Even though I've been talking about an insane savings rate, you could have also been reading my moving story which turned out pretty costly yet still worth it.

All things added up my real savings rate isn't up-and-running so far. And to undisclose another thing, I actually calculated my SR a bit wrong (since I was calculating it as a percentage of my total expenditure and not of my total income). Anyway. I updated my spreadsheet (also in my Q1 recap) and now it's telling no more lies (actually, my SR comes out a bit better with the correct formula). So here are the numbers for Q2!

Savings rate ramp up!

With my monthly income somewhere around 2.5K and my fixed charges (rent, utilities, insurance) being less than 600 euro’s monthly my savings rate is extraordinary since the beginning of this month. Including some money for groceries, fuel and even a fun thing here and there I’m up and running 60%. Whooha!


Did I mention I didn’t even include my vacation allowance and end-year bonus within this net income? So truly, vacations and other stuff aren’t even influencing my SR here.

Pretty neat, but the challenge for now truly is not spending more. As you’ve read, my spending while moving was quite a lot. Of course this made my living place cozy and neat, but for now I’ll have to stay put for at least a year before even breaking even here.

The Move, was it worth it?

So I moved. As stated, I moved within my block to a 31% smaller place for 26% less rent. Initially, I calculated some redecorating costs (including painting the place white and putting in some roof windows since this attic living place was kind of dark) and was hoping to break-even somewhere around 6 months. As these things tend to go, I also ended up putting in a laminate floor and creating a fancy OSB designer-style kitchen (which could partly be used from my old place since I already had done that there). 

As you can imagine, flooring doesn’t come cheap and with everything added up I spent somewhere around 1.600 euro’s for everything (including lighting and other miscellaneous stuff). With me saving 125 euro a month on rent, this means I need to stay here for at least thirteen months to break even. I really don’t have a clue whether I’ll stay that long (I did live in the former space for sixteen months and I do like my new place, but you never know how life moves you). So was it all worth it?

Movement, again

Mindblowing busy as my mind can be, I’ve been constantly staring at my spreadsheet and wondering how I could possibly save more. Me moving to another city and downscaling was one of the biggest leaps I could have made. In hindsight, that was a life changing moment last year but ever since, only so much spending could be allocated in a different way. As always, this is an ‘spend less and/or earn more’ equation. With living somewhere around my budgeted amount (and feeling this is as barebones as I am willing to go at this moment) there wasn’t really that much to scrape off on the spending side.

One-and-a-half Joe Average

I’m one-and-a-half Joe Average.

Q1 recap

Strugglers World, Strugglers World, Recap Time, Excellent!!

Fears and cravings (2)

Even though this one refers to a post quite a while ago, the subject is more or less the same.

Fast forwarding from then to now, I managed to get pretty far. Pretty far in killing my debt, pretty far in personal growth and pretty far in creating a spending habit that feels damn good while still being able to save and invest quite a lump of money. At years' start, my monthly spending forecast looked quite good. Being able to save around 30% of my income seemed manageable (and is, really!).

Now that I'm well away and the first quarter passed, I am beginning to feel some cravings here and there. This started with a feeling I did want to go away for a weekend or week or something. See the world. Which is quite ridiculous since I blown of this idea in the first months of this year since I wanted to save money and vacation days for a long trip by the beginning of next year. The next crazy thing was wanting to buy STUFF! Hmmm.. Need STUFF!!!

Decluttering, the sequel

A while ago I wrote a short post on a possible solution for decluttering. It worked with my clothing; just getting it out of the closet and into a pile made me feel better and better about just getting stuff out of the way. So I bagged it up and took it to the Red Cross container. With my CD's and Lego it didn't really work that good. I still just can't seem to let go of my old Lego since I'm in one way or another attached to the darned thing. And if attachment isn't all of it, it simply also does look AWESOME

70 and a half

The official retirement age keeps rising here in the Netherlands. I am not quite sure how this is arranged in the rest of the world (I do know some people will never be able to retire while others are there when they're just over fifty years old) but at this moment, my pension date would be 70 years and 6 months if I simply rely on working, spending all my dough every month and pay the (ever rising) pension fee from my income. With me being thirty four that means I'm halfway between birth and pension. The trouble with these kind of calculations is that you can calculate that, but you can't calculate where you are between birth and death.

Thumbs up!

With me driving around in one of the smalles car imagineable (and me being 1.89 and a thirty-something guy where most thirty-something people crave to drive around in bigger and faster cars) on the Dutch highway, my left mirror showed me the nose of a car remarkably resembling my own Green Hornet (actually, it was exactly the same type and color car). When the car drove past me, me and it's driver (a tall guy more or less my age) both smiled and gave each other a big Thumbs Up! What a fun moment, two people who are probably both more concerned about what matters in life and saving for better times instead of spending all day struggling to keep up with our ego's. That made my day!

2017 Spending forecast

A weather forecast can't be looking far more than a couple of days into the future and there's no way we can influence weather (okay, there are some conspiracy theories on this subject but that's way beyond my point here, or at least way off topic).

On my spending (and maybe even on my future income) I've got major influence. So a spending forecast can be done for a whole year.

Spending Recap 2016

As promised, a spending recap. It will come as no surprise that most of my whatever money I could get a grip on was dumped in killing my debt. So, as a result, that portion is, well... fairly big.

Transfer

Happy New Year!

I hope you've all enjoyed whatever you did to celebrate the transfer from one year to another, and may this be a good one for all of us!

With the debt-O-meter down to I-Owe-No-One-What-So-Ever, it's time to rethink the whole concept. I think of transforming the whole thing to a save-O-meter. Sounds logical and since it's my blog, I get to do what I want. I am thinking of a number to gain for this year and it's yours to see if I make it by the end of the year. How's 10K working for you? I sure as hell hope I get there.