About me

Who is this Struggle dude, anyway?

Well... I'm a 33 34 35 37 years semi-young Dutch bloke who's trying to find his own path in life. Having studied music, management, engineering and software development I think you somewhat understand how lost I was am when it came comes down to choosing my way in life.

A couple of Ten years ago, I graduated mechanical engineering school, got a job, had a relationship, bought a house together with her and thought that would be it to live happily ever after. You might got the point already, I for sure didn't. Anyway. With me and her wondering where life would lead us, we came to the conclusion it wasn't meant to be and we split up, leaving her with the house and a ditch in her savings and me with an awful lot of debt (because I had no savings at the time). Hello, Real Estate Bubble exploding in your face.

I started paying monthly payments as anyone would have done and didn't look any further. I lived paycheck to paycheck, one day after another, spending whatever was left the days I wasn't working. I still am wondering what I spent my money on, but it must have been things I really didn't need since it where mostly things I can't really remember.

I took on a course in a more mindful direction to learn more about myself. I took another one because I had so much more to learn. And I took yet another one because I am finally beginning to understand little things about my own conditioning here in this society. And then I took more courses on self leadership and stuff like that and (update in 2020): I still didn't get the fact that it is my absolute own solely responsibility to live my life in the way I see a life best lived. I guess this is my ongoing quest.

I met a really lovely lady during the first one of those courses and we got along very well. A bit too well maybe, because we fell in love and are still together and mindfully learning from each other ever since (update in 2020: we are still together, still learning more and more of those crazy things on the concepts we have in our heads about life, love, everything).

Somewhere around the beginning of 2016 I must have gotten shook up and awake because my debt, which I was paying all along, month after month, started irritating me. Irritating me so much I went desperately looking for options to get rid of it. A colleague at the time pointing me out to the early retirement extreme website might have helped, too. Thanks MJ.

During that year, I made a difference. I made a plan to get rid of this debt in four instead of the remaining eight years. And then it happened. I started dumping everything I could in it. I moved to another city. I sold stuff, put the little savings I had in it, sold my car, tracked my spending that whole year. And when I hit the end of December, it was done. I managed to take on the remaining 15K within more or less eight months instead of the projected four years.

Then, I set my course onto saving as much as possible to gain some FU money, try to accumulate more so I can invest and try to live a healthy and fun life while doing so. Without the irritating debt pushing down on me, I hoped to find motivation in writing down my story here and keep track of what is happening. More or less to keep me on track and to grab my own responsibility in all of this. I wanted to be one of those 'financially free' people.

I kept journaling, I kept track of my spending and this financial awareness thing became more or less integrated into my life. Then I got a bore-out at my job. After struggling out of that one (not so much documented here on this blog) I quit that job and went for a complete retraining into the wonderful (really?) world of software development. Struggling more. And then we are where I am now, I guess, at a the point where I'm realising freedom is not just about money. So this journey takes off into a whole different level of perspective of freedom, of life and I have got absolutely no clue where this is going. But...

Feel free to join me on my journey!