Be careful what you wish for

Remember my last post, stating "this car will never ever fail on me"? Well. It did.
Not some major issue that got fixed for around 500 euro's. Still hurts, but my emergency fund had no problem fixing that.

Yet ever since I calculated my possible savings by changing cars of quit driving a car completely this has been on my mind. Not like a light breeze but like one hell of a big hammer hitting me in the head every time I blinked my eyes.

By simply switching cars I can save >1K yearly. That means 50K over the next 50 years. That seriously adds up. Even if this new vehicle gives up on me every 5 years that would still be profitable. And as I stated above... even a Volvo can break down.

So I'm currently looking around for decent Nissan Micra / Toyota Starlet kind of cars. They tend to do very well in tests and are the cheapest of cheapest when it comes down to monthly costs. Plus, repairs aren't that big of a deal (yet that's a big gamble with every second hand car).

This means around 100 a month extra to go into the housing debt. Might not seem like a lot but this ends up in being done paying up two months earlier. Yippie!

I'm also trying to figure out if it's possible to live more frugal. (Okay, I know it's possible given my expences but it seems like I still need a big kick in the butt for going harder at it). I'm looking for a cheap summer holiday. I am willing to be going at a 50% saving rate somewhere soon (with killing my debt mostly keeping me from that now).

Also. I'm selling my e-drumkit. I bought it last year when I got admitted to a new band and I really needed the practice, but now I kind of feel stupid for it since it costed me a big amount of cash I could better have dumped into my debt. I hope to sell it for around 1,5K so I can kill my debt with another 15% or so somewhere the next two months.

What did keep me awake some nights is the fact that I'm reading so much information about financial independence and retiring early that I really hated the fact that I didn't come up with the idea (or read it anywhere) sooner. But hey. Life is life, I'm happy to BE alive and I'm happy I got into this big confrontation with myself at 33 instead of 55. With a little (okay, a lot) of effort i might still make it to retire at 55. Which is a major gain since retirement ages are 67 in the Netherlands at the moment and are suspected of climbing ever farther up to 70 and over. So no matter how big the efforts are, if I can be ahead of that scenario with something around 15 years, hell yeah, let's GO FOR IT!

Funny. That motivates me to look at my expenses once more :-)