The Last Dive In The Abyss

It's prepared. I've made the final call to the nice people of Freo who told me what this months' interest would be and which amount of money I had to throw in the deep dark abyss of personal debt to make it leave my life forever and always.

A nice 1.402,68 would do the job. So taking in account that my salary would be in my account somewhere around Wednesday, I decided to make The Moment happen at Thursday 22nd. My birthday. What better present could I ever give myself besides killing the vacuum of debt and closing the ever recurring loophole of darkness?

So I've set up my bank account transaction for Thursday. 1.403 euro's, just to be sure. Whatever is extra will be booked back anyway. Which would be a little bit of fun in itself, to receive money from the ones I owed for so long.

With me being 34 and debt free of of Thursday, it's time to really start to reconsider life.
I quit almost all of my bands (where the most recent one felt like family and i actually did feel something closely related to heartbreak feelings) to free up my agenda. Besides work and a one-monthly band rehearsal (the last remainder) I've got nothing, nada, noppes in my agenda for the whole year.

I've read a lot of PF blogs this year and the most inspiring ones for me keep being livingafi, lacking ambition, early retirement extreme and Mr. Money Mustache. The thing that struck me like a hammer in the back of my head (although I luckily have got no clue what that actually feels like) is that each and every one of these guys where smart enough to realize around their twenties that working for life and chasing consumerism dreams weren't their thing. They independently from each other became aware of the possibilities to be able to work hard, live frugal and retire early. Their passion was to be completely free, forever.

Of course I wish I had their wisdom around my twenties or something, but I hadn't. Luckily for me, I had my personal abyss of debt crushing my shoulders and a colleague who pointed me to the ERE website. Starting from being stuck an idiot at spending all my salary up to december 2015, I managed to take down most of my debt (15.500, a total of 82% of it to be precisely) since let's say Februari. Or maybe March of this year. So I wasted a lot of money in 2014 and 2015 and only payed around 9% of the debt every year, I managed to kill it the next year. Holy Crap.

Of course, I sold a lot of stuff and began living cheaper and cheaper to get things done. But eventually, I made it. And now 2017 sits out waiting to begin. And I am wondering how the hell I'm going to pull things of. With my current job, it's virtually impossible to save 15K next year. Doing so would need a saving rate of approximately 50% and I'm nowhere there yet with my current budget. Besides, I don't have any more luxury stuff to sell to give me a heads up start.

I've talked to my manager in my yearly job evaluation about feeling under-payed since all of my colleagues are Sr. making a couple hundred of euro's more every month where I am not even while my job got increasingly busier with more assets to take care of. I've been sent away with a promise "he'll talk it through with his manager but he couldn't guarantee anything since it's not his call". Which felt like he's just not going to take stand for me in there. That, along with not really knowing if there's a way to drive up my current income in another job, makes me wonder what the hell I could do to speed things up a little.

Livingafi has shared his job series with the web and I read them all. He made an astonishing amount of money which is, with the difference in taxes here in the Netherlands, nearly impossible to be made just by being an IT guy. Besides, the trouble there is, I'm not even an IT guy. I'm an educated mechanical engineer who knows he's going nuts with staring at a screen all day. Who, besides, in the last years discovered he doesn't like engineering so much anyway and is more or less clueless of what to do at all. For fish's sake. So next year will also be a year of looking around for improvement in the professional world.

And 2017 will be for budgetting, too. I'm fairly used at staring at spreadsheets nowadays.
So first of, I'm going to build a new balance for 2017. With the pension age rising and rising I don't see myself legally being able to quit work before let's say 75. So with me realizing that I might have to work for the following 40 years, I have to make some changes myself here. 

One is cranking up my savings rate. For every year I manage to save let's say 50%, there's a year of retirement coming my way.

Two is looking around to make more money. Kind of clueless there for now.

Three is looking around for a job which doesn't kill my creativity and eats me alive. With my current job being fairly easy-going yet kind of totally not-challanging I am going to have to talk around a bit. Maybe internal courses might help me here. Maybe outsourcing myself to another employer might be the trick. Maybe i could try to beat online poker this time! (Note to self: this didn't help you get anywhere 10 years ago so maybe that's not your thing!).

Four is trying to find a bit more balance. Which really should be one. I feel tired most of the time. My work isn't killing me like the stories I've read on different blog rolls. Yet it's exhausting because it's dreadful and because I ws convinced I had no other options because I was obliged to pay a fair amount of debt. Now that's gone and my agenda is more or less empty, I hope to start and see a bit more color in my life and in the world. I want to get a bit more healthy and try to find out what really drives me (which seems to be a theme throughout my life). I want to spend more time with people I like and be inspired. Be able to say "YES!" to things again instead of a mumbling "hmmokay...".

Maybe that's what's most important for me for 2017. Be a Life Enthusiast again!