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.
So instead of people living a wonderful life, people work and worry most of their lives, dreaming of better times to come after reaching retirement. The sad thing is, though, that these days it seems not so many people actually get to the finish of the rat race and enjoy their well earned pension anymore. With me becoming a little bit more aware of options (really, life is full of options, but if you keep looking at what's wrong you might end up only thinking everything in life is just wrong!) into the early retirement life, I thought maybe I could motivate myself a bit more with trying to calculate how much of this pension age I've scraped of. That's a nice marker I guess to tell me where I am and where I want to go. And maybe it'll act in a same way the debt-paying went and I'll speed things up so I don't end up like this guy?

No more coffee for this old worker please mister boss, it keeps soaking into my chair...

With my first pay-out this year, all of the earned euro's are actually totally mine (okay, I know, "what about your student debt!", but let's just consider those euro's to be covered in my net worth, shall we?). I did had to pay for my non-duality course so that set me back a bit, but there was still enough room left to 'pay myself first'. So I dropped 1K into my investing account and bought a couple of dividend yielding stocks. I am still trying to find out if I'm better of just investing in the Vanguard All World tracker or if I'm better of investing in selected individual shares of high yielding dividend stocks. The risks of the latter are higher, as are the investment costs, yet chances are I'll make a higher ROI over the years since the approach is a bit more aggressive.

I hope to make the new marker grow in time, I've got some ideas to make it show it's current value and the amount invested to clearly see results. I guess the first years won't make a big difference, but with a focus on the horizon I might be able to keep my motivation going. In the meantime, I might just as well start building a showdown of my portfolio since I've got no secrets here.

I really wonder how other people motivated themselves through the first hard years of accumulating without seeing much result in the form of returns, because I think I can learn quite a bit there. My mindset did change the past years and I'm more than ever aware of my spending and saving capability, but I tend to slack away a bit and loose focus when the chance comes by to enjoy life a bit more by spending a couple of euro's. With life always presenting chances like these, I need to keep telling myself what I really want in the long run and how I can be happy with everything I've got so I don't need to be working for another thirty six and a half years before I can be a pensionada.

Who else is in?