Somewhere last year I've hit a major milestone: my Net Worth for the first time ever exceeded 100K. 100.000 euro's. It's INSANE. I've never ever thought getting here ever since the start of this blog was about struggling in life in general and having a debt of nearly -20.000 euro's. And even though I was more or less adding up the numbers every now and then, really making it here and even beyond feels... surreal?
I'm not really sure how to put it. The first 10K where a relief. Getting to 20K was scary. Passing that and going into reschooling, Covid crash, new job etc. was more or less "okay, cool, I can make this through without really having to worry". What a bless. Then came 30, 40, 50K... and to be honest, even though I did count every now and then and filling in my quarterly numbers in my spreadsheet, the second 50K wasn't really something that was on my mind a lot. I've automated my investments, build and dismantled a deposit ladder, opened up a second and third brokerage account and moved some money around every now and then. That's what sometimes made me smile a bit, being able to shift 20K from a bank account into a brokerage account. It's not even that bizarre for me anymore, but when you think about it, 20K is something I can live off for over a year and for lot's of people it's an entire yearly salary!
This is in no way meant as a humble brag or anything, it's just that I find it bizarre that you get used to "just having your own back". What's even more fascinating is the fact that when I didn't have any money and was living paycheck to paycheck, I wasn't that scared about it (stressed for not being free from debt, yes! But not scared about losing money). Now, this feeling shifted to wanting my money to work for me, but also not wanting to loose my money. And I'm still a bit troubled about this shift in mindset. Actually, I would want this to shift more to a relaxed mindset since I need to sit through both this accumulation phase and, hopefully, an extraction/die-with-zero phase later on in life. And live a little while doing so.
Technically, I'm more or less at 25%. When asking Gemini for some advice it even stated I could maybe relax, work less days a week, let compounding do it's magic, but in this crazy geopolitical world and having a well paying full-time job I'm simply going to continue the grind for now and hope to make it to 200K asap, of which most of it invested by then. That's when compounding really should start working.
So for now, I simply enjoy technically having covered over 3 months of expenses and am going to fiddle around with some numbers to try and come up with a plan to mitigate my feeling of living parallel lives.
Struggler FI Status - Jan '26
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