Savings rate ramp up!

With my monthly income somewhere around 2.5K and my fixed charges (rent, utilities, insurance) being less than 600 euro’s monthly my savings rate is extraordinary since the beginning of this month. Including some money for groceries, fuel and even a fun thing here and there I’m up and running 60%. Whooha!


Did I mention I didn’t even include my vacation allowance and end-year bonus within this net income? So truly, vacations and other stuff aren’t even influencing my SR here.

Pretty neat, but the challenge for now truly is not spending more. As you’ve read, my spending while moving was quite a lot. Of course this made my living place cozy and neat, but for now I’ll have to stay put for at least a year before even breaking even here.

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.

Thumbs up!

With me driving around in one of the smalles car imagineable (and me being 1.89 and a thirty-something guy where most thirty-something people crave to drive around in bigger and faster cars) on the Dutch highway, my left mirror showed me the nose of a car remarkably resembling my own Green Hornet (actually, it was exactly the same type and color car). When the car drove past me, me and it's driver (a tall guy more or less my age) both smiled and gave each other a big Thumbs Up! What a fun moment, two people who are probably both more concerned about what matters in life and saving for better times instead of spending all day struggling to keep up with our ego's. That made my day!

Saving myself

With self-leadership on one side and a little bit of the flu on the other side I'm right in the middle of them here on my couch.

I calculated I can live of about 50% of my monthly income without really having to not-do anything beside traveling, eating out and join personal courses. With all those fun things my saving rate goes down, of course. I am still trying to find a balance between those things. Without some kind of free period every now and then I'll go crazy, yet it IS crazy to spend all your money ON and IN those free periods leaving you with nothing but to work for the next one. For now, the focus is on killing my personal loan by the end of the year.