Transportation

I've got a confession to make. Three weeks into my study I witnessed an accident on the highway. Two cars right before me crashed into each other flipping one of those cars on the side. Luckily there where many people coming to the rescue and the people in the car weren't injured heavily, but it was a great shock to see it happen front-row.

Q2 recap

Okido, another quarter gone, another recap to be made. Even though I've been talking about an insane savings rate, you could have also been reading my moving story which turned out pretty costly yet still worth it.

All things added up my real savings rate isn't up-and-running so far. And to undisclose another thing, I actually calculated my SR a bit wrong (since I was calculating it as a percentage of my total expenditure and not of my total income). Anyway. I updated my spreadsheet (also in my Q1 recap) and now it's telling no more lies (actually, my SR comes out a bit better with the correct formula). So here are the numbers for Q2!

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.

The Move, was it worth it?

So I moved. As stated, I moved within my block to a 31% smaller place for 26% less rent. Initially, I calculated some redecorating costs (including painting the place white and putting in some roof windows since this attic living place was kind of dark) and was hoping to break-even somewhere around 6 months. As these things tend to go, I also ended up putting in a laminate floor and creating a fancy OSB designer-style kitchen (which could partly be used from my old place since I already had done that there). 

As you can imagine, flooring doesn’t come cheap and with everything added up I spent somewhere around 1.600 euro’s for everything (including lighting and other miscellaneous stuff). With me saving 125 euro a month on rent, this means I need to stay here for at least thirteen months to break even. I really don’t have a clue whether I’ll stay that long (I did live in the former space for sixteen months and I do like my new place, but you never know how life moves you). So was it all worth it?

Movement, again

Mindblowing busy as my mind can be, I’ve been constantly staring at my spreadsheet and wondering how I could possibly save more. Me moving to another city and downscaling was one of the biggest leaps I could have made. In hindsight, that was a life changing moment last year but ever since, only so much spending could be allocated in a different way. As always, this is an ‘spend less and/or earn more’ equation. With living somewhere around my budgeted amount (and feeling this is as barebones as I am willing to go at this moment) there wasn’t really that much to scrape off on the spending side.

One-and-a-half Joe Average

I’m one-and-a-half Joe Average.

Q1 recap

Strugglers World, Strugglers World, Recap Time, Excellent!!

Spending Recap 2016

As promised, a spending recap. It will come as no surprise that most of my whatever money I could get a grip on was dumped in killing my debt. So, as a result, that portion is, well... fairly big.

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.

Life costs per second

With my current investigtions and spreadsheet it occured to me I could quite easily calculate what my life costs me per second nowadays. Turns out, my current yearly budget (in which I am trying to get out of debt and without saving really anything) my life right now costs me 0,107 cent every second. Even though that sounds like hardly anything, this adds up to 6 cents a minute; 3,86 an hour (still seems like nothing) yet this ups to an mindblowing 92,66 per day!

With me glued to my screen for the past tho days reading a very interesting blog of a man capable of living of only around 500 a month, paid through rents he gets paid from property he bought after a couple of years of hard labour and frugal living while only somehere in his mid twenties this makes me very, very aware of the fact that I, at 33 right now and still only paying of a debt and hardly saving, am ages behind.

Here's my plan!

Ok. So after moving, I supposed to save some 3K extra annually. That would mean I could more than double up my downpayments on my long term loan... take a look at my new figures...

Debt-O-Meter

Ok. This is where I am right now. With my current downpayment rate, I still have 84 months to go. 84 months! For me being 33 years of age, that feels like a 'lifetime-in-jail-card' for my game right now.

Here's how this looks in figures...

Movement!

Yes! Movement!

After my confronting personal finance investigation, leaving me with a spedings which kind of makes my stomach go a little shaky for the least, I felt the urge of movement. Some of my biggest expences where rent and my car. Especially travelling to and from work kind of kick in, as you could see. Problem is, where I lived (in Dordrecht) there was no way I could get to work in time using public tranportation. By bike wasn't an option eather with times up to 1,5 hour single trip.

This got me looking for a place closer to work, but I didn't want to spend more on rent. Well, that made things a bit more difficult since rents in Rotterdam are 750 and upwards (more 1000 and upwards if you don't want to rent a place you never ever want to be). Excluding utilities, that is.

Private Investigations

Dududududumdumdum... always reminds me of the Dire Straights... Cool song. And I love cool songs.

What I don't love is my recent confrontation with my personal finance situation. I wanted to get a grip on things, and since I'm working with yearly budgets in my professional life, why not apply them to my personal life too? Well, because of what I told you... it's confronting.