Goals are for suckers, so I set myself a new one

As always I'm philosophin' about money, work, financial freedom, burn out, relationships, the whole sjabang. The thing is, since I lack motivation and discipline and most of the other succes factors as I've read lately and also, writing and reading aren't good for your future either (so what the heck are you doing here anyway?) I noticed I'm the one nagging for change but seem to be refusing to actually do anything. Because hey, impossible goals and to lazy/unmotivated/undisciplined to start working on them. I'm gonna be waiting until it feels right.

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!

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.

2017 Spending forecast

A weather forecast can't be looking far more than a couple of days into the future and there's no way we can influence weather (okay, there are some conspiracy theories on this subject but that's way beyond my point here, or at least way off topic).

On my spending (and maybe even on my future income) I've got major influence. So a spending forecast can be done for a whole year.

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.

Bye bye 2016, bye bye personal debt

So this was it for 2016. It was a moving year. Literally since I moved from one town to another city. Figural speaking since I moved most of my money from being spend monthly to being freed-up to dump into the deep dark abyss called personal loan to finally being all mine as from the first salary payment in 2017.

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.

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.

40 days to freedom... and then what?

The timer on the right tells me I'm 40 days away from freedom. At least, freedom of debt. Nothing to do about it anymore, it can't go any faster (and why should it?) and it's nearly impossible do be done any later.

Basically, with reaching my goal, I've been wondering what do do next. I feel like I'm pretty comfortable with living below my means, so I am not too worried I won't save a lot of money the upcoming year. What I'm wondering about now is what drives me. What is my deeply intrinsic motivation in life. I am feeling a bit lost there.

I've recently picked up a new course in self-leadership from non dual perspective, I hope this will bring me closer to what really inspires me. It's not that I can't come up with things to do; I can think of hundreds of things to do, but all of those things don't seem to really touch me or give me energy anymore. And that feels somewhat depressing yet at the same time like the moment in my life to go and look  deeper into my own self. Why do I do what I do and what happens when I let go of all the things I used to do?

A solution for decluttering

While posting my last post about attachment, a thought hit my mind. The reason I keep my cd's in a drawer, for instance, is so I can't see them. They are nicely tucked away and when I open up the drawer, I feel a bit of the attachment and emotion there is in that drawer.

I think this happens with a lot of stuff people tend to keep close, but out of sight. Sometimes even not so close in a storage, but out of sight anyway. I think it's not a 'maybe, one day, I could use it'. I honestly believe it's the attachment to the piece of stuff. In an ongoing consumerism world, what we 'have' shows for who we 'are'. I have, so I am. For some reason I manage to become a staring time traveler whenever I see stuff from the (even sometimes not so) good old days.

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...

Done with it.

I’ve closely monitored my emotional, physical, working and financial situation and I’m done with it. And to be honest, I’m also done with being done with it. It lacks productivity, motivation and gets me nowhere. So no more complaining and time for change. I’ve come to realize that I lack goals in my life at this moment and the lack of a goal makes me be lazy, unproductive, feeling down and wanting to sleep all day. Heading towards a bored-out you could say, with some serious aspects in my life that need attention. No more hiding my head in the sand, but time to pick myself up, dust myself of and give myself the highly demanded ‘kick-under-the-butt’ forward.