I am my biggest problem in life

It took me over ten years, lots of self-help books and personal training and finally a burn-out to come to this very simple conclusion: I am my biggest problem in life. Even though this is a very simple conclusion, the solution is far from simple. The decision to step out of this lies somewhere deep covered underneath my default settings.

Love and attention is always the answer

After my last post on stuff I took some more time for myself and putting things in perspective (and I sold one of the MacBooks, which of course gave a little more breathing room). The thing is, we human people are pretty decent hardwired by default, yet the programming part (or conditioning or whatever you call it) can sometimes contain bugs. Most of those bugs are created in our youth in reaction on receiving (or needing) love and care of our parents. And no matter how hard they try, there will always be deficiencies that you want to be made up for in one way or another. This making up for might grow out into behavior that might not be of best interest to one other.

Why I hate stuff

The other day I noticed a beautiful quote.

And man, did I need to get myself into some things-chasing behavior before finally noticing what's going on.

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.