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?

What it feels like

Have you've ever wondered what it feels like to pay off a loan?

In most cases, people take on a loan to pay for something they want (or, something they consider a need, but I won't go down the road of explaining the difference since those subjects are covered on most financial blogs). So, you basically ask someone (the lending party) to pay for your want and the next couple of years you are paying for your want every month and you pay a little bit extra because the other party wants to be rewarded for the fact they did have the money for your want when you wanted your want but you didn't have the money for it. Sounds fair enough, and at least you get to play with your new toy every month. Unless it's a brand new sportscar which you already wrecked. In that case, you're probably pretty much feeling the same as me.

Patience

And now we wait...

My debt kill plan is rolling on fine. It's practically guaranteed that I'll be done with the housing debt by the end of this year. Even if that somewhat magical finish line for some reason won't be passed by then, it'll be January next year. I don't have to do anything but dump everything into the great abyss of debt. Those transactions are made automatically by my bank account so there's nothing more I can do.

Mileage

Recently I had to fill up my gastank for the second time since I had my 'new' car.