Hello from the Netherlands

[Arno_dutch]

Hello everyone,

I stumbled across this website and forum and the idea of taking control of my life and finances is appealing to me.
I am living in the Netherlands and within the next two months I will finish my masters in mechanical engineering. Getting a job should not be too difficult with my degree, a well paying, fun job is a bit harder to find unfortunately.

In my upbringing I have received a healthy dose of frugal living and being a student without much funds has only made me more cost-aware. My current situation is that I have about €17k in student debt when substracting the amount in my savings account from my debt. My cost of living is already quite low about €550 per month excluding going out and excluding €150 a month of tuition fees. I am mentioning these because these expenses will be gone within 2 months . I am not a big spender when it comes to going out, I just don't know exactly. It is something I want to quantify more exactly in the coming months.

This website has opened my eyes to the choices available to me. Looking back on my 25 years of life so far I have been very happy in general. From my top ten moments none of them are related to large monetary expenses. I have not talked to anybody retired or otherwhise that said I wish I would have spend more hours working in my life. I am undecided if I want to go hardcore and reach for complete early retirement or go with a milder version where I end up working 3 days a week. Thank you for revealing these options to me!

Financially speaking the next 1-2 years will be focussed on saving enough of my income to be able to pay off my student debt if neccesary. Interest is very low on student loans here and I make about .5% a year by just keeping it in a savings account. Assuming a standard starting wage without bonusses and assuming my current expenses without tuition and going out would give me a savings rate of ~70%. Hence student debt can be gone within a year.

On a more practical note. How is everyone monitoring their monthly expenses, what kind of tools are you using?
Any specific advice from the dutch readers on this forum?
I have been looking into (free) software that can automatically import and categorize expenses on my bank acccount according to my own keywords/rules, without giving up login codes ofcourse. I want to gain insight in my monetary flows without it taking up too much time because that time is better spent making money or having fun. I am currently looking into WinBank (dutch) and GNUcash (too complicated for the intended use it appears)

Thanks again for opening my eyes!

[rube]

Hi Arnold and welcome.
I just download the 'mutaties' of the bankaccounts in xls format and copy - paste them in my own excel sheet. Categorising per line I do manually, but that is not too much work. Then everything else is aumatically calculated.

Good luck and consider to start a journal.

[Hankaroundtheworld]

Hi Arnold, sooo.... another Dutchie here, NL awakens
I am also using excel, I have tried a few online tools, but excel is still better as it allows to build your own scenario's
It is great you are aware so early abt ERE, it took me a lot longer (but we had no internet in those days, to my defense)
My advice is to get rid of the debs asap, feel free. Other than that, i would go for the "hard" route, so earn a lot now that it is possible, and if you go abroad, you can even double/triple your earnings. In this way, you reach FI in 10 years or so, and be totally free.
good luck!

[dxxr]

> On a more practical note. How is everyone monitoring their monthly expenses, what kind of tools are you using?
I use penningmeester, see: www.penningmeester.net

[mxlr650]

On a more practical note. How is everyone monitoring their monthly expenses, what kind of tools are you using?

For last 1.5 years I have been using Quicken and am happy with it — my Quicken data is stored locally on the computer (encrypted with Bitlocker). I have not yet bought into the cloud thing like Mint where one password break-in can expose all financial accounts. I started using Quicken after FI and found it to be great tool to track things from multiple places and we process it every other week so we remember the spending easily, and it takes like 30 mins for us from start to finish. It is also possible to download CSV files from different accounts and write VBA code to automate Excel processing, but it has not been a priority for me.

BTW, welcome to the forums, you already have a great start!

[message]

Hi Arno, also a Dutchie here...
Registered today, after a lot of reading for a while.

[McTrex]

We just sit down on the first of every month and put all transactions in Excel manually. Costs about 1-1,5 hours to get everything up-to-date.