Early Retirement Extreme Forums

So, the Dutch government fell, quite suddenly. So now my taxes that I'm paying this year (a bit is withheld with every paycheck) aren't going to the right wing government we had until a few days ago, hurray. On the other hand, we're back to being ungoverned, and who knows what's next. We'll see ...

...and I read that English and German are closer together than English and French? So may be useful for some people who speak English. Or maybe helpful if people had German as their foreign language in school.

For the Netherlands, the areas in the middle and the west of the country are busy and ...

@loutfard, for someone who grew up quite close to the border with Belgium, I must say that I know quite little about it. I speak Dutch, so I would probably want to stay in the Dutch/Flemish speaking part of Belgium, which is the north part (so also the part that is less rural, correct?). Do the ...

If you would count retirement contributions, then many people contribute more to "savings" than they realized. And often they do it without realizing it. For example, in the Netherlands one contributes to the national pension plan and in return will (well, hopefully) receive monthly payouts once ...

Absolutely. Do note that Belgium makes it more difficult to run a sustained deficit. Consumer credit law is rather more strict. As an example, the national bank keeps an archive of all credits extended to Belgian residents. Banks are required to consult this before extending credit. If they award ...

Oof, I found this table hard to understand. The percentages in the second and third column are apparently the percentages of Belgian households who have the savings rate mentioned in the first column when it comes to their monthly income (column 2) or additional income (column 3).

As also described ...

Hi Rube, I got a sister-in-law who divorced last year and now has to manage her own money - and she put some in those mortgage loans; plus I got a sister whose divorce got finalized a few days ago and who is working towards moving into her new house in July. So two divorces in the family within a ...

So Frugaldoc, real estate only has a favorable tax treatment if it's the house that you live in. These days here you can deduct the mortgage interest you paid as long as: 1. the house is your primary residence (with some extra criteria for when you're moving or divorcing and temporarily have two ...

The problem with many pills is that the potential problem that they're treating is in the future. For example, these days I monitor people's blood thinner use and advise on their dosage (medication like warfarin needs dose adjustments regularly). Many of them take those blood thinners because their ...

You can wonder whether you want to prevent death by pneumonia when you're in stage 6 or 7 of dementia. Maybe not. In the Netherlands they used to say that pneumonia was the old person's friend - by ending life in a reasonably merciful way when life here has become almost too hard to bear.

Do you ...

So my plan to not pay any income tax this year... I have to think hard whether I can and want to pull it off.


So we have now filed our 2024 taxes, and... my income + asset tax burden will be 785 euros total (on a pretax income of 49k - which would come with a roughly 11,400 euro tax bill if ...

Hi, welcome! Dutch person here... Your English is pretty good, keep that in mind as a possibility for some side income. (For example tutoring).

And I want to ask: you live with your grandmother, and I'm glad for you that you can do that. But what will happen to you / your housing situation if she ...

There is many more to it, but I would need to check things more thoroughly. If your SIL is serious, I can have a further look at it and email or call for more details and share experiences.


Sorry I never came back on this. She did decide to put some of her money on the line, but not all of it ...

Maybe stay home but DO venture out in the local area to walk and enjoy the weather. Hopefully we'll have lots of nice weather in the upcoming months... Congrats on the bonus (although that was already in April, time flies) and I think you might be beyond 200k by now (slight stock market recovery is ...

I only remembered on April 17th that I hadn't had to pay my mortgage on April 15th, so clearly there was no surge of happy feelings on April 15th - and also not really on April 17th.

We've been on holiday these last couple of weeks. We went to Sicily (and Seppia gave us some good tips on what to ...

I don't think people here are using this as their platform to sell their course, event, consulting services, podcast, or book that could have been a blog post or two.


Gee, thanks. That said, please buy my course on solar panel energy hacking, for three easy payments of $49... ;-)

Putting all ...

...Oh, my mother also has done tutoring - that might be something for the retired teacher as well, to focus some of her teaching efforts on one or a couple of kids and maybe on a favorite subject that she taught before?

It's tough sometimes, isn't it? To shake a feeling, even if rationally you know that feeling doesn't help. And also tough to look at all the good things instead of the little issue - it's like a little splinter in your foot perhaps.

It's good to take your mind off things and just go out and enjoy ...

Sounds like it's time to start up the hiring process again? Or is this a thing that only works in January for some reason?

Oh by the way, the market downturn means that your net worth decreased. It happens. Hurray for being able to buy some more stocks at (slight?) discounts...

So... a few days ago, I paid off my mortgage! If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said "no way". My mortgage was at a 3.5% interest rate (before the tax deduction, which would take the actual net interest rate down to about 2%), and I had it with my parents. Quite the sweet deal for me at ...