Did over a decade of education in Biology, during masters participated in a student competetition which made me realize the career options in Biology aren't for me.
Made a switch with a bootcamp to back-end programmer and worked that job for the past 3 years or so.
The job is alright, colleagues are fun, the time invested sucks (at 36h, next year 32h).
The last few years life accelerated, bought a house this year, grown-up job and all that stuff.
Still negative networth from student loans (0% interest so not paying these off in a hurry).
I've been fascinated with FIRE for the past 3 years (fancy that, when I start my real job! Funny coincidence).
Never liked spending (or earning) money, the dream is not thinking about money at all.
Got a moderately sized house.
Looking to have kids in the next year or so.
Decent income.
No car (cycle everywhere)
Moderate food budget, mostly home cooked.
Girlfriend is on board.
I love crossfit (expensive hobby).
BrainDump
The goal is to track our income and expenses in this journal and provide a dumping ground as we align our lives with ERE. This is the first time I'm posting anything on FIRE on any forum. Why here now? First of this is the first year where I feel we're actually moving in the right direction and because this has been the only place that really challenges my beliefs. Other blogs and subreddits are just confirming my current beliefs, which means I can't learn anything from them.
At ERE as a philosophy and way of life clashes with how I view FIRE and life, this is enormously valuable.
I haven't been through all the resources; I've read a few journals and a couple of blog posts.
What I've read so far fires (hah) my brain like nothing else. E-RE vs ERE, web of goals, anti-fragility to name just a few key words I've come across.
Which has cost me some sleep lately, hopefully this journal will help with putting my thoughts out here instead of having them rumble around my headcase.
My viewpoint on FIRE has always been to get out of working quick by focussing on the financial side of the equation. The classic E-RE approach. We've always been natural spendthrifts because we hate thinking about money and dealing with the hassle of buying something. The effort of figuring out all the requirements and matching that with price and convenience is exhausting. So instead I don't buy or my girlfriend finagles something together.
She's good at the skills side of the equation and I'm good at the financial side. She's working on understanding (and supporting me) on the financials and I'm slowly coming around to learning skills around ERE.
Practicalities
I still want (need) to pick up the ERE book but I'm not sure if I want the e-book or the pocket version. The e-book is almost 30 euro's cheaper but I hate looking at graphs on my e-reader. Any idea's? Help me out making a choice hah.
I'm working on collecting all our expenses for this past year and compiling them together. We honestly only have a vague idea what our monthly expenses look like. Our expenses are (normally) around 1500-2000 euro for two people we estimate. Thats a gigantic gulf of understanding our expenses which I'm hoping to bridge.
An additional challenge is the (hopefully temporary) lifestyle inflation, where we bought a house late last year. We spend a lot of amount of money on stucco/paint/couch/bed, building out a homegym and installing insulation everywhere (new windows/wall and floor insulation). This represents a big cut into our savings this year. We're doing everything at once for a very nice ~30% rebate from the government. The goal is to get reasonably close to a energy neutral house. We'll see how close we get. For the next 1-3 years we are only planning to install solar panels as a major house expense.
This is not purely a financial choice but also to reduce or impact on the climate.
From my initial inventarisation of our running costs housing is ~22% of our income. Thats more than I expected. We'r getting new deals on internet and gas/electricity which will cut into it a bit.
Since forever I've had this eronious and strange idea in my head that lentils are not that tasty. Last week, we've made some wonderful dishes using lentils and fancy that I love it. Last weekend we also food-prepped 4 dinners and 4 lunches which hopefully drops our food budget a bit and stops us from ordering in (from perceived lack of time/energy for cooking).
Anyway, this post is long enough now, on sunday I'm looking to post my first update with our financial situation as it stands. I expect we'll have plenty of oppertunity to save more.
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We were both shocked at the amount of money we spend this year, as we spend 50% more than our income was just a few years ago. Most of these additional costs are my girlfriend getting her drivers license and home improvement. We've agreed to consider this year a 'lost' year in terms of investing and see it as the great spending spree of our adult life. We are not repeating this. 
Frankly, we have no idea how to repeat this as the major home improvement expenses are done 2021.