Dominic's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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Dominic
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2022 12:23 pm

Dominic's journal

Post by Dominic »

Finally starting a journal. Something I’ve never done before as far as I can remember.

Quick overview before we start back in 2015: Our current net worth is probably about €400.000, which mainly consists of index funds and 18th century bricks and beams (our house). Our combined yearly spending sits around €24.000 and has been steadily decreasing over the last couple of years. My wife hopes be FI around age 40 with about a million + our primary residence payed off. I hope to be independent sooner by reducing our spending, and diversifying and raising our incomes. Before reading further you might want to read the introduction I posted last week:viewtopic.php?p=264702#p264702.

Part 1: University, Graduation and moving to China

Because this will start out as a financial journal, I feel like our graduation in 2015 is a good place to begin since I started out with a negative net worth and discovered ERE at that time. I worked in greenhouses and supermarkets as a teenager but I also took out some government issued loans out during university. In general I lived quite frugally, sharing a house with a group of housemates. Spending hovered around €700 a month. At 26, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to working 40+ years in some office, so I googled ‘early retirement’ one fateful day and here we are.

I worked in greenhouses and supermarkets as a teenager but I also took out some government issued loans out during university. In general I lived quite frugally, sharing a house with a group of housemates. Spending hovered around €700 a month. My wife (then girlfriend) and I met during our time at university and decided to move abroad. Instead of backpacking we decided to teach English in China and travel in our spare time. Our first financially sound decision as we would later realise.

We did EFL courses during our last year at university and got hired for a full year as English teachers. After that, we gave away/sold a few pieces of furniture to fellow students, stashed our bikes and remaining furniture at our parents’ places and packed all we needed for year abroad in four suitcases. We moved to a provincial capital of around 4 million people in the middle of the country.

While I was sitting on that plane to China my loans were about -€20.000 with a 0% interest rate which can be increased yearly but currently still sit at 0% (should’ve borrowed more!). I saved around €5000 of that loan as an emergency fund. So I started out with around -€15.000 net worth. My wife was a bit richer at the time as she had a net worth of -€5000.

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