mush journal: what will happen next?

[Ego]

As much as I believed in my steps to reach the top of the ladder, I actually can't handle full-time jobs. It's a great evolution to be able to get hired, but it's of no use because I hate full-time jobs. I hate them I hate them I hate them. Voilà.

Me too. Full-time jobs drain all of my energy and fill the best parts of the day and do not allow me to do the things I want to do and.... a hundred other reasons. I absolutely hated them.

Something I learned early on helped me to deal with it. My guess is that you also learned it in a round-about way from your aerial adventure job. It has to do with safety nets. At some point, regardless of how well they are maintained, safety nets all disintegrate eventually.

The trick is to get good enough to not need the safety net before it is gone.

Back before my net was gone, I was fortunate to live in a place where people where arriving with nothing. They had no net. No language skills. No friends. No right to work. A constant fear that they would be caught and sent back. I was amazed by how differently they saw the same full-time job.

Imagining the world through their eyes actually changed me.

It may be painful, but imagine a future where your parents will not be there to catch you when you fall. That day will eventually come. You will have to function with only the strengths, skills and networks you built.

Once you internalize that future reality, get busy.

[mush]

Hi! I'v been wanting to write an update for some time, especially since I totally changed path (again), but I recently feel like I'm more back on track with ERE.

I'm really writing it down quickly to coerce myself into giving more details later.

Shortly put, I took over part of a bicycle mechanic shop and I've been doing this for a little more than a year now. I decided to work part-time. With SO, we also moved last year out of my parents into our own rental, from which we will likely move out soon of because destiny wants it.

First year of business was okay and I earned enough to pay for personal expenses and build myself a spare parts and accessories stock. I'm confident I can live off it, but it's not really my intention.

This is the second year, things are going better, but it's also because it's the peak months (high seasonality in this business).
I'm hoping to bring my NW to 60'000 CHF by the end of 2027, because a friend (with a much higher saving rate) and I want to buy a house in Jura.

That's it for now

@Ego: I remember the first time reading your comment. I was actually scared and you did instill some feeling, albeit not exactly your point, of gratitude for everything that came to me in the last years. More specifically, I know how worse it could be, and I know that I'm really ready to fight to keep it the way it is now.
As a teen, people were always commenting how easy I had it as a Swiss national, native speaker, with sort of wealthy parents that were willing to help. So I always had tiny teeny white guilt. Now, I never liked this storytelling, but I take some pride in the fact that, although my parents built me the way I am with kindness (sometimes too much maybe?), most of what I have now I did without them.
But I'd be nowhere without the help of others, and not being able to rely on it at some point in life is not a fear, but something that feels highly unlikely.

I wouldn't like "chop wood, carry water" alone either anyway.

I digress, but it seems through life, we always need safety nets as a way to learn stuff and feel confident in ourselves (because it's there! you know I mean?). Being scared of losing what you have is, for some, a path of stagnation. Anyway, more concrete stuff later.

[Jean]

Will you join us at the meeting in july?

[mush]

@Jean: The climbing meeting (viewtopic.php?t=13248&start=60) near your place? That'd be really great. I'm afraid it's a bit late for me though: I'm in Serbia until July 27th so I could probably attend from there to the supposed end on July 28th. Can bring some climbing gear too. PMd you my Signal ID for the group.

Since the last update (posting.php?mode=quote&p=286538).

• May 2024: I wanted to have a "bike food truck" but wasn't making any progress towards that.
• April 2024: Still not making any real progress, I approach the only bicycle builders in my area to see if they can help me building the trailer (really, the first step). Their answer is (put shortly): "Go ahead, but we're looking for someone to rent half the space and fix bicycles. You can use the tools."
• April 2024: The next week, I start fixing bicycles there. Not what I was looking for but 100% what I needed,
• Rest of 2024: I'm at the workshop, building an inventory, learning the trade, enjoying the new relationships there and our new home with SO.

After all the mess at the beginning of the year, it was a relief to be mainly focused in one thing, without thinking about much else.
Financially wise though, 2024 was like 20'000 CHF in, 20'000 CHF out.
Most of the spending aside from the big ones (health insurance and rent) was in the kind of small purchases one easily justify a few times a month. Like second hand stuff (tandem bicycle, L-tek DDR pads, coffee equipment, Guitar Hero controllers) and Aliexpress or Amazon rage.

It's 2025 and lifestyle inflation got me. Still spending a lot on coffee beans, fishing gear and stuff. I recently acquired 2 coffee roasters, and I'm loosely trying to turn this interest in an income (or at least not a deficit) by starting a small scale roasting business.

Random facts:

• I'm getting good at an arcade rhythm game called Pump It Up where we go almost weekly with a friend since a bit less than a year. Too much money spent there, but lot of fun.
• My smartphone just went black last week and, despite a very careful battery replacement, the cause couldn't be found. Had to buy an used one in an emergency to be able to run my business. A Google Pixel 5 at 68 CHF. This week was a pain partly because of having to start again and loosing a bunch of stuff despite cloud backups.
• Last week too, I crashed with a client bicycle I was testing almost in front of said client. Was hurting (physically but also my ego) for a few days after that.
• Today, a random child tried to steal an electric scooter from me at the bicycle workshop and I had to run after him to get the scooter back. First time I have to deal with that though.
• Didn't pay myself in January but May and June were netting around 4'500 CHF each in my pocket.
• I got a student license for motor scooters and sub 125cm3 motorbikes because you just need the car driving license to get it. Now I have to take a 12-hour lesson with a friend scooter and I'll have the permanent license. Seems like a worthy asset for the price.
• In two weeks, I'm going to volunteer at a very large coffee industry event in my town, hopefully I'll learn some stuff and make some contacts.

I have these evenings where I feel super grateful, for the quality of life I have, for the time I spend with SO, for the opportunities I had/ have, and for the pleasure I get from repairing stuff and running the workshop mostly my own. I can see myself doing that for a while.

How long though, until life gets back at me, until something bad happens? I sometimes feel unworthy of these. People around me work more, for less. It's why my mind wanders back to the concepts around ERE. Fear and gratitude.

This, and my town sucks. I want to move from there as soon as reasonably possible. "Reasonably" implying that it's the first time I do something I like the way I want. So I can only get out of this once I got either something else, passive income or enough money saved. Not wasting this luck because of me being childish.

I've gotten pretty lazy at churning through numbers, whether business wise or personal finance wise, so I'm really just trying to instinctively make more money and spend less. It seems like it's been working alright in the past months.

[Stasher]

Great progress on the bike business hustle, as for the food bike....maybe combining your coffee roasting with a cargo bike setup would be the better combination. Coffee beans don't go bad quickly like meal prep items do comparatively, less risk and more upside the coffee route maybe?