Journey to fulfillment - gettingwiser's journal

[gettinwiser]

Hi all! To avoid repeating myself, here's my introduction viewtopic.php?t=13416
Super short summary: 29 yo male, Spanish, remote software dev, worried about inflation and trying to save as much as possible to achieve financial freedom in my 40s, if possible while not hating my job and having some space to enjoy my youth.

This is going to be the first entry of this blog, my idea is to post at least monthly about my financial and general life state (just some general approximations, I'd like to stay anonymous for now), with occasional posts on other topics whenever I feel I need to explain or discuss something.

The structure of the updates might change over time

JUNE 2025 UPDATE:

FINANCIALS (in euros):
Net income: ~3000: 2200 salary + 800 in tax returns (yearly "declaración de la renta")
Expenses: ~850
500 rent + light, gas, water + food (predetermined monthly amount, goes to bank account specific just for this)
350 all the rest. In upcoming updates I will separate this into more categories, but this month has been a bit chaotic with different expenses than usual. For now, I will say that this 350 include: sport, car, short trip with gf, and family visit for my town's main festivities.

Saved ~70% of my income this month, or ~60% of my salary. This has been an exceptional month, as normally my only income is my salary, and some months I have much bigger expenses, mainly due to the car or to visiting friends and family.

This year's average monthly savings so far are about ~45% of my income. I'm aiming to end the year with above 50% monthly savings average.

WORK
I've been working on a fintech SaaS company for several years as a software developer. I'm quite bored of the the project now and looking for a change. At the moment what interests me most are the pharma and the consulting industries, so I will try to switch to any of those, with a bit of a preference for pharma. So far I've passed a couple of interviews but conditions offered where lower than asked, so no change for now. Hopefully will be able to update this in the next couple of months.

HEALTH
I'm in decent shape, with a bmi of 23, and decent strength in calisthenics movement patterns (can do muscle ups and other intermediate exercises). Used to do short workouts every day before work, but the last couple of months I've gotten lazy, I need to regain the habit. I do a team sport twice a week, so my cardio is not terrible, but I'm quite bad at running long distances. I'm also terrible at flexibility, and this is getting worse with time due to working sitting from home every day. Eating habits are decent, I don't count calories but I follow a more or less mediterranean diet, and I don't eat sugary garbage during the workweek (I sometimes give myself a treat on the weekends).

Regarding mental health, I'm in quite a happy place right now with family friends and gf, so no complains there. I'm a bit frustrated and anxious about changing jobs and having a fulfilling career, and working on cutting my unproductive video content consumption, and substitute all this time with reading and some hobby projects.

Thanks a lot for reading me, gotta run now, see you on the next update!

[delay]

Thanks for sharing your experience! Your salary sounds good for Spain. It's usually a bad idea to stay where you are not happy. Why not consider a salary cut? Each month spend on a job you don't like is one that you won't get back.

I'm in decent shape, with a bmi of 23, and decent strength in calisthenics movement patterns (can do muscle ups and other intermediate exercises). Used to do short workouts every day before work, but the last couple of months I've gotten lazy, I need to regain the habit. I do a team sport twice a week, so my cardio is not terrible, but I'm quite bad at running long distances. I'm also terrible at flexibility, and this is getting worse with time due to working sitting from home every day. Eating habits are decent, I don't count calories but I follow a more or less mediterranean diet, and I don't eat sugary garbage during the workweek (I sometimes give myself a treat on the weekends).

Regarding mental health, I'm in quite a happy place right now with family friends and gf, so no complains there. I'm a bit frustrated and anxious about changing jobs and having a fulfilling career, and working on cutting my unproductive video content consumption, and substitute all this time with reading and some hobby projects.

That reads like a lot of self criticism! Lazy, bad at running, terrible at flexibility, frustrated about job, unproductive video consumption. It's also almost stereo typical for your/my generation.

ERE offers one way out of that.

[gettinwiser]

@delay woops, I hadn't notice how negative those comments about myself sound until you pointed it out, thank you for noticing.

About the job, one of the offers required me to become a freelancer but still work 40h/week for the company, for a salary that was around 500 net euros less per month. The pay cut could have been a pass, as the project sounded interesting, but less job security and worse conditions overall where the deal breaker for me. The other interview was for a software consulting company, and right after having word approval, the client that I would have been working for broke the contract with the consulting company, so they had to freeze the hire. They might call me if some new project that requires my skills pops up, so fingers crossed.

Also, my current job is not that terrible, it actually is great in every single sense (bosses are great, small company with very nice team, remote, flexible start of the work day...), except that the project is a single app that I've been developing for over 4 years now, and I'm starting to feel terribly bored about it. So I'm waiting for an opportunity where the project motivates me and the working conditions at least similar to current ones, even if earning a little bit less in the beginning.


On another note, I believe the main reason for this kind of heavy self-criticism is that I'm quite self-demanding, combined with being an overthinker. I don't consider myself lazy, but I'm very prone to overthinking and I suffer a lot of paralysis by analysis, which translates to big time procrastination. I'm often filled with ideas about things I want to try out and projects I want to embark on, but I always try to go too far too quickly and I get overwhelmed, instead of taking it easy and experimenting without guilt and without the need of becoming "great" at something before even starting.

It's a bit of a paradox, my mindset is still heavy on the rat race of becoming the "best" at whatever I start, but at the same time because of this mindset my actual days are filled with over analyzing everything, fear of failure and procrastination, which is terrible if the objective is to become great at something, and not great for my mental health.

I will give a thought to this, hopefully with some time I will be able to relax and enjoy life more, and experiment with new hobbies/projects just for fun, improving on them just as a side effect of curiosity and spending time on what I find more interesting.

Any comments, related experiences or suggestions on how to start changing this mindset are welcome. Thanks again @delay for making me realize that I need to work on this.

[ForaDesSembrat]

At the moment what interests me most are the pharma and the consulting industries, so I will try to switch to any of those, with a bit of a preference for pharma.

What is it that draws you to the pharma and consulting industries in particular? I spent several years working in pharma, and while the working conditions were generally good, I often found the work itself not especially engaging. It might be different in teams more focused on drug development and research, but I imagine the skills needed for those roles often go far beyond software development. Large consulting firms, on the other hand, are known for being extremely demanding and typically require working significantly more hours than average.

[gettinwiser]

Thanks for dropping by @ForaDessSembrat! Hope that you are settling fine back in the Basque Country

Well, my academic background are biological studies and statistics, so I am kind of drawn to this industry because I understand the overall process of drug development and I would like to contribute to it in some way. But I hate lab work, so I'm willing to try the statistical programmer and data visualization/dashboards angle. One of the languages I know better is R, and I want to capitalize on the switch from SAS to R that is slowly taking place in pharma. About software consulting, I know this is usually a very demanding industry, but I have noticed that working on the same software project for a long time is not for me, so looking for a chance to participate in several different projects with different clients. Hopefully I can find a software consulting company where I can find a decent balance and not burn out.

Who knows, maybe I try both of them out and find out they are not for me. What I know for sure is that I don't want to get stuck in my current job for much longer.

[gettinwiser]

Woops, I mixed the nicknames, sorry @ForaDesSembrat, the Basque Country comment was meant for the @Frugalchicos family, who commented on my Introduce Yourself post.

Nevertheless thanks a lot for taking interest on my journal!

[zbigi]

About software consulting, I know this is usually a very demanding industry, but I have noticed that working on the same software project for a long time is not for me, so looking for a chance to participate in several different projects with different clients.

Software consulting companies will usually make you work on the same project for the same client for a very long time. Unless you actively complain I guess, but even then they'd probably want to keep you in a given project for at least a year so that the client is not unhappy about losing people soon after they got productive on the project.

[gettinwiser]

Hey @zbigi, thanks for the warning. If possible, I would like to avoid having to jump into maintenance of an existing large codebase, as I'm doing right now.
Ideally, I would like to go for a bit of a hybrid job between software and data, like creating dashboards or developing small/medium size tools and packages for internal use in pharma or other industries. So maybe a software/data science consulting company? We'll see where I end up at haha.