First a little bit about myself. I have a lovely wife and 1.5 year old daughter and I work as a department manager with a rapidly growing IT company. My wife works about 2 days a week as a elementary school teacher, and she is also the one taking care of our daughter and household during the week.
Born and raised in the Netherlands by quite conservative parents I have never gotten used to excessive luxury and spending. My dad always had well paid jobs as an insurance-agent, account manager, CCO and so on, so I always considered my parents wealthy. My mom does not have a job and has always been responsible for taking care of me and my brothers and the household. They have a nice fixer upper stand-alone house since I was born, but even in the times where my dad made a true load of money my parents never considered buying something ridiculous even though my dad was regularely pushed by co-workers to buy some kind of mansion. My dad always told me how ridiculous he thought it was that his boss used to tell him 'One day you can also live rich like this, buying Armani suits and getting your groceries in Paris (300 miles away!!)'. My dad also lived by the idea to save a lot and retire quite early, but unfortunately fate got other plans and he lost his job at exactly the wrong moment and was forced to take a much worse paying job a year later. He told me that if he had 2 or 3 more years in the well-paying financial sector he could have survived until his social security and pension kicked in, but the fact is that that is not the case.
All and all you could say I have a bit of an ERE root, but being young and ambitious I never gave to much thought of it. Until about a year ago I happened to find a book in our local library called 'Entirely Free' by Gerhard Hormann. The book is about a dutch person who is well on track to pay of his mortgage extremely early on a normal salary. I was fascinated by it but since I lived in rental house back then I was not immediately converted
In the past year I have read all the posts on the mustache-forum, read quite a bit in here and also in the dutch equivalents of this forum and now I can say I have a completely different mindset then before. My wife even refers to me as the 'old' Nick, and the 'new' Nick. And she even helps me in my decisionmaking when I am about to spend too much on something by saying that I am thinking as the old 'Nick' and that I should really postpone my decision until I have regained my senses.A year later now we have bought a 1956 extreme fixer upper house, and completely renovated it ourselves to modern standards with minimum help of contractors. Apart from some work on the garden it has been completely finished now. The house itself cost around 160k, and we have spent about 40k on renovating it. Estimated worth right now is around 200k, so we didnt lose anything on renovating it which is quite extraordinary in here. The rent on the mortgage is about as high as the original rent on the rental appartment, and obviously by paying of the mortgage that amount will lower every month instead of having yearly 4% increases in rent. Now that our financials are quite stable again I am very serious about ERE (or at least accumulating a big stack) and since I have started tracking every income and expense, made forecasts and already made some progress in cutting costs. I will start a journal on this forum and post monthly updates with some fancy graphs.