A spoke with a colleague the other day about his new house. At some point he mentioned that his wife had completed the adult life bingo (“Grote mensen bingo”) this year. They had gotten their first kid, moved to a new house together and she landed a dream job. Their life was good and he was visibly happy. How do you win adult life bingo? His comment made me chuckle, but also triggered some thoughts about adult life bingo. What is on this bingo card? Or what should be on this bingo card? My guess is that the bingo card […]
Energy , Personal
Home Battery vs an Electric Car?
Before diving into todays post, quick reminder that tomorrow we will be meeting with a bunch of internet strangers and talk money in the La Place, in de Meern. Hope to see you there! In this post from not to long ago, I looked at our expiring energy contract, dynamic energy contracts and energy trading using a home battery. I got a lot of feedback on this post, primarily offline. Very useful stuff though! It actually made us think again about a few issues and risks with the home battery for trading energy. Another thing that popped up was the […]
Jobs , Personal
Becoming a Public Servant
Life is never boring in the Cheesy household. After a somewhat unexpected loss of income at the beginning of the year, I have an update! I’ve got a new job, and one as a public servant! I bet you did not see that one coming. Me neither! Why on earth am I becoming a Public Servant? Let’s review, shall we? How a FIREd Brain works… Having a nice stack of cash (and investments) makes you review your career a bit differently, In my humble opinion. Whereas in the beginning of our careers we would focus more on money and career […]
Personal
And… back to Koos Werkeloos
Welcome to 2024 (better late then never)! First post of the year and it’s one with a bang. I lost my job… And… back to Koos Werkeloos! Job loss The story is as follows, last year we cleaned out our cash reserves in an attempt to upgrade our money pit into a home. Albeit not finished with said money pit, I did start to look for income to infuse our cash position last yeat. I was fortunate to find a decent job, on rotation basis and abroad, on an interesting project. Fast forward to 2024 and due to tightening of […]
Personal , Real Estate , Taxes
Not dead yet!
Nope, we are not dead yet! Albeit we are now over halfway our lives (statistically speaking), we are not planning to call it quits just yet. Life has been good but busy. Financially we are making steps forward once again too. Working really does miracles! Only major downside is that you have a lot less time to do fun stuff. Me no likey. Life update Quick summary, we bought a house that was too big, too expensive and needed a shitload of work. We call that a money pit. Said money pit is slowly improving, albeit not completely finished yet. […]
Personal
No Longer Koos Werkeloos!
Quick service announcement. I really suck at this whole FIRE thing, seriously no idea what I’m doing. We first bought a million euro plus money pit and now I go back to work! So, I’m no longer Koos Werkeloos. One does relate to the other… Despite the fact that we could live in the money pit on one income. We have depleted our cash reserves quite a bit due to the renovations (which are still under budget, surprisingly) and lack of income from my end the past year. It got so bad that we only had about €4-5k left on […]
Personal
Happy New Year!
We wish you the best for 2023, all in good health and financially succesful (of course)! The new year will no doubt be interesting on all fronts. It has not been boring the the last few years, I expect no difference in 2023. We plan to finish the renovations of the house, optimize our finances. Perhaps even find new employment (or some other challenge to make daily life more entertaining). Net Worth Drop Financially we dropped a bit in Net Worth/Cheesy Index terms (still need to calculate how much), obviously because of the purchase of the money pit and limited […]
Personal
Koos Werkeloos
Koos Werkeloos. Not sure what this directly translates to in English, but something like “Joe unemployed” probably. Unemployed I am! Mrs. CF is currently the family’s sole breadwinner. Why Unemployed? Why am I unemployed? Currently two reasons. I had a good gig going as an independent contractor, but unfortunately the project got shelved and I could not continue. There is still a chance that the project gets restarted, but no news so far. Still hoping that it does, would be fun and involve some international travel to places where it is a lot warmer than Dutch winters. But the chances […]
Personal , Real Estate
Un-FIRE yourself – a crash course
How to Un-FIRE yourself – a crash course. There are many ways to UN-FIRE oneself. By far the easiest one is to buy a house that is way too expensive. And that is exactly what we did! You can too 😉 It’s so great to be able to provide this useful financial information with a restarted blog! The Cheesy Index I’ve revived the Cheesy Index again, and… it is a bloodbath! We used to be able to get around with about €29.000-33.000 per year (we had little to no mortgage payments and are frugal most times). With the new money […]
Personal
Why we bought a money pit?
Before we dive into why we bought the money pit and why it’s great, let’s assess the money pit.