Life has been fun (new post “How to un-fire yourself: France Road Trip” is pending) and entertaining lately, hence planning a meetup got put on the backburner. But I’ve been getting multiple emails to do one again. So, here are the details for the upcoming October 2024 Fire Meetup! Where? I’ve been scouting La Place locations for a while now. Finding one that is reachable by both public transport and car, has long opening hours, has enough space to facilitate 20-25 people sitting together and is not too far a drive for us (yes, I’m lazy), is surprisingly difficult! Hence, […]
Fun , Personal
Adult Life Bingo
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 […]
FIRE Meetup
April 2024 Fire Meetup
As promised, here are the details for the next April 2024 Fire Meetup! Where? In the spirit of the previous meetup, plan is to keep it free and at a public location. Despite La Place being a lot more expensive than I remembered (heck, I am really getting old). They have good facilities, easy access and lots of space. Hence, plan is to meet at the La Place in De Meern (west of Utrecht). Address: La Place de Meern, Meerndijk 59, 3454 HP, Utrecht When? Saturday April 20th, 2024 from 13:00 onwards until…. (closing is at 20:00) What to bring? […]
Dividends , FIRE Meetup
2023 Dividend Totals
Before diving into the 2023 Dividend Totals, I’d like to thank all the 25-ish people that showed up during the last FIRE meetup in Leiderdorp! I had a blast, I hope you did too. We even got to the point that the last 6 of us pretty much got kicked out of the La Place as it was about 30min past closing :-). Plan is do do it again, likely around April. Location and date are to be confirmed. Keep you posted! Anyhow, what did our dividend growth share do in 2023? Here is a quick overview. Dividend Income Due […]
FIRE Meetup
FIRE Meetup
When we had one of our FIRE buds over for dinner a few weeks ago, we got to the topic of FIRE meetups. We organized about 7 of them plus a Castle weekend. Albeit a lot of fun, they take a lot of work and effort to organise. I’m very lazy by nature, so this naturally works counter productive. We both agreed thou, that it would be great to have a FIRE meetup again. But one without all the hassle (and thus also without presentations or cheap food and drinks). We came up with the following plan, we would meet […]
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 , 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 […]