Author Topic: My story (case study)  (Read 2346 times)

Martin04

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My story (case study)
« on: September 21, 2016, 08:34:05 AM »
Hi everyone!

I have been thinking I have to get a better control on my situation so I tried to apply the first mustachian principle to me (move out close to the work, get rid of the car...) but it didn't quite work out so I'm afraid I will need some help.

so here is the situation:
My wife and I are french and live in germany. We both work and earn approximately 5200€ pro month (together, after tax).
We have no credits of any kind \o/
We rent an apartment for 700€ a month.
We use quite some vehicles to go to work and for fun : a car (peugeot 206) and two motorbikes (500 cb and 600 cbf). They are not the most expensive, but still a hole in the budget.
My wife has 15 kms to go to work and I have almost 20 in the other direction.
With all the small or regular expenses we are able to put between 1000 and 2000€ aside each month and it feels like we could do better to me. As I write this, it occurs to me that I have to work on my budget-tracking... and I will do that.

Here are my and our plans/goals for the future:
We don't want to work all our life, so we need to get our retirement plan in tracks before we are too old/tired to work.
My wife wants to have children in the future (I'm not ready yet but it might happen). We can't wait too much because we already are 27.
I want to drive around the world on bikes with my wife, and I want this to happen before we are too old to get children (so 2019 looks like a dead-line). But in order too succeed, we need to be able to get rid of our jobs for one year and we need money. That's why we need to get more money saved than what we already achieve.
Everything we are able to save until april 2017 is virtually lost because we will use the most of it to finance a wedding-party. I understand it sounds like a nonsense, but we also need to have fun right now and we will enjoy gathering the whole family for a nice occasion.

So here are my thoughts until today:
Someone would have said "move close to your job and sell the car". But if we move close to my job, my wife has a 35 kms commute and it's the same problem the other way around.
One of us could quit to find an other better located job but it's not easy either. My wife has a nice and well-paid job (engineering for porsche motorsport) she doesn't want to leave. If she did, she wouldn't earn as much anyway. On my side, I don't have such a nice situation but it took me so long to get a job that I'm not ready to quit. Even if I would, I would have to get a job at Porsche's because they are in the middle of nothing (and they don't want to hire me). So we need 2 vehicles every day. We use the third one to have fun with friends on weekends : we just go with tents and rough plan where we want to end up.
I will try to use the bicycle to get to my workplace but it seems pretty far away to do this every day so I don't know. Right now the doctor doesn't allow me anyway.

So here I am : stuck at what I understood as one of the first steps of the mustachian's journey. Is there a solution I didn't see (beside having a real look at my expenses and taking control on it)?

mozar

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Re: My story (case study)
« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2016, 08:45:47 AM »
You can have anything you want but not everything. You can't blow all your money on a wedding and take a year off and expect to get your old jobs back and have kids in 3 years and retire as early as you want. You are doing well but you have to pick and choose. I'm pretty sure egg freezing is available in Germany if you want to look into that.

Mother Fussbudget

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Re: My story (case study)
« Reply #2 on: September 22, 2016, 01:43:02 PM »
Quote
So here I am : stuck at what I understood as one of the first steps of the mustachian's journey. Is there a solution I didn't see (beside having a real look at my expenses and taking control on it)?

I think having a "real look at ... expenses" IS *THE KEY THING* you need to look at FIRST
Take a hard look at expenses.  It's the biggest thing in your life that you have control over.  Document where each euro is going, and try to eliminate (or lower) monthly payments (examples: cut the cable bill, get a cheaper cell-phone-plan, etc).  Economize - find ways to do things cheaply, and save the extra money.  There are plenty of resources available here, and on the net for how to save, and still enjoy life.  I've  been reading "The Tightwad Gazette" - a 1990's era newsletter that's now in book form (thank you public library!), and while much of it is aimed at home-schooling mom's, I found lots of great ideas there.  Think outside the box - hold that wedding party in a public park, or some other amazing 'free' or low-cost location, and have it as a pot-luck dinner where everyone brings a dish to share.  Go for FUN over pageantry.