It's been roughly six months now since my 'last' workday. After that I went on a nice trip to South Korea and Hong Kong. When I came home I was finally going to find out whether I was truly going to be OK living only of my investments. I wasn't at all nervous or worried. I was just very interested to find out if I could stay afloat financially. I always had problems (and still have) getting true insights in my spending. I put all my monthly expenses and other payments in a (Libre Office) spreadsheet, but it never really gave me a clear overview of my spending. Some months were clearly more expensive than others. Often caused by unexpected motorcycle repair or the purchase of airplane tickets. And that would give a distorted image. Somehow, it never gave me a real good sense of my monthly expenses. It wasn't tangible enough for me. I'm very visually orientated and a spreadsheet with numbers just doesn't do it for me and putting it into a graph didn't help either. No worry though, I just continued filling the spreadsheets. Meanwhile, I kept an eye on my spending and my bank balance for the last six months as well as the value of my investments.
And I noticed a few things.
My bank account wasn't losing money as fast as I might have expected without 'money-from-labour' coming in. Even after paying my income taxes. I wasn't being frugal at all, but the balance on my bank account wasn't draining as much money as my GTI was losing fuel (from driving may I add). That was a very nice and soothing finding. Apart from that I also noticed that my investments did very well lately. Even though there's a lot going on in the world. Wars, tariffs, orange-faced lunatic and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. It all didn't affect my investments all that much.
So, in conclusion, my current investments are more than enough for me to live on.
As you may have noticed, in the first line I wrote: 'last' workday, where I put the word last in quotations. That's because I never really intended to retire. I just didn't like the idea of having to work to live. I want to work, because I like to. And not work, because it's in the way of me living. I have some news on that matter, which I will write about in my next article.
