Waffle

Here's what I've done in the past few days to reach my various goals in the run-up to my wedding and emigration:

Emigration: I have looked at the requirements for a Nonimmigrant Visa for a Fiance(e), and started taking action towards fulfilling them. The proverbial low-hanging fruit here turned out to be getting a copy of my birth certificate, which I ordered online.

This weekend, I will inventory fully, sort the requirements, time path and budget into a format that is easy for me to access and read, and start gathering up the other documents. Compared to when I last looked into this stuff, the process doesn't look so hideously complicated, but I will need to break it down into simple, manageable steps.

Stuff/money: I have found a taker for my old, large drawing board, who is willing to pay €100 for it. That will go towards paying for that visa application. And the drawing board will go to a good home with someone who will take good care of it.

Health/excercise: I have trained my guts out on Monday and Wednesday with my running group, running at the highest level even though I'm out of shape. It was hard, but if I do this three times a week, I will be back in shape in time for the 4 Mijl in October.

That's it for now. Work starts in earnest on Saturday with the emigration process inventory.

The other day, in the midst of what looked like becoming an ongoing conversation about tightwaddery, I posted about decluttering for the first time in months. That's no coincidence. There are four aspects of my life that I tend to get antsy about at the same time: money, clutter and mess in the house, my terrible time management, and my terrible organisation. These subjects are closely related: my disorganisation and clutter affect my ability to budget effectively; my poor time management affects my ability to budget, but also my ability to increase my income and my ability to fix the other problems.

Last evening, I did some financial decluttering: I went through the many files in the desk safe and threw out:

1. anything that was more than 10 years old (10 years being how far back an audit might go in theory);
2. anything sent to me by the Tax Administration, the local authority, my insurance company that was strictly informational except the very latest version of the document in question;
3. anything that was the debris of my financial administration, i.e. empty tax return papers, "sketches" of my old tax returns, scribbled notes, etc. It's possible that these things might be involved in an audit in the future, but I'll take that chance.

I also sorted everything that was unsorted, which I'm afraid was a lot. It was the most tedious way I could think of spending a Friday night, but it did help me feel better about a number of things:

1. I found out that I had everything I need to be able to file my tax return quickly so I can be on time for the extended deadline of September 1 (budgeting, time management, organisation)
2. I also found out that I had paid National Health Insurance advances over 2007 and 2008, which I should be getting back now that I'm on a salary and paying taxes/national insurances by the month. (budgetting)
3. Looking at my bank statements, I realised that for all the disorganisation in my budgeting cycle, there's one thing I'm pretty good at doing, which is saving. I put € 1600 in savings the month after I came back from Aggie's, and have enough saved up to cover a month and a half's frugal living expenses, a plane ticket (return) to the US if booked early and coverage for the financial time bomb I mentioned earlier. That time bomb will be defused once I've filed my taxes (budgeting)

So that's making me feel good about myself. I'm still not done with this round of decluttering and it's going to be a difficult one, because the last one was less than six months ago. But I need to do it just so I can move all the stuff from the studio there. There's a lot accumulated there over the past seven years.

More proof that the improvement areas in my life all relate: because I did not allow myself to go to the supermarket over my lunch break this week (budgeting), I was able to have shorter lunch breaks (time management) and I could use the time to make phone calls, dealing with some studio-related issues and contacting a driving school (organisation). That made my lunch breaks the one moment during the day when my own disorganisation didn't bite me in the ass constantly.

While discussing this post privately, Aggie pointed me to the Tightwad Gazette's website, which hasn't updated since the time when the earth was still cooling, and the blog The Simple Dollar, which, it turned out, is good enough to keep me reading for hours on end (though I'd like some higher ratio of meaty to brief postings - but I'm probably in the minority among blog readers). The Simple Dollar has the kind of strictly-finance stuff that always makes my eyes glaze over, but also lots of practical tips for reducing debt, budgeting and how to live frugally and enjoy it. I'll be studying it a lot in the next few weeks.

Last February, I got very interested in the blog of the You Need A Budget website. Their product is a range of personal budgeting tools ranging from well-designed spreadsheet templates to a fully-fledged application for Mac and Windows. I followed the blog for a while, subscribed to the course, kept detailed financial records for a few weeks, then decided that I probably didn't need a budget anyway. I need to reconsider that, considering how I managed to overspend this month compared to the targets I set for myself.

Both The Simple Dollar and YNAB are aimed at mainly American readers whose main goal is to live debt free. The Simple Dollar's main author has a life story involving a financial meltdown; I can't readily find the backgrounder on the YNAB site anymore (something about it began rubbing me the wrong way back in February/March, so I stopped going), but if I recall correctly, the author has always been concerned about avoiding debt. In any case, I'm not a perfect match to the sites' target audience. I've always been debt-free , and while I did have my own financial crisis last year, it resulted from my income drying up while I didn't have an emergency fund. So I could solve it by first going on the dole, then getting a job as fast as I could. Within three months, I was financially healthy and saving money.

The reason I'm now getting more interested in personal finance/frugality sites is that I have my own set of goals that involve having a lot more money than I have right now. My (modest) translator's salary allows me to live well, but leaves little space for what I really want, which is to travel and eventually emigrate. Before that, I want to take driving lessons, which in this country don't come cheap at all, and learning to drive after the age of 35 is probably going to take me a lot longer than it would have done when I was younger. I also have a few ticking time bombs in the form of rebates that I will no longer qualify for in the near future, replacement costs for household items such as my 20-year-old fridge and my computer equipment - stuff like that. Right now, I try to save 300 Euro a month at the start of each salary cycle, plus whatever I took out of savings again during the last salary cycle — so if I come up short during July and take € 150 out of savings, I put € 450 into savings as soon as my July salary comes in.

This month, that's kind of gone to hell. After stashing away that 300 Euro, I only have another 300 in disposable funds each month, and I kind of depleted that with the cost of a trip to Utrecht for a wedding, a gift for the bride and groom, dress footwear for the occasion (which I was going to buy anyway, but if it hadn't been for the wedding, I'd have held off for another couple of months), the new hosting plan for my website and a few other, smaller things that I'll need to track down. I'm not hurting, but a bit more clarity and restraint in my spending would help me a lot, especially in the area of not having to unexpectedly eat lentils for a week. I like lentils, but not every day.

There's one step I'll be taking this month; after a year of only being able to use it evenings and weekends, I'm giving up the studio I share with (as of August 1) four other artists. That's going to save me € 50 a month, and I'd done that immediately after signing on the dotted line for my current day job, that would have put € 600 in my pocket by now. That's one discount plane ticket to the US if I book early!

I'm also looking at the income side of things. I've decided that a second job is out, for the time being, and while selling my originals can deliver a nice bonus from time to time, it's not structural so I can't count on it. That's something I'm going to have to figure out.

Update: More from Aggie on socioeconomics and tightwaddery