My plan, so far

[AlwaysCurious]

The last two weeks were quite busy ones as I headed for my holidays. With my laptop and lots of offline reading meterial, I was determined to work on my plan, my goals and my financial future and I think I did well. My family made it possible that I really could spend more time on that than I normally spend on my J.O.B. Well, and staying with my dear parents-in-law put me offline anyway as they life on the country side with no internet within miles

I'd like to share my thoughts and findings with you, but I have to prepend a little warning. It just starts making sense for me and as a non native speaker it is even more complicated for me to write this down. I take just the headlines and try to comment on them a little

Topics I covered, items on my todo list this weeks:

• Read "Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living"

"Sometimes you get tired by the work you DON'T do" was the most important lesson for me in that book. The overall optimistic attitude and the truth that there is no bad fate but only our perceptions on the world, that is already fundamental part of my believes.
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• Read "Napoleon Hill, Think and grow rich"

Mr Hill says, the basic requirement is the absolute will to acchieve something. This unbreakable will is something I need to learn. But without setting up goals, how should I know the direction for my will? So setting them up is highest priority for me. The book gives the right motivation as well: Reaching your highest goals takes the same ammount of energy as it needs to bear an ordinary life. Well, then, what am I waiting for?
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• Read "Robert A Heinlein, The number of the beast" and half of "Time Enough For Love"

Hey, there was even time for recreation There always is.
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• Sped through "Bodo Schäfer, Earn more - 20% more income within a year" (own translation)

Quite a poor book compared to the others. Proclaims quite a decent investment strategy. But one thing that struck me, I do remember: "Those who seek safety by mitigating risks, will only find anxiety and fear"
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• Sped through "David Allan, Getting things done"

I took some ideas out of this to enhance my personal Wiki I use in private and for my job. It is so very important to write things down, to free your mind for more urgent things. And it helps remembering, focussing again.
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• Summarize and evaluate personal assessments from the past

I got lots of usefull feedback during job applications, yearly review sessions with my superiors, through external (mostly management-) trainings etc that I didn't use until now. Putting this together really helped me getting a consistent view.
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• Set up a self assessment while considering my self perception and public image out of above mentioned feedbacks

Well, that's more some sort of very, very personal diary.
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• Set up a list of my core strengths

Strength = Ability + Motivation. Now that is a positve and rewarding task! I really enjoyed finding those out, seeking evidence in my memories.
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• Set up a list of my weaknesses

This needs a lot of honesty to write down where you lack either ability or motivation. Fortunately you can do something against both forms.
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• Start listing my passions

Again very personal. My only concern is that at the moment I cannot see how this helps me finding the right business for me.
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• Put up the scaffold of my financial dashboard

It has to include actual accounting data, net asset value, monthly income, spendings, savings and financial goals. Quite a lot I'd like to integrate into a single sheet or a single web page (no scrolling allowed, automation would be nice) Hey, if I come up with a sophisticated online solution, maybe there is a market for that?
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• Evaluated the exact ammount of money we save every month

Now that the spendings for our new built house ease down, this is easier than during the last years. What really made it possible, is that from the year 2000 on I have each and every monetary transaction in one huge Excel sheet. Setting this up along with the possibility to import bank account data and automatical categorize it was a huge effort in itself. But now I know where the areas of improvement really are.
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• Set up saving plan for the biggest spendings the next year (car, porch, ...)

I was surprised that it is easily possible for me to put more than 10% of my monthly income into investments. So I decided to start with that as soon as possible.
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The big questions are "How" and "Where to find investments". I think rare metals, energy and IT would be best sectors, but I really don't know where to look for qualified information. If anybody could link me to some starting ground, I'd be very thankfull.
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• Estimated the retirement pension I have to expect

Took inflation into account, evaluated gouvernmantal forms, company pension and my life insurance
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Evaluated out of that the necessary assets I would have to build up by then​

Figured out that this can be done without changing very much in my life
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Figured out how slowlane this is and decided to look for investment strategies
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• Evaluated current net asset value and set up a linear forecast for the next years

Well right now I am just at roughly 160,000€ most likely to reach 220,000€ in 2010. Hmpf. Projections until retirement are only showing that I really need to start investing to reach my goals.
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• Started setting up a vision board

most of it is around travelling with my family to see the many fecetts of the world, so my goals are to earn a high class globetrotter lifestyle. Sort of.
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• Set up long term and mid term goals

Earn 6 figures (in Euro) by 2010 - if I don't come up with a replacement for my dear J.O.B.
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Get Forex trading profitable. I aim for 0.5% a day, 0.25% as the lower limit.
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Do more sports (one hour every other day)
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Drink less beer (Arrgh, do I really have to?)
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Loose weight (5kg this year)
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Pay mortgages completely by 2020 which is the year the contract ends. If inflation is high until then this goal could be dropped due to other forms of investments adding more to my net asset value. It will be around 180,000€ by then, if inflation stays at 3% in the EU that's just half of todays value. So the real goal is to build up at least 200k in investments until 2020.
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Travel more! Explore the world with my family.
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Build up (at least) 1.2 Mio € until retirement 2037. Yeah slowlane, I know, but this whole exercise is a starting point. These goals are sort of minimal goals that will be refined, broken down and hopefully accellerated. By finding out that these goals are really possible, I loose my fear and uncertainity. This is one of the biggest acchievements during my holidays: The future is getting brighter, I gain strength and get more optimistic that there really is more and it is reachable!
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• Set up a daily review template for my personal Wiki

Grow habits in tracking my goals daily. Vision board and financial dashboard will be integrated into this review sheets. I must not let my goals slip away again. And I do want to count my blessings and write them down to help me during hard times.
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• Filled out and sent the application form for a Forex live account. After half a year of learning and demo trading it is about time.

For me this was an awfull lot of valuable things I acchieved in a short time. I wrote many many pages on my laptop and this post is just a short summary of that (and I will reuse it for exactly that purpose). One of the biggest things that helped me was the knowledge of Parkonson's law. I did it that way: For whatever item on my todo list I estimated the time I would need, then gave Mr Parkinson a smile and set up a really rediculous small fraction of that time as my actual goal. And it worked. Surprisingly it worked again and again. Now I want to translate this for my initially long term goals. I am convinced that it is possible to reach Fastlane beginning from my quite conservative goals mentioned above, simply by setting much shorter timeframes. I am working on that..

Now, I am really happy that I did this exercise and am more motivated than ever to go on. Fear looses it's teeth and claws due to a plan that gets clearer and goals that are broken down to feasable pieces.
May all of my future holidays be like that!
Cheers :cheers:

 

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[fanocks2003]

Agree, more people should define things more often. I already do that and have been doing so for the past 3 years. I review my finances (P/L statement and balance sheet) in detail every month, my credit score is reviewed every quarter at this point and I also review my own dreamlines and the cost of doing them (also done every month). I also review the details of how to have them accomplished and who to call to make the dreams to actually come through. Read Tim Ferris book about "Dreamlining".

You can't know what to do if you can't measure what you are supposed to do (if I remember the self-help books correctly).

Good post and speed++.

 

[AlwaysCurious]

Thanks for getting my feet back on the ground

Yes, I do need a lot more background on that topic, and am thankfull for any leading direction how to aproach this. So thanks for the book recommendation. My current problem is that the whole investment topic is extremely wide spread and there is too much unsorted and unrelated information out there. Right now, I simply don't know how to distill an investment strategy out of that.

As I learned form another great thread here, I will try to specialize as soon as possible rather than diversify. I think I will first concentrate on energy, IT and maybe health and water supply sectors as I see them quite future-proof.

Just like my approach on Forex I will first paper trade until I throw in real money. By end of the year I intend to start investing 10% of my monthly income on a regular basis. Mid term goal is to make 10%+. If this turns out well, I will raise the monthly input to 20%.

 

[AlwaysCurious]

@michael, thanks for the rep and your interest in the financial dashboard! I will post more about it as soon as I get some time again to think it through. Most important is to get the requirements straight: What do I want to get out of it, besides from some self assurance that I control my finances. Right now it is just a bunch of huge Excel sheets that I have to condens in a meaningfull matter and maybe translate it to a webpage.

 

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[yveskleinsky]

I can help you achieve 6 figures before 2010. Contact me.

Careful with the solicitation there Smooth Playa, it comes across as though you are a, umm, how do you say? Smooth playa.

 

[T.J.]

It's true what they say "elephants don't bite."