It’s Raining…

A LOT here in The Netherlands. This week my husband and I got soaked while riding our bikes to work. Since we don’t cheat and drive the car instead (one of us would still be soaking wet because we have one car) we just had to endure it.

We do have proper rain suits, so our clothes stayed dry. However, our backpacks and shoes (and socks!) were soaking wet every time. The contents of our bags were suffering from this. My husband carries a laptop which he already has a plastic bag around in order to protect it from the water.

Before winter it had crossed my mind to buy these type of covers for our bags and shoes.

I wish I had done it then and got them at the cheapest rate. Obviously I didn’t and yesterday we were fed up with this. After work I went into town and bought two covers for our backpacks at €9.95 each and covers for our shoes at €22.95 per pair.

There were probably better deals out there, but I decided not to spend lots of time searching for them. We needed the stuff NOW.

Another lesson learnt…

I am off to work and it’s raining cats and dogs right now…

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Free Online Workouts

Just a quick tip today: http://www.fitnessblender.com/

A cute couple that makes these awesome workout videos in their garage on a shoestring budget and distributes them for free online.

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Dare I Tell You About This?

Ehm…yeah…so…we were toying with the idea of another winter sport holiday. We started looking around for cheap apartments and we found one which was extremely cheap. Much cheaper than the one we booked a couple of weeks ago. That one was €585 in total and this one’s only €425 for a whole week. Then we started thinking whether we were really going to do this.

Here are our lame-ass reasons:

• I’m still not pregnant
• Hopefully I’ll get pregnant soon and that probably means no skiing for the first couple of years until the little brats are old enough to join a kiddie class (unless some grandparents want to come along and watch them which I think is very unlikely to happen)
• We enjoyed our previous winter sport so much, it was great for the body (I lost two kilo, yay!) and mind (we spent lots of quality time together, I love my hubby!), seriously!
• I would really like to become a competent skier
• We will go on a cheap summer holiday using our foldable caravan
• We can fork over the dough
• We like to “buy experiences” instead of stuff these days. We just are the couple that travel a lot and enjoy the memories
• Just cuz we can?

Anyways, no turning back now. We booked it!

Please, be nice!

Love,

Mrs Econo…yeah right…

We Have Paid Off 50% Of The Interest Only Part Of The Mortgage!!!

This morning I decided to check my bank account since my salary should be on there and it was. Before my salary was added to the bank statement I had already noticed that I had a surplus of almost half our monthly expenses.

I thought of two different options. Number one was to throw that amount into the interest only part of our mortgage. Number two was to stash it on my personal savings account. I had a look at our overview and I then noticed that we still have a larger emergency fund than we decided we want. So that made the choice very easy….I threw it into the interest only part of our mortgage. And guess what? Now we have officially paid off more than 50% of that part of our mortgage! YAY!

This paying your mortgage off thingy is getting really addictive. I am so looking forward to the day that we will sign off the interest only part of our mortgage and tell the bank to stick that part of our mortgage where the sun doesn’t shine. The interest only part of our mortgage makes up 1/7 of our total mortgage. The greatest part is made up of a savings scheme which we have been throwing extra cash in as well.

Would you have made the same choice?

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

And Another Business Investment: An Iphone

The husband spent €700 today on a brand-new Iphone. I already told you we are working on an app which we hope will generate cash in the near future. We bought the Apple computer but you can’t really test these things if you haven’t got an Iphone, right?

Do you want to know a funny fact? My husband is sooooooo NOT into Apple! He’s rooting for the Android team! However, we found out that android users hardly every buy apps whereas Iphone users buy shitloads of them. Sounds like a sensible business investment now, doesn’t it?

And now we need to stop spending and start cashing in!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

P.s. By the way, it’s not some shitty useless app were are designing. It will actually benefit mankind, trust me. There’s even the odd chance Mr. Money Mustache might approve of it.

Cargo Bike Trailer

I have been bidding on a second-hand cargo bike trailer of this model:

Sure, Mrs EconoWiser has never owned a bike trailer before and she’s going for the jumbo version straightaway! A brand new version would be €400 and I can have a hardly ever used version for €150 which I think is a pretty good deal. It doesn’t have a top, though. I think I would like one. I have seen new ones ranging from €85 to €150. It tends to rain sometimes here in The Netherlands so a top is probably a very good idea.

By the way, I am going to be using this beauty every week for my grocery shopping trips instead of using the car. And there are probably many more purposes for the newest edition to my automatic life balancing machine!

I am rather proud of my badassity!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Running In The Snow

Holland is covered in a nice thick blanket of snow. It looks great, obviously. It’s just not too practical, especially when you want to keep running outside three times a week.

Instead of being a complainypants I decided to shoot myself with the Optimism Gun and strap some snow chains under my running shoes. Guess what? Ever since the snow fell I was able to keep up with my schedule and run three times a week. It’s a ton of FUN! The workout is even harder because of the unevenness of the snow…even better for those buns of mine!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Our Apple Purchase And Business Investment

Yes, we did. We spent €1350 on an Apple Mac Mini. Since I bought it on my business’ name (I own the our business gig due to practical reasons concerning my husband’s career) we will receive a tax break from it. I think it cost us half the amount that way.

Hey, but buying new Apple products isn’t very Mustachian is it? Indeed, you’re right. However, my husband and I are working on new business ideas. We have a couple of ideas for apps and we are currently working on one. We didn’t buy a new screen or whatever, just the device we (my husband) needed in order to start developing apps. He’s currently going through free online courses on how to build apps by a professor over at Stanford. I just love the fact that this sort of information is out there and available for free.

I am working on the app as well by setting up and writing out the whole idea. I hope this will become another interesting side gig for us!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

Our Shopping Spree

Today my husband and I went shopping. He needed jeans and another running outfit. So hopped on our bikes and we cycled to the city centre. Since it was a Friday afternoon it wasn’t too crowded and we knew exactly which store to go to because they have jeans that fit my husband perfectly. We stormed in, grabbed a few designs in his size off the racks and he tried them on. He bought 3 pairs of jeans on sale.

I quickly had a look at leather bags in the same store since my handbag (I only have one and use that one) is tearing apart. I have specific requirements so the search was rather quick. Unfortunately, none of the bags on sale fit my requirements.

Off to the next store for our sports gear. That took a bit more time and the sales racks were scattered all over the place. It took us quite a while to find what we wanted to try on. In the end, my husband bought running pants and a long-sleeved shirt which were the items he was looking for. Unfortunately, these weren’t on sale but we couldn’t be bothered. He runs three times a week and only has two pairs of running outfits for winter. When going to the cashier to pay we were really fed up with the whole shopping thing. We had been at it for about an hour and we just wanted to go home.

My mum asked me to go shopping with her. I told her I really dislike shopping these days and there’s nothing I need (or want, for that matter) right now. I hope she won’t ask me again.

Do you dislike shopping for clothes as well?

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser

The Amount We Saved In 2012

So, 2012 was an expensive year for us. We made some big purchases in January for our house. And we went on holiday to India, skiing in Austria and chilling in Germany. We only got back into our old frugal mode from a couple of years ago around mid-2012. Now that I have last year’s numbers I can see that we still managed to save/not spend a whopping 20% of our income that year!

Mr. Money Mustache thinks one should save 50%-75% of one’s income in order to retire really early. That triggered me into calculating whether we would be able to do such a thing. When I extract the outrageously expensive holidays and the one time purchases for our home we could be saving about 33% of our income. Wow, that sounds like fun and not too bad! Of course, our winter sport last week doesn’t help for this year’s total…

As a result I have put a new goal for 2013 on my list. Saving/not spending at least 30% of our income, which we’ll put into our mortgage.

I just keep on calculating percentages and I think it’s a lot of fun. I didn’t know we were doing so well, yay! Early retirement, here we come!

Love,

Mrs EconoWiser