October 2024 – Trip to China and meetup

October 2024

October 2024 was a pleasant month, with multiple enjoyable events. The weather was better again in the second part of the month, so we could profit from nature. Outside the usual weekend events, there was nothing really out of the ordinary for this month.

As mentioned before, we are planning to go back to China in 2025. Our last time in China was at the beginning of the pandemic (awful timing) and we had to come back early because we were afraid of the borders closing. And we have not been since because it was difficult because of the continued issues with COVID-19. But now, we want to go back so that my wife can see her family and my son can see China for the first time.

We have only booked the plane tickets so far. They have become so much pricier. The last time, the trip from Zurich to Hong Kong was 600 CHF per person and is now 800 CHF (same flight). The flight is 33% pricier. This is really wild. And we now pay for three tickets instead of two, so we go from a trip of 1200 CHF to a trip for 2400 CHF. We could have saved some money with indirect flights, but even a direct flight is already tiring enough for me that I do not want to consider anything else.

When we add the hotel in the upcoming months and the local expenses to this trip, it will be an expensive trip. We will definitely not go back every year, but we may still go once every three years or something like that.

Our income was standard this month, with nothing particular, except for one small dividend payment. With our expenses and this standard income, we only managed to save 20% of our income. It is, of course, not too bad, but also not great for our long-term goals.

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in October 2024:

In total, we spent 13763 CHF in October 2024. Without taxes, this amounts to 7221 CHF, much higher than our goal of 5000 CHF.

The main difference with our standard expenses is the 2400 CHF for the plane tickets. Other than that, we also bought two pieces of furniture for our son’s room, to be better organized. We also had some smaller bills for courses, for instance. And we went to a small market party in a neighbor village.

On the groceries side, we had more than usual because we did one on the first day of the month and one on the last day of the month. Moreover, we also had more meals outside the house than usual. And we also bought for 160 CHF of dried meat in the small market.

Overall, our expenses are arguably not too bad. If we did not spend so much on plane tickets, we would be below our goal of 5000 CHF. Indeed, we managed to be more reasonable with miscellaneous expenses. So, I am fine with these expenses.

2024 Goals

Here is the status of our goals by the end of October 2024:

As we can see, the colors are very mixed in this result. Our financial goals are doing terrible, while our personal goals are doing well.

Obviously, our spending goal is very much failed. We wanted to spend less per month, but we are spending more. And we wanted to increase our income, but it actually decreased. And together, these two facts mean our savings rate is also down. So, we are decreasing on these three metrics.

On the other hand, I managed to optimize one further bill, by reducing again our heating bill this year. This will start to be reduced starting next month. We have managed heating pretty well this year. And we are, of course, being aided in that by the clement weather.

I am still improving my workouts this month. I am definitely on the right path, but this month was not great for frequency. I worked outside of home multiple times and every time I do, it is one less workout I can do. It is absolutely not the end of the world and outside some exceptions, I work from home 95% of the time, but I may have to improve on that.

This month was also pretty good for our energy consumption. We can still probably improve, but it is in a good place now. We will most likely not decrease it by 10% this year, but even decreasing it by a few percentage points is good.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about our goals this month. I thought we could do better with our expenses, mostly, but I keep getting proven wrong, month after month. On the other hand, my health goals are doing well.

FI Ratio

Here is the progress of our FI Ratio as of October 2024:

This month, we saw a small increase in our FI Ratio. This increase was mostly driven through the returns on the stock market and our small savings of the month. We are back at the level of July. On the other hand, our average expenses increased our target, reducing our ratio slightly.

Overall, our net worth is doing good progress and should allow us to retire early. However, it will be difficult to retire early with our current level of spending, especially given its upward curve.

The Blog – Tiktok, meetup and forum

For the first time in seven years, I did not post on schedule for the first article of the month, which was one day late. It is not really a big deal, but I will be more careful in the future.

It had been a while, but I was back on a podcast: The Key To Financial Freedom & Smart Investing. I like to do these from time to time.

I have also been talking about it for a long while: a meetup. If you are interested, I am trying to organize a meetup for the community in Fribourg in December. You can head on to the forum poll if you are interested.

This month, the blog turned seven years old. It is a bit crazy that I have been blogging for so long. One of the things I mentioned in the article was migrating the forum to a self-hosted instance. And this is done! After a hiccup and some lost data, I managed to migrate the forum properly to my instances. This will save us 660 USD per year. There should not be any difference for users.

Finally, we have also started doing some videos. This is something we have wanted to do for a long time. At the beginning of the month, I had enough posts written in advance to have some time to try doing this. For now, we have decided to do some TikTok videos in French. However, I am not convinced about the business value since we cannot even share links to the blog in the TikTok videos. So, I do not think this experiment will last long. I would prefer doing YouTube, but YouTube videos are more work. My wife is editing the videos.

Other than that, there was nothing special on the blog. The last week of the month, I had very little time for the blog, so I hope this changes next month. If it does not, I may have to reduce my schedule for articles.

Next Month – November 2024

November 2024 should be fairly standard. I will go to Germany for a few days for a conference for work. I have not been at a conference for a very long time, so it is good to go back. Other than that, we have a few events planned already for the weekends, but not too much.

Financially, it should be a good month (at least better than October). Expenses should be standard, but we have some shares vesting that should increase our income.

What about you? How was October 2024?

Recommended reading

• More articles about Updates
• October 2023 – New heat pump boiler
• May 2021 – The house strikes back!
• August 2021 – A good simple month