Yesterday I received my annual pension overview from my employee's pension and I was shocked at the difference in the estimated end value from last year's estimate.

2006 estimated value: 297,636.91
2007 esitmated value: 195,572.63

Over 100 thousand difference. Then I read on to find out that they changed a few things in the calculations.

1) They did not include any predicted pay raises.
2) They used 4% standard interest rate instead of 5%.
3) The company has changed their percentages for contributions for the age ranges, favouring the older participants in the pension scheme. This is to try and combat the low amount of savings in that age group.

However, I think this really shocked me into realising we are not saving any where near as much as we should be for retirement. Something new to work on once we have built up our emergency fund.

The title of this post refers to the hunger for success, and alludes to a situation I have been dealing with at work and am having a hard time letting go. I feel that I need to understand the situation before I can let it go and therefore I will start recording this issue in this blog and in that way I hope to it out of my system. These rants relate to personal finance in that it affects my attitude to earning more money.

I would to set the scene: I work for a international company at their headquaters and in my work I have to work with people for all sorts of different backgrounds and cultures. Now since I've been exposed to an international environment from a very young age this does not bother me, and I do consider myself very flexible when it comes to other people. Well just over a year and a half ago I was working in a team of about 10 people when a lady from Jamaica joined us. Let's call her Emma. She appeared to be a very beautiful, intelligent, well spoken, quiet and serious lady. Emma appeared to pick up the job very quickly and did not readily involve herself in the frivolous antics of them team. She would take every opportuntiy to ask questions about the job and would ensure she wrote down the answer. we were all very pleased to have her as part of the team, despite her reticience to join in our attempts to lighten the spirit in the office. Then slowly after time she started joining in the conversations and bulding relationships with the other team members. At the time I was one of the longer serving team members and everyone in the team would come to check their question with me, including the new manager. I was the team mentor and the manager's back up, however it is important to know I did not mentor Emma.

Then as she began to realise that I would alsways give her a full answer to her questions, whereas the other team members did not always know how to answer her questions, she started coming to me and adopting me as her mentor. She did this by flattering me and she tried very hard to become friends with me, even offering to walk with me on my way home, which meant she would need to walk 20 minutes instead of 10 to get to the strain station. We seemed to be bulding a freiendship, albeit rather quickly. During these walks she would tell me about her personal situation and as she eventually filed for divorce from her husband, these conversations were quiet personal. More personal than I wanted them to be, however I got the sense she needed someone to talk to.

Then one day, while our manager was away on holiday and I was back them up, this girl started being awkward towards me and eventually stopped talking to me. I only found out why many weeks later and will now share both her version and my own version of this story below so that you may make your own conclusions:

Emma - During the few days that I was backing up the manager, it was announced by our director that one of our team members would be leaving us (he had been fired). That day Emma told me that she was worried about her contract as it seemed as though alot of people had been leaving lately and I told her not to worry as each case was different, there was no general trend. It was more a co-incidence that alot of people left the department that month. However, after that the director and I were discussing how the team had received the information and he asked me if anyone had any particular worries and if I thought he should maybe go and reassure them. I mentioned the conversation that I had with Emma, so the director spoke with her to reassure her that she needn't worry about her contract.

According to Emma, the fact that I spoke to the director about her worries was what annoyed her. She saw at as me dimishing her in the eyes of the director. She took my actions as a betrayal and told me that everyone is ambitious but not everyone has to step over other's bodies in order to grow.

Please would you share you opinions about Emma's opinion to me, as I'm not sure if I'm being obtuse or not, but I found it strange.

My version - Up until that day before the incident described above, Emma had received praise from all angles on how good she was as an employee. How happy we were with her, that she was the best our her training group etc. Several months after she started we hired an American guy, who was also very serious about his job, so much so that he would come in early, do nothing but work until lunch, take his lunch and then leave late at night. The few days before my manager went on holiday and the several days before this evident, he was handling the work that would normally require 3 people to handle. So the incident I believe caused the issue with Emma is, I asked this guy if he was okay or if he needed any help from anyone else in the team. He said no, so I told him I thought he was doing an excellent job, thanked him and asked him to let me know if he needed any help. When I sat down at my desk Emma stood up for a chat and I made a comment on how well I thought this new guy was doing and she quickly returned to her own desk.

I believe I stood on some toes with Emma, by reaconizing someone else's work to her.

Again, I'd appreciate your comments on this situation.

I will break the rant here as I feel you have enough spelling mistakes and rambling sentences to deal with.

I'm doing a little celebratory dance right now as our net worth has finally reach the golden positive numbers. WOOHOO!!!

We still have my student loan debt, however, we now have more assets than liabilities and can really start aiming to build on our current financial foundation.

It feels good to reach these goals.

Last month I started tracking my progress against my financial goals for this year against a monthly scale. As I have set several goals in different areas of saving and am aiming to achieve these goals in order of priority, I find this a much easier way to measure my progress. How I am trying to do this is that I am noting down what my individual goals are and the value amounts of what I expect to achieve by the end of the year. Then I noted what my actual starting amounts were then minused these two amounts, which gave me the actual amounts I would require to reach my goals. I then divided these amounts by 12, which gave me the monthly amount required to reach the goals. I can then compare my actual amounts saved or paid off each month to the monthly amounts provided by the above calculation. This way I can see which goals I am on target to reach after 12 months and which ones I am still behind on.

I have also carried out this calculation on my goal net worth, which includes all the individual golas I set. This gives me a clear indication of how I am tracking overall for the month.

So for example, I may be behind on paying off my student loan by 2 months, but I may been ahead of paying off my CC by 2 months and therefore still be on track to reach my financial goals by the end of the year as my net worth may be right on target.

I hope my explaination is understandable. This system of goal tracking is very much a work in progess for me and I'm open to any feedback or suggestions you may have that might help me keep a better overview.

________________________________________

Well after all the explaination lets have a look at my progress to date. I managed to pay off our CC this month (woohooo go us! - I'm still celebrating this one and will be for a long time) which means I have accomplished my total target for the next 12 months on that one. The only debt we still have is my student loan, but due to the very low interest rate (3.5%) on that loan we have decided not to pre-pay it just yet. Instead we are going to build up our savings, which has already started and hopefully should pick up some momentum in the next few months. We are currently not behind on any of our goals and are ahead on some, which puts our net worth at our 5 months expected goal. Woohoo!



This is the first year that we have ever set actual financial goals for ourselves and it is also the first year that we've had so much extra cash. Mainly due to both of us changing our jobs in the second half of last year, which increased our take home income by 1000 EUR each month. So there were alot of uncertainties when I set the goals for this year. I do not feel as though we will keep up this great progress for the whole year so I don't think I need to adjust my goals to be more agressive. If we can reach them I'll be happy. Then we'll see what the next step will be.

We have finally paid off our CC in full WOOHOO. Below is the beautiful sight that I saw when I checked out CC balance online today, with all personal information removed.



I was aiming to have this baby paid off in March'08, however due to life happening the pay off date was delayed. However I am so happy we have finally paid off this 17.5% interest rate financial shackle.

I also want to celebrate the fact that our net worth is only -251. We're almost at our goal of having a positive net worth. I'm so proud of the amount of progress we have made since January and am determined to keep up the momentum as much as possible. I do not expect that we will keep to the great rate of progress for the rest of the year, but I do feel as though we have managed to adjust our way of thinking from a mindset of spending to one of saving. I think it helps that we have discussed both our longer term desires and that we are both focused on saving in order to make them possible.

Woohoo go us!