2023 is slowly coming to an end and we are planning ahead for the year 2024. For me this year was the year to create a foundation for a new business or income stream. At the moment I am an online contractor for four days per week for a British company – fixed days and fixed times. As the work is remote I can work anywhere as long as the time zone is relatively compatible with British office hours. I have worked in several different countries and it is close to an ideal situation.
I said close, as I am not keen on the fixed hours and because I work from France, my day ends rather late. My goal is to create side hustles that over time can replace my current income. You know that passive income that keeps on coming while we sleep. Hey, but a girl can dream and have goals, can’t she?
I have been self employed for over 20 years and most of those years were spent in Australia. It is very easy to be self employed in Australia and several of my business ventures have had moderate success. I have been a remedial massage therapist, a counsellor, an interior designer and had a garden business which was by far the most successful gig.
At the moment I am also self employed – sole trader or auto-entrepreneur as they call it in France, where we have lived since 2017. Being self employed in France is a bit harder to set up but once you are in the French system, it runs quite smoothly. France has changed the rules around being a sole trader during the last 10 years but unfortunately they still hit sole traders hard with social contributions.
We may be considering leaving France…..
The big disadvantage of being in France is not being able to access our Australian pension. The countries do not seem to like each other enough to facilitate that exchange. For that reason – and a few more in fact, we are thinking of moving to Spain as Spain is one of the countries where you can receive an Australian pension. Actually you would be able to receive it in most countries in western Europe except the UK and France.
As a result we have started to research Spain and do a bit of planning ahead. Another reason we want to leave our home town Limoux, is the climate during the winter. It may be in the South of France but we find the winter too long and too cold. One of the main reasons we moved to Australia was the weather and good weather we have had. We spent 17 years in Brisbane and 9 months of the year the climate is close to perfect there. The three other months, summer, are the problem!
So researching Spain means thinking about the weather and in contrary to France, we have to be aware of areas that are too hot. Andalusia for instance, sounds fabulous in the winter, but the summers seem just too much of the good thing. Climate change is making many areas uncomfortably hot. On the other hand we would like the winter to be mild.
Limoux drops to similar temperatures as the winters in The Netherlands, where I am from. And, that, is the country I left because of the weather. I feel I have gone full circle and I am back in what I left. Twenty years ago this part of France may have been true to the claim of having over 300 sunny days per year. At the moment it is far from the truth as the amount of grey days is quite astonishing.
The beach at Roses, Spain
Could a move to Spain be the answer?
We have spent a fair amount of time in different parts of Spain. Mostly visiting my sister who used to own a house near Roses and doing housesits. We have done several housesits in Cataluña and in Denia, both very nice destinations. Unfortunately both are not our cup of tea to settle. Cataluña has the wind we like to avoid – the Tramontana and Denia is comfortable but has too much of everything in a negative way.
Following the climate, reading blogs and talking to people, we have found that Castellón might be an area of interest. Castellón sits in between Valencia and Cataluña. It is quite pretty, is not overly touristy and the climate seems to tick the boxes. So we have decided to check it out.
So here is our planning ahead itinerary
It started with a housesit in the centre of Valencia over the Christmas period. Usually we find housesits during specific housesit sites but this was organised via friends. Thus our Christmas was be in Spain, in Valencia with my husband, myself, one of our daughters and two cute cats. To be honest I was quite excited to say the least. I seem to hear more and more interesting things about this city. In fact it has become the latest ‘in’ destination for people to retire. And I am not sure if this is a good thing, by the way.
After the Christmas period, we will start our research and the first target area will be the area in between Castellón and Valencia. When we search for a destination in France, we created a list with criteria that were important to us. We simply dismissed everything that did not have some of those criteria. It is not easy to create a list like that as you have to anticipate and imagine through planning ahead. You can’t let yourself be blinded by pretty villages that seem perfect. If they don’t have the criteria, they are not perfect nor suitable.
Valencian beach on a sunny winter day with a perfect blue sky
Our list of criteria
Our list of criteria for Spain is different than the list we had for France. After all, we are almost 10 years older and now proximity to hospitals is high up the list. We experienced how important this is when we did an off-the-grid housesit in rural Cataluña. Our car broke down and the French road service could not find our coordinates and we had to meet the Catalan mechanic in a nearby town. Imagine having to do that when you need an ambulance.
I mentioned the weather being one of the criteria, health facilities is surely amongst them and proximity to the sea and hiking areas. Although we will be expats ourselves, we don’t like too many of them and we want the town to be alive all year ’round. Many pretty towns are only alive in the summer and in the winter they turn into ghosts towns. The target is a normal Spanish town where Spanish people live and work with facilities that are open all year.
Limoux is one of those towns and we can conclude that we stayed faithful to our criteria list. It ticked many of the boxes and it still does apart from a few things that I mentioned before. Climate was actually never on the list and we knew about the pension but were not ready to start planning ahead for our pension at the time.
To sum this up, we are preparing and planning ahead our next move abroad. Our oldest daughter reckons that we will never settle as we like to move and explore new places. Fortunately our current lifestyle supports that kind of attitude and lifestyle.
Are you good at planning ahead or does this totally not resonate with you?
After doing a bit of planning ahead for 2024, I felt like reflecting on the year 2023 so far. In January this year I set myself a goal. My goal was and still is to create the foundations for a new business that hopefully and eventually can give me a ‘retirement’ income.
The job I have at the moment is not a bad one at all. I work online and as long as there is good internet, I am able to work where ever I want. No need to commute and to spend money spent on office outfits. A huge disadvantage is the lack of time freedom as it is essentially a job from 9-5.
So the aim is to ‘fix’ that with other income streams. I am aware that this is for many people a dream goal and it may not be as easy as it sounds. I am having a go and the year 2023 was the year to set up a few structures and work towards that goal.
Moving forward in the year 2023
During the first three months I have been focussing on my health and decluttering. Not literally decluttering but shifting unnecessary baggage from my mind and my computer. They do say, if you get rid of un-necessary clutter, you create space for new things. And somehow that happened and an iPhone photography course showed up in my social media feed.
It was affordable and I got stuck in to it when I finally caught covid in June. This little critter made me feel very tired so doing a course seemed a good way of passing the time. I even followed it up with an editing photo course. Very creative stuff and it motivated me to take pictures in a more focussed way.
I have to admit that I dabbled at photography since I was an eight year old. I grew up in a house with a dark room to develop pictures and I had a go at graphic design and photography at art school. You can read more about it at a later stage.
Being on a roll
Since then an online Finnish magazine chose two of my pictures and and published them in one of their online editions. One is the feature picture for this article and the other one is just below. I also have created an account with a stock photo company and I have now submitted close to 20 pictures.
To date, they have accepted 9 of them with a good rating and these nine pictures are now for sale. One photo got a rating of 4/4 and it happens to be the same picture that the Finnish magazine chose. Maybe it is indeed a good photo and you can see it just below.
Published in Docu Books volume 39
I feel I am on a roll. I have even gone so far as making the decision to create a photo gallery website. And after a few weeks of brainstorming a business name with friends and family I have now registered a domain. More about that to come!
So if I draw the year 2023 to a close, I have done two photo courses and have 9 pictures for sale on a stock photo website. Two of my pictures are published in an online magazine and I registered a domain for a photo site. I feel that is a fair bit of progress!
There is more in the pipe line but I am not ready to get that off my chest. After all the year is not finished yet…
Since I have been tracking my habits on a daily base, I have become aware of a few obstacles that could stall my progress. The habits I am tracking are exercise, sleep, alcohol intake, just to name a few.
To be precise, these obstacles are examples of self sabotage that unfortunately stop me from getting ahead. By tracking all kinds of things in my daily life, I have become alarmingly aware of some of my ‘lesser’ thoughts and actions. They must have been around for most of my life and I see how they have affected many aspects of my life.
My worst obstacles in a list
1.The first BIG one is procrastination. I realised that tracking and making daily notes, helps to reduce procrastination. As soon as I do not track, whatever I plan for next week is on dangerous grounds. Whenever a more urgent matter pops up, it seems to get more priority. Even if I write my intentions down, it is sadly not a guarantee I will do it.
Once certain behaviours become a solid habit, I tend keep to them as I don’t want to break the chain. A relevant example is doing daily steps. I have now been doing a minimum of over 5000 steps per day since the beginning of February. It has become part of my day and I don’t like to see a day with only 2369 steps so I make an effort.
2. That bring us to the next one – priority. I probably don’t give enough priority to my dreams and as a result they remain just that – dreams. Typically, I plan around a few aspects of these dreams but I don’t seem to make real progress. To be honest I am still not really clear why I do this but it is a stubborn recurrent pattern.
I feel that I let everything that ‘seems’ more urgent, come in the way of my goals. As if I ‘found’ an excuse not to have to commit. I say ‘seems’ because as a matter of facts I can say no, but often I give in and don’t. This not only refers to external requests from other people and situations, it also concerns my own choices. Will I write a blog post tonight or watch Netflix? Will I do yoga or sit on the couch? Familiar patterns to all of us, I am damn sure!
3. Number three has to be ‘feeling overwhelmed‘. I obviously want to do too much and have not a clear oversight of what I want to achieve. Maybe I need a coach! That kind of bugs me as I am always coaching other people successfully so why would I need a coach for my own stuff? This has to be a flaw of many coaches and counsellors. After all, if you can help others you must be able to help yourself, right?
I wonder if that is really the case. I am in the middle of all my thoughts, plans, intentions and dreams and as a result I obviously lack overview as I am part of it. So how do you create sanity in this chaos that you are part of yourself? How do people do that?
So obstacles or not, here is a quick recap – I have made 2023 a year of planning and creating the ground work for a future online business. And here I am making a fuss about not being able to ‘see the light’ in March. Do I ever learn? No wonder it does not make sense
4. So that brings me to the next obstacle – impatience. There is a wonderful quote by Tony Roberts about this.
Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in two or three decades.
Tony Roberts
Putting it in perspective
Instead of working steadily on this plan, I obviously imagined to have it ‘done and dusted’ by the end of March. That is quite ridiculous. So to put it in perspective, I have done a quarter of this year and so far I have worked on my health. I make sure I have a regular sleep pattern, minimise alcohol – in fact it is virtually zero at the moment. I do my daily steps and work my muscles, I meditate 4-5 times per week and I journal daily. All these things have become part of my daily routine and are no longer cut short by any obstacles. Not a single thought of procrastination in sight! An interesting take on how to beat procrastination is described by Mel Robbins. She reckons that the cause is avoiding stress.
If the above were the achievements from another person, I surely would applaud them. Yet, I don’t do this for myself and I wonder if how common this is…..
So to sum this up, I am in motion and I am making progress. Quarter 1 of 2023 was all about health and awareness of my physical condition. Now I have to plan what quarter 2 will be about – my gut says defining my NICHE.
During February I have been busy tracking a lot of my activities on a physical and mental level. My previous post was about habits and keeping track so I can find out what could do with a change.
I like to follow up with how that worked for me during February. The idea is to explore a few things in my life. One of them is how to become the type of person who is capable of setting up an online business by the end of 2023. I intend to reflect on that process once per month in a blog post. This is my first reflection.
The first thing I did!
One of the things that I implemented during February was tracking. I had my birthday in January and funnily two of my presents were tracking devices. To be precise, a Fit Bit and a really fancy planner called the Happiness Planner. Both of them are perfect to track a variety of things and that is exactly what I have done.
From a health perspective I tracked my sleep pattern, my heart beat, my water intake, my daily steps and exercise. It is quite cool to see what you can measure with such a thing. Furthermore I noticed something interesting.
While I was tracking my behaviour and my habits, I became more aware and motivated to do the behaviours I had chosen. For example, I decided to do every day 5000 steps as a minimum. Before I set the actual number as a minimum on my Fitbit, I did not achieve 5000 every day. Since I set the 5000, I make sure I walk that extra mile as I want to tick it off the list.
Tracking – does it work?
I love updating spread sheets and marking what has been done. Tracking steps, daily exercise and water intake seems to make me do what I need to do. It definitely helped me with measuring my progress and I did not want ‘to break the chain’. I wanted to show up and add to the chain. On top of it I really enjoyed doing it and was amazed how I managed to fit it all in.
Filling in the Happiness Planner is a similar activity. It asks me to think about intentions, habits and awareness to name a few. It also focusses on self love, gratitude and what to look forward to. I have noticed that I am natural good at tracking factual things such ‘to do’s and what to schedule.
When it asked me to reflect on ‘what I love about myself’ and ‘good things about today’, I have to dig a bit deeper. However, as such questions are asked on a daily base, I can’t do anything else than fill them in or at least have a go at it.
I am reading the well known book Atomic Habits and in there it says, that for a habit to stick, you have to feel successful even if it is in a very small way. I do have a feeling of achievement about last month – a sense of small wins. In reality not much has happened but I know now that I can walk every day 5000 steps. I make an effort to drink between 1-1.5 liters of water and my heart rate is behaving like it should.
Additionally, I have been doing a short meditation every morning after waking up, did the yoga sessions I scheduled and filled in my planner. I did this all before I started to work so getting up in time was crucial. Simply the act of tracking sparked my enthusiasm to continue doing the things I had set out to do.
All this has given me a sense of fulfilment. Above all it forces me to stay honest with myself as tracking acts as evidence of the progress I am making. To be honest, it is almost a bit addictive. And it means I have stuff to write in my planner.
On my list was the write a monthly blogpost about all of this and there you go! Here it is!
Feel free to let me know if you are the type of person that tracks! Even if it is just to see how you actually spend your time. There may be a dark side to the habit of tracking and that is that it becomes more important than the purpose of doing it. I surely keep that in mind!
January is usually the month where many of us tend to review our habits. Full of hope we set New Year’s resolutions and we hope to become a better version of ourselves. Unfortunately most of us will have forgotten about our good intentions by the end of the month.
Lately I have seen a new trend where people object to setting New Year’s resolutions. Instead they decide to set intentions and hope they have more chance of getting a successful outcome.
Believe it or not but intentions don’t seem to work either. None of these things are effective unless you back them up with measurable goals and a solid plan of process.
I also have set New Year’s resolutions in the past and forgot about them soon after. Looking at my goal setting history, I realise I may have to make a few changes to my approach if I want to be effective.
Therefore, I have decided on the following. Instead of setting goals and focus on the end result, I will concentrate on the process that I will need to go through. In addition, I am going to assess my beliefs and habits and see if they are congruent with the outcome I am aiming for. I am pretty sure my beliefs and habits are not as helpful as they could be. Consequently they may need a bit of ‘reframing’.
The plan is to do this with the help of the famous book ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. I have been wanting to buy this book for a long time and for some reason it did not come my way. Until recently when I found it at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.
I started following James Clear almost a decade ago. At the time he was a photographer, a blogger and a body builder. Looking at his track record, he is walking the talk when it comes to creating new habits or getting rid of unhelpful ones.
Habits and identity
What appeals to me most is what he writes about the role of identity. This is not the first time I hear this but it comes down to the following. If you want to achieve certain things, you will have to become the type of person that is capable of achieving such things.
An example close to my heart is alcohol. If you are interested, you can read my blogpost ‘What is the best decision you made in 2022’ right here.
For instance, if you want to stop drinking alcohol, you will have to become a person who does not drink alcohol. It is not enough to remain someone who tries to stop. Another example that interest me is creating a successful online business. In order to do that effectively I have to become the type of person who knows how to create and market an online business. I obviously won’t be successful if I have have a go at it without having the necessary skills, strategies and timeline.
I have a few ideas for an online business. My intention is to explore how to become the type of person who is capable of setting up an online business by the end of 2023. I intend to reflect on that process once per month in a blog post. Writing about it will hopefully help me to keep on track and may give you a few ideas to act upon for yourself.
I hope you’ll find it inspiring to read and follow my experiences.
