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…
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!
As a matter of fact, I can and ……..I am proud that I made it.
Curious? Here we go. In April 2022 instead of flying to London I spent unexpectedly a day in hospital on a heart monitor. Consequently I found out that I had a few heart rhythm issues and that I would need an operation. The cardiologist muttered almost mischievously that of course drinking alcohol was not the best thing to do. While saying that he was doing a scan of my heart and did not even look me in the eye.
In France there is a joke that if the doctor asks if you have been drinking and your reply is – ‘No, nothing at all’. He would say: ‘What, not even wine?’
I decided to take the cardiologist’s advice rather seriously. Maybe because deep down I felt that I would love to drink less regularly. In fact I had been thinking about it for some time. I looked up causes of the heart problems I had and there it was – cause number one, alcohol and number two, coffee. Two of my favourites!
The best decision in action
Moving forward 6 months, I am still drinking a few coffees per day. However I have almost removed drinking alcohol from my life and against expectations, it was not hard. To be honest, it almost went by itself.
This made me think as I never before had a real need to stop having a glass of wine. Despite the fact that I felt that I rather would not have the habit. This time the urge to have a drink was gone and I slowly became indifferent about it.
Throughout the summer I explored zero alcohol beers and I discovered they are getting increasingly popular. Furthermore there are some tasty ones out there and I tried a few different brands. When Autumn came and the weather became slightly cooler I did not fancy a cold beer.
Then something interesting happened!
Imagine coming home from work on Friday. You feel like a drink to reward yourself and to finish of the work week. Instead, I felt more and more that that drink was not going to give me that feeling of reward anymore. In fact a cold glass of sparkling water with a slice of lemon had the same effect. It seemed that the association of alcoholic drink and reward had become less strong.
It went even further and even if I poured myself some wine with a meal, I forgot to drink it while I was eating. So why have it then, was the logical conclusion. I am not sure what exactly happened but without me putting any effort into it, I had reduced the association between wine and enjoyment. To be honest I am thrilled that it happened like that.
My best decision made
Now I tend not to drink during the week and have a bit when socialising with friends or going out for a meal. I am happy to sit hours on the tiniest glass of wine and usually end up pouring it into my husband’s glass.
And one more thing – no more bad wine, please! If I have some, I would like a wine I appreciate. For instance there are a few local cafes where they serve rather mediocre cask wine. It definitely is less attractive going there since I made this decision.
Can you relate to this at all? I am sure there are many people out there who wish they could do this as well. Yet it never seems the right moment. In my immediate circle of friends there are at least a handful of people who have made the same decision during the last year.
Have you ever had that feeling of doubt creeping in when you are in the middle of preparing a change? This is how I felt when my husband asked me if I realised it was just going to be the two of us for a while.
To get you up to date, we are in the process of moving to a big estate to become the new caretakers of a property. It was sold earlier this year when we were there doing a house sit. The property we will call our new home is in the Ariège with only a few small villages close by and a few bigger towns approximately 30 km away.
3-5 years of settling in
My husband’s question made me think! I have always loved starting over again, meeting new people and exploring all the new things around me. From experience and I have a fair bit, I know that it takes me 3-5 years to feel settled somewhere. It takes that long to make friends and feel comfortable. One of the things that always strikes me most is to figure out where you can find random things like a needle, pins or nails.
This new destination in Daumazin, Ariège offers nature, gardens and plenty of land but going to a café for a quick drink will be a thing of the past. To be fair, we don’t even know if the few cafes that we found in surrounding villages will be open. French villages can be fairly sleepy during the winter months.
Naturally I am a very social person. I like to be in touch with people, meet and talk to people. Social media is from that perspective a god sent. My experience is that it has helped me to connect with many likeminded people all over the world.
Social Media helped me to reconnect with old childhood friends, even a teenage boy friend and I made many new virtual friends. With some I click so well that I am sure we would be friends in person.
Moments of doubt
I suppose it is fairly normal to have these moments of doubt when change comes closer. It may help to put things in perspective. My usual approach to change is to be openminded, have no expectations and walk into it with energy and guts.
I can remember that this is how I started a new life in Sydney in 1991 and it paid off. I found a job within a week and made ‘friends’ there quite fast. Australians are in general easy going welcoming people and embrace strangers without hesitation. Many of them were once in the same situation after all – being a land of immigrants.
The biggest thrill for me will be the outdoors. Stepping outside and being surrounded by nature is like a medicine for me. To put it in perspective – where I used to live the only thing I see is the house in opposite and the street is not much more than a car width.
There will be opportunities to garden, possibly start a vegetable pad. I like to eat organic and make foods such as pestos, chutneys and jams. How wonderful would it be to go shopping in your own garden?
So, after this little ‘awareness’ moment and writing it down is as always helpful, I put on my gutsy hat and steam forward to this new life with energy and zest!
When doubt creeps in!
If you are going through a change and see these moments of doubt creeping in. If you feel you need a little retune, why not reach out, tap into my experience and let’s evaluate it together.
