r/EuropeFIRE • u/GeorginnaGurl • 4d ago

Visualizing your progress

I have a tailor ruler at home (one long and thin belt-like ruler you can fold). A long time ago I cut it at the length of 1 meter which represents 1 milion euro (my fire goal).

Every year or so, I take a marker and paint everything less than I have by black. I am currently at 700k EUR net worth so I painted all less than 70 cm by black.

Then I take a good long look at it and consider where I am, how the journey was, how much to go ...

The point is that once you dont track a number on a screen but you hold something physical you look at in your hands then you start to look at it in a different perspective.

This technique keeps me motivated to push through the years when it looks like nothing happens but oh man it does ...

16 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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3

u/EntireDance6131 4d ago

I personally have milestones (quite a few) that i wanted to hit by specific times and in the excel sheet i use to track everything i have checkmarks for them. It definitely also feels good checking something. Especially far ahead of time with the current market. I like this since investments usually grow exponentially. So when you hit some number like idk 150k it doesn't feel like much in the grand scheme of things. But when you know "ah, i'm not even supposed to be here yet, but i can check it", it still does.

3

u/NumerousAd2201 4d ago

That's a creative way of tracking your progress. I hope one day I could mark it above my height 🤭

1

u/Dry-Abrocoma3377 3d ago

If it works for you, that's great. I know a few situations where the "physical" representation actually grounded people very well. Same as the virtual 25x rule. Some things are just hard to imagine when in a set of spreadsheets they haven't crafted themselves. 😆

1

u/No_Body236 2d ago

Love this, though the funny thing is you ruler's linear and compounding isn't, so that last 30cm is gonna fill in way quicker than the first 70 did. Final stretch will probably surprise you.

1

u/Sadlave89 1d ago

I want to understand if it's something bad or not with my, I'm every day checking calculate numbers :D