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Golden handcuffs - when you are sticking it out, just because it pays so damn well

If your job or career pays so well that everything else pales by comparison it pretty much locks you down in golden handcuffs. Yes, this is an extremely privileged position, yes, an unsatisfying high paying job is objectively much better than unsatisfying low paying job. It is a first world problem for sure, but it’s still a problem. If your job is not great, but they are similarly or better paying ones out there, then you don’t feel like you need to stay in it. If on the other hand your job pays you twice as much as many other jobs you could have and if you value money, then you might get stuck. For people interested in financial independence the money matters a lot as it’s their ticket to freedom. It makes a lot of sense to increase your income and increase your savings rate, cutting your ‘working years’. If you look a the famous blog post of simple math behind early retirement , the difference in years to early retirement between saving 80% of your income vs 50% is pretty signific
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Capital Gains for Asset Traded in Different Currencies

It’s December again and time to pay up the Irish Capital Gains taxes (if you are an Irish tax resident) for the first period of 2021. If you need more info about it, look at  citizensiformation.ie . I have just calculated my due capital gains this weekend and I thought to share some of my tips. I’m not a tax professional, so as always feel free to double check any advice on this blog. Gain != Gain in foreign currency converted to EUR at current exchange rate One big pitfall you can make while computing your gains for assets in USD is to look at the gain in USD and convert it to EUR at the current exchange rate. Why is that bad? If the exchange rate was constant, then it wouldn’t be a problem at all. But if the rate fluctuates, the difference can be substantial. Imagine you invested 100 EURO in December 2016. With exchange rate 0.95, this gets you ~105 USD, you buy stock X with it. Then in January 2018 you sell your stock for 115 USD, it appreciated, nice! The gain in USD is 10. But you
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Degiro vs Interactive Brokers - my experiences

If you are new to investing you might be asking yourself how to do it and which broker to use. In Europe there are a bunch of popular ones, but for serious investing people usually recommend either Degiro or Interactive Brokers. This blogpost is not an ultimate guide to those two products, I’m just a normal investor and I want to share some of my experiences. I also only use the web desktop versions as I don’t want to do investing (or trading) from mobile. Your mileage might vary. Why Interactive Brokers and Degiro are good options for your brokerage? Trusted companies - not likely to disappear Work across different countries (easy to transfer assets if you move countries and support different tax regimens) Low fees (there use to be a regular fee for Interactive Brokers for accounts with assets below 100k, but it’s no longer the case) Access to many different investment products My history of using Degiro and Interactive Brokers I started stock investing with degiro. I have a basic acc
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How I ended up with an overly complex portfolio

If I exclude employee pension contributions, as of October 2021 I’ve been investing for a little over three years. I didn’t know where to start and it seemed risky and complicated. Funnily enough I think I was much more anxious about paying taxes correctly than losing money. I had this unjustified confidence in myself that I will make good, rational decisions regarding the investments, but filling the tax forms correctly… oh my! In this post I will describe my investing journey and how I ended up with an overly complex portfolio. I hope you'll enjoy it! Early beginnings I started with a clean slate. Or, almost. I had stocks of the company that I work for. They give employees stocks as part of the compensation - it's called Restricted Stock Units ( RSUs ). But apart from that, the best experience with investing I had was having a savings account with a tiny interest. I knew very little about real estate investing at first. No one in my close family did it, none of my friends did
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Good property management companies are worth their weight in gold

Real estate might not be that passive One of the biggest differences between stock market investments and owning real estate is that real estate is much more work. With the stock market, one of the best strategies is to keep regularly buying more shares of a diversified fund, and that’s it. You don’t need to sell (and you shouldn’t really!) and there is no need to spend a lot of time researching if you found the right diversified fund (e.g. VWCE) With real estate, the buying itself is a lot of work and that is usually just a beginning. Unless you buy the place rent ready, it needs to be renovated. You need to find the right tenant, which includes advertisements, tenant verification, showings and so on. Once you have a tenant, things sometimes break and you are the one responsible for fixing them. When the tenant leaves you need to check the state of the place, clean it and do any necessary repairs and find a new tenant again. It’s a lot of work and small things add up. Especially if yo
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Buying a property: renegotiating after the inspection

In this post I want to share some tips about renegotiating the offer on the property after receiving the results of the survey (inspection) and valuation. I am not an expert negotiator and there are many real estate investors that are more experienced than me, but there isn't much content about it. A post like this in the past would be a great help for me. The advice here is based on my recent purchase of a rental property in Dublin in which both the survey and the valuation showed some problems. I successfully used their results to lower the price of the property even though the market at the time was very hot. Photo by  Sora Shimazaki  from  Pexels What to expect from renegotiating after the survey When you buy a property , after the seller accepts your offer you enter the ‘Sale agreed’ phase and you should quickly get the valuation and survey scheduled. Before you officially sign the contracts you can still walk away or renegotiate if you are not happy with the results of the s
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Buying a rental property in Ireland through the pandemic: sale agreed to keys in hand

My partner and I managed to buy a rental property with a Buy To Let mortgage in Dublin, Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic. It took ages though, just going from sales agreed to keys in the hand took over 6 months. In this post I want to describe how the process looked like for us after the seller accepted our offer. You can find a very good article about how this process generally works at  citizensinformation website . I would recommend reading that before you bid on the properties. In this post, I won’t talk about the exact numbers on this deal, I have made a youtube video about it back in November that you can see here .  Closing process and the required team To get your offer accepted when you are buying with debt you need to have a mortgage pre-approval, which tells the seller that you are likely to get a mortgage. When I was buying my primary residence in Dublin, we used AIB which had good rates and had an office very close to work. However, the process of dealing with the bank
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