Uncategorized – Financial Independence Europe: Recent Episodes
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Today Mathias talks with Luke and Rebecca about donating and philanthropy. Luke works for the organisation Giving What we Can” and Rebecca is already retired from her corporate career at WeWork and other companies. She is now teaching people part time about personal finance at Yield and Spread. Interestingly Rebecca is now giving what she earns in her side business to people in need. Today we want to find out why. Once you achieve a certain wealth, people often experience a...
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The post Episode 147 – How To Give Effectively | Luke Freeman and Rebecca Herbst appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
In this Episode Alvar interviews Brad from the Man Overseas on his journey to financial independence and how he is making it work. We also talk about: House hacking How to invest in real estate Alternative investments Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Itunes, Android or Spotify. Direct download here. Join our facebook group and subscribe to our newsletter to get infos about our latest online events
The post Episode 117 – The power of a Sabbatical and House Hacking Yourself to FI | Man Overseas appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
We previously talked about The Joy of Building Side Hustles while working a day job, and it’s no secret that many people are starting new businesses and sidelines to be able to work faster towards gaining financial independence. For your side business to succeed, you’ll need to keep up with the times. Here are some essential technological features that every business (old and new) should have: 1. Cybersecurity Measures ITProPortal recommends having effective cybersecurity measures in place in order to...
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The post 4 Technologies Every Business Needs to Have appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Hello! Today Alvar talks with Steve, CEO at Money Dashboard, an app that has simplifying personal finance management as its goal: he shares with us insights on how to use this type of apps in an effective way and how it can help people on their way to financial independence. Enjoy! We also talk about: Transactions categorization Planning Cross-country account management Relations with banks Data usage Identifying blind spots Don’t forget to subscribe our podcast on Itunes, Android or Spotify. Direct...
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The post Episode 081 – Managing Personal Finance | Steve from Money Dashboard appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Hello listeners! Today we dive into the very basics of this podcast: What does financial independence mean and why does it matter so much? We do it by getting to know the personal history and motivation of each one of our three hosts, and how they are actually working to reach their objective. This is a very personal episode and we hope you will find it useful! We also talk about: The history of FI What it actually is Target...
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The post Episode 046 – The Why and What of FI 🧐 appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Welcome to another Friday episode! Today it’s just us three – but it gets pretty interesting. We talk about personal side hustles we’ve each done and how they’ve succeeded, and we also go through a quick process for people to figure out a good side hustle that makes money 🤑. We also talk about: Alvar’s side hustles and philosophy Is investing a side hustle? Araminta’s side hustles and philosophy Scalable and not so scalable side hustles Mathias’ side hustles and philosophy...
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The post Episode 028 – 3 Co-Hosts Discuss Current Side Hustles and How You Can Get Started appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Hoi hoi round 2! Today we interview B from the Netherlands. After buying his flat at age 22, he tells us how he got started with property investing, why he sometimes recommends timing the market and his refinancing strategy. What we also talk about: Why and how he got started with real estate so young Wealth tax and some property numbers How and why he refinanced his apartment His philosophy when it comes to debt Not paying off his student...
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The post Episode 027 – Why I Refinanced My Apartment to Invest in the Stock Market | FIRE The Boss appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Bienvenidos again! Today we interview a lovely Spanish couple living in Germany, working on their path to FI through passive investing. We talk about the pillars of passive investing, what ETFs are really about and how to invest as an expat. What we also talk about: How Will and Fog completed a masters in Finance The debate between active and passive investing What would happen if everyone invested in ETFs Tools to invest as an expat Don’t forget to subscribe our...
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The post Episode 025 – What is Passive Investing and How to Get Started as an Expat | WillyFog appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Hoi hoi! Today we have an awesome guest from the Netherlands! Mr Cheesy reached FI this year in April, so we discuss how he did this in Holland, what he really does all day and what saving €€ is really all about. What we talk about: Mr Cheesy’s intro to FI What he does all day The Cheesy Index and the Dutch tax system Saving 100k€ His awesome Europe trip Don’t forget to subscribe our podcast on Itunes, Android or Spotify....
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The post Episode 019: Reaching FI and Paying Wealth Tax | Cheesy Finance appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
We’ve got a pretty mind blowing episode for you today with Ken from The Humble Penny! We talk about Ken’s amazing personal FI journey as someone who literally started from 0, we focus on personal development and he gives us some great actionable advice to reach life optimisation. Don’t forget to subscribe our podcast on Itunes, Android or Spotify. Direct download here. Who is Ken? Ken is 34 years old, married and with 2 sons. He lives outside London and...
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The post Episode 018 – How FI is All About Personal Development | Ken Okoroafor appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
Our second Friday episode! We asked the Reddit and Facebook groups for questions and got an amazing response – today we discuss how to get started with investing as a beginner and some awesome resources for us Europeans to reach FI in Europe.
What we talk about:
- The simple way of getting started with investing
- How Araminta and Mathias got started
- The difference between ETFs and index funds
- European resources used by every co-host
- The European equivalent to US FIRE tools
Don’t forget to subscribe our podcast on Itunes, Android or Spotify. Direct download here.
Getting started with investing A great question from PF212 on Reddit! He asks the following:
How do I get started? I have opened a DeGiro account, but I have no idea what to do next! There’s a lot of information in regards to comments suggesting “buy bonds/ETFs/indexes/etc. – but I have no idea which ones to go for?
A really great question, and one we all face when getting started on our own personal FI journeys. It’s especially confusing for us Europeans – there’s plenty of info out there for Americans to get started, but for Europeans it can get a bit tricky.
I (Araminta) start off this answer with my own personal experience: start simple and take one step at a time.
I literally only started a year ago, and it’s taken me some time to learn how to invest properly, where to start, etc – and I’m a personal finance blogger and FI podcaster. But as Barney says in one of our latest episodes, you want to start simple and celebrate the small wins. Although the process will be slightly different for every country, I put together some generic steps anyone can follow to get started with investing:
- Identify a tax efficient investing vehicle
This means figuring out what your country offers to protect yourself from taxes. In the UK we have the ISA, in Switzerland they have a Fisca and in Spain you do this through a pension plan. What does your country offer?
- CHEAP, GLOBAL, INDEX FUNDS
Index funds mean you buy the entire market instead of just one stock. This means if one company goes bankrupt it’s quickly replaced by a new company. Index funds return an average of 7%, are passive and very simple to use. Open an account with a brokerage through your ISA/pension plan/country’s equivalent and look for funds with:
- The words: global and index fund
- LOW FEES
Check the details of the fund for those words and double check the fees. Vanguard is famous for having very low fees (0.22%) and some great global index funds. Some examples are their LifeStrategy fund and Global All Cap Index Fund. As long as they have those words and are cheap, you can pick any one you wish.
- Monthly contributions
The best way to build up your nest egg is to keep investing every single month. This means setting up a direct debit or an automated transfer the minute you get your paycheck. Calculate a percentage that you’re comfortable with investing, and then ask your bank to send that percentage every month. This will build up your portfolio quickly and efficiently (and with literally no work involved).
- Go pro
Once you feel comfortable with your monthly contributions and with how you’re investing, then you can decide to go pro and try some new investing strategies. But it’s important to start simple and easy – when I started I wanted to try everything at once which got me overwhelmed and then I pretty much did nothing. Educate yourself, read some FI blogs, talk to other people, listen to more of our episodes ;). Then you can decide to go pro (tons of resources in the next question!)
Here are some things you could try:
- Dividend Growth Investing
- P2P Lending
- Property investing
- Geoarbitrage
Mathias tells us how he started investing with stocks and startups (crazy!) and then once he financially educated himself, realised it was better to do low risk index funds and ETFs. We have a bit of a discussion on what the difference is between the two and we come to this conclusion:
ETFs:
- More flexible and specific (e.g. can decide to buy only Asian stocks, only Tech stocks, etc)
- Can buy and sell an ETF (which means more fees)
Index funds
- Less choice
- Can’t go wrong with them
Both ETFs and index funds are a great way to diversify and invest low risk – however, as a beginner I recommend starting with index funds because it’s less confusing; with whichever you pick you can’t really go wrong. ETFs and index funds are interchangeable, so it’s more up to you!
If you disagree or have a different opinion we would love to hear what you think (we’re not financial advisors or experts!), so drop us a comment below letting us know
European FIRE tools This is another question a lot of Europeans have; what’s the European equivalent of Personal Capital, Mint, Betterment, etc?
With this, we got another awesome question from Reddit:
I’d be interested in platforms to plan your way to FIRE like OnTrajectory. Also FIRE tools targeted at the European market instead of existing tools primarily targeting users from the US.
Alvar
Alvar brags (rightly!) about how little time he spends organising his budgets per month. He tells us he sits down once a month with his girlfriend and they go through their spreadsheets and do an overview of their journey. Something like a budget party (cooler than it sounds). Here are the resources he uses:
- Mad Fientist’s FI Lab
- Pretirement app
- No More Waffles Spreadsheet
Mathias
As he says himself, Mathias is German and into finance – we call him the spreadsheet master. He has one chart for his net worth, one for his asset allocation and one to calculate how much he saves. He tracks every strategy he uses, every buy, sell and dividend transaction and then puts it into a program so he can even check it out on his Smartwatch. Yep, a proper spreadsheet master.
He says there are some benefits to spending 2-4 hours a month preparing and analysing spreadsheets; you check your balances, it keeps you on top of your money and you learn a lot. A good point.
Here are the resources he recommends:
- Mr RIP’s Google Spreadsheet
- Calculator [German]
- Compound interest calculator [German]
- Github P2P
- Portfolio tracker [German]
- some music from Mathias Hometown while crunching the numbers
Araminta
As mentioned before, I literally only got started in this personal finance world about a year ago and so am still adjusting and adopting new techniques and strategies. But I’m finally happy to have found a method that works for me when it comes to budgeting: I link my bank account to a budgeting app, and control everything from there. I set a percentage to go to investments. Then, once a month I spend 10 min slotting the numbers into a spreadsheet so I can easily compare month to month.
The complicated part about Europe is that it’s hard to recommend resources that work for every country. So my number one piece of advice, as always, is financially educate yourself as much as you can so that then you can personalise your own FI journey with the tools that best work for you. Here are some that I use:
- Yolt (my budgeting app)
- How Young FI guy invests
- How Foxy Monkey invest
- How Mustachian Post invests
- J L Collins blog
- Stock series, calculators
- J L Collins book: The Simple Path to Wealth
- The Monevator
- Reddit: r/EuropeFIRE
- Facebook: Financial Independence Europe Group
A lot of actionable advice and tips in this episode – we hope it’s somewhat useful! We’ve got quite a few questions now for the next few Friday episodes, but we would still love to hear from you. If you want to send us a question check out the big button that says ‘Send a voicemail’, or send us an email at financialindependenceeuropeATgmail.com. You can also sign up to our newsletter and responses to our emails will get priority over others
The post Episode 16 – How to Start Investing and Europe FIRE Tools appeared first on Financial Independence Europe.
