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Portfolio update – September 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my sixth portfolio update or the year 2021, I hope you enjoy them. I’ve decided to post updates at the end of the quarter, as things are not so interesting every single month. Now let’s get into things!

The last three months have been exhausting: after the move, which was quite in a rush, we had to arrange the old rental house for the next tenant (this is the unwritten rule in Germany, you get a newly painted and clean house, you need to leave it the same, otherwise the landlord will paint and fix damages out of your deposit). After we managed close the rental contract, we had work to do in our new house: small fixes, work in the garden, buying different furniture and appliances etc. And then it came the renovation of our attic, for the home-office. I think I’ve spent most of my free time in stores like IKEA, Höffner or Bauhaus.

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Portfolio update – June 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my fifth portfolio update or the year 2021, I hope you enjoy them. I’ve decided to post updates at the end of the quarter, as things are not so interesting every single month. Now let’s get into things!

The big news since April is that we finally signed the papers for the house at the notary in May! Horray! Finally, after almost one year of waiting, since the house was reserved for us. Things started to move quickly and at the end of May we received the keys, although the process is not yet finalized and the seller didn’t get the money from us. It is a weird situation for us, because usually the buyer gets the keys and can move in after the seller receives the money in their account. Anyhow, we asked our lawyer and we cancelled our rental contract (thus saving some money), we made some small renovations and end of June we moved to our new home. Our own house in Germany!

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Portfolio update – April 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my fourth portfolio update or the year 2021, I hope you enjoy them. Now let’s get into things!

April was a normal month, but the big news is that things started to move regarding the house we want to buy (actually they started in March). Now we exchanged some documents, we hired a lawyer to help us with the contract and in May we will go to the notary and sign the buying offer. The process for this house is a bit different than for the normal buying process in Germany, because we buy from a big company and they have their internal ways. I will write a separate post about buying a house in Germany.

Investments wise, two of the companies stocks that I’ve bought last month have not performed very well, but I can say that I didn’t make too much investigation into the companies – rookie mistake.

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Portfolio update – March 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my third portfolio update or the year 2021, I hope you enjoy them. Now let’s get into things!

March was a good month: I’ve started the real work for the project at work, I can say I like it, even though that this requires more meetings and video calls fatigue is a real thing, a day full of video calls wears you down. Regarding the startup, things are on track, we are developing our product. I (together with my partner) joined a Startup Mentorship Programme, it should help us in our journey. Investments wise, there was a drop in the market and I took advantage and bought some individual stocks. We’ll se how they perform in the following month and years.

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Portfolio update – February 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my second portfolio update or the year 2021, I hope you enjoy them. Now let’s get into things!

February was a good month professionally: I’ve started the new project, it involves doing more work that requires communication rather than technical stuff, but it’s something that I enjoy so far. The startup that I’ve started with my friend seems to be a good idea, we already have two investors that promised to fund us for this year! Yey, exciting times ahead! Investment wise, this month was not so great, basically I’ve lost some money on the shares that I’ve bought, including a marked loss of 100€ on GameStop (note to myself: don’t speculate on the stock market). I would have been better off if I’ve invested this money in a ETF, but I want to get some knowledge in how to invest in the stock market anyhow.

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Portfolio update – January 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my first portfolio update or the year 2021, I hope you enjoy them. Now let’s get into things!

January 2021 was a very good month, not especially in the financial terms, but in terms of new opportunities. I would say the year 2021 started very strong, with more opportunities arising than ever before. I’ve tested the waters of freelance after many years of pause and managed to get my first contract (that ended after one week at the client’s request, doesn’t matter, the first step was made). Also, in my day job I got a new project with a new position that I haven’t done it before, so I am pretty excited about that also. And, to top it all up, a friend came up with a business idea and from the end of the month we are working on our startup.

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Portfolio update – December 2020

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my first portfolio update, I hope you will enjoy them from now on. Now let’s get into things!

December 2020 was an OKish month, I was a little pissed that I had to pay back to the Taxman (Finanzamt in Germany) around 1500€ for year 2019. I don’t know, maybe there is some optimisation that I can make, for the taxes in 2020 I will use a financial advisor, because I have a more complicated situation anyhow.

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My investments in 2020

Happy New Year in 2020! I hope this year will be better than the last one for you and your families! I hope we can put behind this terrible year, that came for all of us with a lot of alterations in the normal life, many restrictions and hard times.

For me it was a good year, my job was safe and I worked on a project that I liked. For my wife, not so good. Her job is not so safe, her company fired some people this year, the Berlin office is getting smaller and smaller at some point it will close. But hopefully she will find something else until that moment comes.

Now, let’s get to investments! As I said in the previous post, I’ve started investing at the beginning of 2020, with peer-2-peer lending and stocks & ETFs. I’ve have invested in three instruments and another asset class (real estate) was already in my portfolio:

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What is my starting point?

I am starting this journey with not so much stuff. I don’t have rich parents, rich aunts from where I can inherit fortunes, I come from a country (Romania, in Eastern Europe) where salaries were low and very low when I started my career, but got better in the recent years. I don’t have financial education, my schools and my parents didn’t offer me one. All the knowledge that I have is my own education and research on the web. I have started to read more about investments, finance and asset classes in the beginning of 2020, so just almost one year ago. My sources of inspiration are books, internet articles, finance oriented websites or Youtube channels. I will talk more about them in the future, most probably I will dedicate separate articles for that.

I am a married guy and have two small children under age of 5, that require constant investments of money and time. But they also bring me joy and I want to raise them to be independent and happy. I live at the moment in a rented house outside of Berlin and also I kept the contract for the apartment in the city (that is sub-rented at the moment) in the case we will need to return to Berlin.

We own an apartment in Romania that used to be rented until a few months ago and we plan to rent it or even sell it in the near future. The rental market is not so great in Romania, there are not so many laws and you can lose money if you have a bad tenant. We have a car, some cash in the bank and few investments, around 7000 EUR. Almost nothing, compared to other people that are pursuing the same path. I’ve calculated our net worth at ~ 180K EUR. I will create separate articles each month with my (our) net worth and updates.

Let’s see how we can increase our net worth and invest wisely, so these investments will return a nice lifestyle, shall we?