Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.
Welcome to my second portfolio update or the year 2025, I hope you still enjoy them. Now let’s get into things!
On the professional side, things not so good, but not so bad. The company that I am working for is not investing anymore into the Berlin office and I think they just want people to leave, to hire in other cheaper locations. This reflected in my annual performance review, where the results were less that expected. The things are not so bad as I like what I am doing and learning a lot, flexible times, home-office when I need it and good engineering culture. The compensation part and not having a level promotion would have been just a title change, as the salary would not have increased too much. What they changed this year was that the bonus we got as RSUs will be converted in cash, which I find a good move for short term, as I will get that salary percentage each month, instead of waiting for 4 years to vest. I still have 40% of my RSUs unvested, which means that I will lose them if I leave the company, basically 40% of my annual bonus in the last 4 years. I’ve written here an article about how RSUs work.
I will look for a new position after summer vacation, but no rush in finding something immediately, unless is something better than I have here.
Personally, nothing exciting happened. We won’t do any serious house renovation this year, maybe just minor stuff and arrangements in the garden, that are some leftovers from the works from last summer, details that require a lot of time. I figured out that we invested around 40K EUR in the house so far, which is quite enough for the moment, as we did the most pressing stuff: heating, new kitchen, external blinds for the windows, new floors for the bedrooms and office space. Renovating the bathroom would be the next big project (and expenditure), but we don’t want to go over 10K EUR. We’ll see what offers we get from the tradesmen.
That’s it from the personal side, let’s see how my investments performed:
My investment account was at €24,545, with €891 more than previous update, due to assets appreciation and some hundreds of EUR invested. I’ve started again investing in the stock market with a small sum that I plan to increase in the future. I am no longer “investing” in the RSUs given by my employer, as I’ve written earlier. I use Trade Republic as a broker and if you create an account using this link, we will both receive a bonus of €25 after your first trades.
I had experienced investing into P2P lending with Mintos, but at the moment I am withdrawing all the funds. At the moment I have €290 in the account and all the money are in the recovery phase, with little chance of seeing my money back.
Finally, some numbers about our total net worth: it increased by about €1,500 compared to last quarter (savings + investments). The increase is really small, but daily expenses higher that normal, FX downturn, as some deposits are in RON (Romanian currency) and a Easter vacation in Romania are to blame for this. But some must also enjoy life, instead of saving money and being unhappy.
