Tag: stocks

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Portfolio update – June 2022

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my second portfolio update or the year 2022, 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!

On the professional side, things are not looking good. I’ve got a small raise, but my company had to lay off 10% of its workforce, in an effort to “focus on being profitable”, rather that following growth with all costs. Fortunately I was not affected, but some projects got shut down, including one that I worked a lot in April and May. Oh well, we’ll see what future holds for me.

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Portfolio update – March 2022

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Happy New Year 2022! Welcome to my first portfolio update or the year 2022, 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!

On the professional side, everything is good. I’m settling in the position, getting to know the colleagues and IT systems. I am happy that I work for a global company, with distributed workforce, with no need to come to the office, only when it’s needed. In January I have received my RSUs (reserved stock units), but they will start to get vested starting January 2023, but also this is the time when I will need to pay taxes for them. I will write a separate article about how the RSUs work in my company and how the taxation works in Germany.

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Portfolio update – December 2021

Dear fellow investors, friends, family and future self.

Welcome to my seventh 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!

October was my last month in the old job, so I’ve decided to use all my remaining vacation days and have a holiday in Alicante, before starting the new job. As I told you in the previous update, we had a semi-failed attempt for a seaside vacation at the Baltic Sea in the middle of July (!!) and we had to try one more time.

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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 2021! 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, Germany.

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?