Summary of April 2024

 

Summary of April 2024

The war continues and what is worse is that Ukraine have started to lose some ground. I hope that this can be turned around again and it's a pity that there are so many young Russian men that considers that joining the army is their only way to improve theirs but probably more often their families life.

My van is now standing on all four wheels again. Lesson learnt for me, no chance to change wheels on the rim as a single person and without the proper equipment. So I took one wheel at the time to a garage and had them do it for me. The temperature is now also increasing meaning that it is now more comfortable to take it out for a spin again. I see several proper mobile homes out on the roads and on seaside parking lots so also I should do this.

I flew down for a week to take a look at properties in my favourite area. I had some difficulties to get hold of the brokers so in the end I only got to see three places. All of them were "illegal" dwellings. Two had no water and no electricity and ALL of them had a toilet that is flushed out to a dug out and covered hole in the ground. Madness Spain, madness! When I was there back in 2006 I was horrified that the University drains was just going straight out into the ocean but clearly this has not improved over the years in Spain. It is time for improvement and it is not THAT difficult to install a 3-chamber well for your black water. As you probably understand I have slightly changed my strategy and I've decided to buy the place first and then drive down there. It is yet another change to my plans but what can I say... life is good in my summerhouse and driving there in three days with all my stuff will be more convenient.

In April there was a proper dip in the stock market which it has started to regain a bit of again, being 100% invested, no income  and not yet bought my house I am for sure more sensitive to these fluctuations.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of February/March 2024.

The total invested value is now at: 343,328 €. No further investments were made.

The value of the portfolio is today: 542,962 € and I have 2,188 € in cash. I have realised gains of 9,653 € and unrealised of 199,633 € (58%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 78% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 18,061 points which means that it has decreased by -2.1% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has decreased by -1.8% in the same time period.

Conclusion: The biggest drops have been coming from the US stocks for me during this month. Received some nice dividends and 25 degrees in Spain is not bad!

Summary of February/March 2024

 

Summary of February/March 2024

After an "election" in Russia surprisingly Putin won with 88% of the votes and the war continues in Ukraine. I. for one, hope that EU will push through with using the frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine in their efforts to defend their nation.

I've been feeling a bit down, especially in the end of February, which I self diagnose as a mild depression. I'm feeling better now, but clearly I am destined to work and not having a proper job is a strain on my mental health. I additionally got a flat tyre on my camping van due to that the valve broke off, happily it did not happen during driving but while it was parked in the drive way. In my stupidity I was not aware of two things when it comes to wheels... #1 the valve is, due to them being tubeless, directly sitting on the rim and #2 when you order tyres you get exactly that, a rubber tyre without a rim and without valves. Great for the environment but it makes it difficult to sort out on your own. This means that the adventure starts to cost a bit of money due to all the items I needed to get however I hope that I will soon learn to put on new valves and new tyres on already existing rims.

It is a strange, strange feeling when ones money just keeps increasing without one having an income. I've never lived as "cheap" as I currently do and I spend in the region of 250-300 EUR per month which is far below my estimated 1,000 EUR per month. It is a very good moment to go out and buy property with cash and I must pull myself together and get busy buying a place. Oh, and I had a lovely Easter celebration with my family here in the summerhouse.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of January 2024.

The total invested value is now at: 343,328 €. No further investments were made.

The value of the portfolio is today: 549,106 € and I have 984 € in cash. I have realised gains of 9,653 € and unrealised of 205,777 € (60%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 78% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 18,443 points which means that it has increased by 9.0% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 6.9% in the same time period.

Conclusion: DAX has gone crazy during the last two months and even though I was far behind my assets increased by 23.5k €. The snowball is clearly rolling down the slope which might be a stupid reason that is holding me back because I know that when I buy my future property then I will kill off that snowball.

Summary of January 2024

 

Summary of January 2024

More and more women are now being trained and used in the army in Ukraine, I hope that Russia decides that enough is enough and that the voices of the mothers in Russia keep increasing in volume regarding sending and having their boys being killed in a meaningless war that Putin decided to start and now probably keeps running due to pride.

I had a lovely ski trip to Trysil with my brothers and my cousins families. Trysil is a very nice place with long slopes that reminds me more of the Alps than anything else. Skistar and their inflation is making it costly though. I hadn't realised but my brother told me that Skistar apparently failed with their Austrian adventure. Pity, I hoped they would be able to go global but this might leave a mark on them for years to come. My poor little nephew managed to break his leg the first morning of skiing. The first (not yet up at skill level) and the last (tendency to make riskier decisions) appears to be the moments of additional danger. Is there a correlation with investing? I know for a fact that I was really bad in the early days and made seriously bad investments. When you have too much money, do you become reckless then again? May I never have that quantity of money! Angel investors are however needed to keep the entrepreneurs' of the world going but I prefer to be an entrepreneur than to become an angel investor.

My consultancy job is moving along ok, I would, at this point in time, like to increase it slightly, and I will have to have a discussion with them about that.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of November/December 2024.

The total invested value is now at: 343,328 €. No further investments were made.

The value of the portfolio is today: 525,591 € and I have 632 € in cash. Some dividend cash was taken out from my German stock broker. I have realised gains of 9,653 € and unrealised of 182,262 € (35%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 77% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 16,927 points which means that it has increased by 2.0% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 4.4% in the same time period.

Conclusion: It's been a good start of the year and my portfolio has increased with 15k € which is an amazing figure on its own especially considering that my monthly costs currently are around 250€ per month. What goes up shall at some point come down again and I will need to extract money for the next stage pretty soon.

The stock portfolio development during 2023

 

Due to the end-of-year rush on the stock exchange the development of the portfolio was semi ok. My stock portfolio increased in value by 54.6k € of which 11.1k € was in added investments which means that 43.5k € came from snowball effect.

In the previous report the stock portfolio development 2022 I spoke about that I had readjusted my target from the original 750k € to ~450k €, to buy a renovations object close to a warm beach and close to skiing during winter. Spain has started to be more interesting that France. I handed in my letter of resignation and left the UK in May 2023 to move back to Sweden to live in the family summerhouse while converting a campingvan. The campingvan is ready and I'm planning to leave in spring 2024. I do around 2 days per month of consultancy job for my old company but I must say that I am bored. Being retired is not as fun as one might think it to be. Everyone of my friends in Sweden are busy with their kids and their activities and it is a very, to put it bluntly, boring, not to have a job to go to every day. I'm therefore very certain that once I have fixed the renovations object I will, one way or the other, get back into the workforce again.

As can be seen in the graph above my plan is working well. In my first year (2012) of investment I ended up with a stock portfolio in the value of 17,659 € which was 4,744 € more then my plan required. In the second year (2013) my stock portfolio grew with 73 % and ended up with a value of 30,623 € which was 4,723 € above my target meaning that I managed to stay ahead of my plan but I did not manage to increase this advantage. In the third year (2014) my stock portfolio grew with 57% and I ended up with a value of 48,208 € which is then 8,333 € ahead of my investment plan which means that I managed to double my advantage during 2014. In the fourth year (2015) my portfolio grew by 53% and I am up at a value of 73,579 €. My plan was to have a stock portfolio of 54,915 € in the end of 2015 which means that I am now 18,664 € ahead of my plan. During my fifth year (2016) which was horrible in terms of new investments my portfolio still grew by 20% and the value was up at 88,414 € which mean that I was still 17,312 € ahead of my plan. In the sixth year (2017) the portfolio grew by 24% with a value of 109,606 € which was 21,802 € ahead of my plan. Followed by my seventh year of investing (2018) and an estimated growth of 19% and a value of ~130,000 which kept me 22,726 € ahead of my plan (hit by divorce). To then in my eighth year of investing (2019) with a growth of 24% with a stock portfolio value of 160,669 € and me being 33,216 € ahead of the plan (still hit by divorce). In the ninth year of investing (2020) and a growth of 52% and a stock portfolio at 243,801 € and me being 94,629 € ahead of the plan (final year of being hit by divorce). In my tenth year (2021) I had a growth of 57% and a stock portfolio at 383,941 € and by that I was 211,395 € ahead of the original plan. In the eleventh year (2022) I had a growth of measly 19% and a stock portfolio of 455,859 € and by that I was 258,156 € ahead of the original plan. In the twelfth year (2023), the year I left my job, I had a growth of 12% and a stock portfolio of 510,439 € and by that I was 285,661 € ahead of the original plan.

The larger the portfolio the less impact further investments will have and in this case I've not only stopped putting any more money in but instead I'm now taking out money instead.

Conclusion: 2023 turned out to be a good year for my stocks that no longer relies on new fresh large chunks of money being added to the pot but instead extraction of assets.

Summary of November/December 2023

 

Summary of November/December 2023

War is still going on, which means that food prices will not be coming down any time soon besides from the obvious that people keep dying due to one idiots decision. Winter has hit very hard this year and it is very cold in many locations in the northern Europe. I myself sitting in my summerhouse need to help out the heat exchanger by using the fireplace. Happily I had a lot of left over pieces of wood from my campingvan conversion so that has saved me a trip to the recycle centre, although, not the best for the environment. Heating of a place, no matter if it is my campingvan or the summerhouse is crucial and it is an interesting experience to take stock of. It is also a catch 22 with the the solar panels and winter. when the sky is clear and the sun is shining it is very often cold, however, the LiFePo batteries gets permanently damaged if one charge them when the temperature is below zeros deg C. So, when the solar panels can work, they cannot charge the batteries and when the batteries can be charged the sun is not shining on my panels. Everything should, however, be solved by driving toward the sun!

The consultancy job has continued and I've written invoices to my old company. The project has gone fairly well and we need to get it now to the next level, which I hope we will accomplish now during January with customer trials.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of October/Early November 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 343,328 € which is a drop by ~10k €. Several companies were sold: Netflix, EasyJet, Skanska, BASF and H&M to reduce the taxes that I need to pay from the sale of my Netflix shares. Over 10k € was taken out from my German broker account. In the UK broker account I re-invested the money from the sale of Netflix and EasyJet and bought more Berkshire, ETF-All World, Burberry and McDonalds.

The value of the portfolio is today: 510,439 € and I have 967 € in cash. I have realised gains of 9,653 € and unrealised of 167,111 € (33%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 76% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 16,594 points which means that it has increased by 8.9% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 9.0% in the same time period.

Conclusion: People seems to have been really, really happy about Christmas coming around this year and the stock markets reflected this. I just barely beat DAX also this month. I must say that it feels strange to take out >10k € and yet have an overall portfolio value increase.

Summary of October/Early November 2023

 

I will start as I unfortunately always have now for the last almost two year... War is still ongoing!

The campingvan has now been finished which felt very good. Everything is in and I passed the MOT. I tested it out and I had this wrong thought that it would be more like living in a home but it really isn't. It is luxury camping on wheels. The temperature outside is pretty much like inside. It can get a couple of degrees higher with heating, but I do not want to use gas heater and I'm scared about draining the batteries so I use very moderate heating. A fridge is also draining a lot so unless the sun is really shining for many hours a day I will not use it. No need when it is below 10 degrees anyway. I made a test drive and the first night was 5 degrees. That was cold. The other three it was between 11-13 degrees which is fully acceptable. I do not get a lot of charge from the solar panels now during winter, which is really sad and very limiting. I will not take off until spring next year.

I've continued to do some consultancy job for my old company. It is going fairly well and the invoices are being paid.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of August/September 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 353,601 €. No investments were made and no investments were sold.

The value of the portfolio is today: 494,047 € and I have 1,569 € in cash (took some out from my German one) on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 7,487 € and unrealised of 140,446 € (28%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 73% of my portfolio.

DAX is now down at 15,234 points which means that it has decreased by -1.0% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 0.9% in the same time period.

Conclusion: The stock market appears to be muddling through and I don't see anything exciting at the moment.

Summary of August / September 2023

 

Summary August / September 2023

War is still going on between a dictator and a democracy in Europe. Horrible!

I would like to apologise for that I have had to combine two months in this report. I was about to blame it on that I've been busy, and I have, but still... 

During the two months the sun was shining so I've been very active with my van conversion. I additionally painted my parents house (with their help of course) and my consultancy company got up and running so I've worked with my old company and was even sent for a week to the USA represent them in an activity.

Van conversion - last time I had insulated, moisture barrier and laid out the floor. Now I have done the same with the walls, the doors and the ceiling. I've put in a kitchen area with a sink, I have fresh and grey water tanks and a foot pump for the water. I've put in my bed, I needed to build a frame and storage space underneath it because I lost so much surface with the bed. I've put in a table to eat at and to work at. I've put in a mirror to gain more light and make the space look bigger. I've put in infrared heating which I think is a lovely new way to heat up small spaces. I've put in fire alarm and carbon monoxide alarm which is less required since I will not use gas but still... The batteries (2x24V in serie to give 48V output) are in and connected to the inverter, the solar panels (2x24V in serie to give 48V output) are connected to the MPPT/Inverter, the AC current and the home fuse box is in and after a bit of a trial and error journey are now also working and are releasing as it should and my three AC outlets works perfectly fine. I still have three things running on DC which is my ceiling fan, and two lamps. All these are also working fine. One big issue though.... the inverter that I bought was for a home and I had failed to realise that it needed a substantial voltage from the solar panels to charge the batteries. Once I realised the mistake I've also realised that I cannot increase the solar panels to reach the needed voltage so I've been forced to order another inverter which will arrive shortly. This will however require me to parallel connect my batteries instead of having them in serie. What's left? Well, I need to put in a lot more storage space, I need to put in media, swap out the inverter so those freaking batteries will get charged, I need to put in a toilet, fridge, induction cooker. These are hopefully the big ticket items left. I also need to do a MOT on the van, which I should do during October.

Painting my parents house was not really fun but it had to be done and I'm happy that I am around and could help them out with that! At the absolutely worst location, three panels needed to be changed out so that was a bit of a drag and though I'm not afraid of depths I must admit that my legs started shaking a bit when standing high up on the ladder and needing to lean out to hammer them stuck in place. Anyway, now it is done and will hopefully last for 7-10 years.

In the end of August my company was finally up and running. I got a bit upset with the Swedish tax office because they demanded me to show my private economy when the company requested F-skattesedel and VAT register. To my knowledge an AB is it's own legal person and in this situation the Swedish tax office takes the decision to NOT consider it as such due to few owners of the AB. I provided them with the requested papers and I could finally sign the contract with my old company. This led to me going over to the USA on assignment for a week and additional work being interviewed by journalists, speaking to potential customers etc. This additionally delayed things with my van but on the other hand I could write an invoice to them which I did now in the end of September.

I do enjoy living in my summerhouse and I've started to think more and more about delaying my departure until early next year. Both due to that I'm running so late, it gives me more time to test it out before heading to the south, and Christmas is not far away and I definitely wants to celebrate that with my family here in Sweden. It feels good to have been able to join in on all the Swedish events this year that I haven't been able to for 20+ years such as midsummer, crayfish party, birthdays etc.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of July 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 353,601 €. No investments were made and no investments were sold.

The value of the portfolio is today: 491,025 € and I have 2,284 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 7,487 € and unrealised of 137,424 € (28%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 74% of my portfolio.

DAX is now down at 15,387 points which means that it has decreased by -3.7% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has decreased by -2.0% in the same time period.

Conclusion: The stock market went down for a while in August and have since then now started to recover slightly during September. Due to some dividend payments I'm very close to take some money out from my German stock broker but at this point in time I do not yet need it so I leave it for now.

Summary of July 2023

 

Summary of July 2023

War is still ongoing and agreements made are no longer kept. The ages of people being called into the army in Russia is increasing, while Ukraine is at it's max capacity. My thoughts and hopes are still with the Ukrainians!

I've significantly underestimated just how slow things are. My consultancy company have not yet been received the all clear and my old company is screaming for me to help them out due to too many projects come to a standstill. Good for me one might think but I really do not want a fulltime job again consulting or otherwise and also it makes me wonder if I left my old company in a bad way i.e. my handover was not as good as I hoped? I provided everything they asked for and more so I should probably conclude that that's on them.

My campingvan conversion is also a lot slower than I had hoped for. Rain, rain, rain is holding me back since I do not want to bring in wet insulation, floors, furniture etc. and my only option for cutting and adjusting things is under the open sky. What I've accomplished to todays date is the following... repaired the car, rust treated and painted the interior, installed a skylight and fan, installed solar panels (no other electrics), installed floor ventilation, insulated the floor and laid floor and now I've started to insulate the walls. Ordering of things have been much slower than I had hoped for and the amount of sunny days in July has been few. I also made a small holiday trip to Andorra to visit a friend, get some sun and allow my brother and his family to have some alone time in the summer cabin. I did not, in the end, perform any jobs with my nephews. A big storm is running in Sweden at the moment and when the sun arrives I need to help my parents to paint their house since that has absolute top priority. My van will have to wait. I shouldn't be stressed about it but I must admit that there is some level of frustration.

During my trip to Andorra, being in and walking in the mountains, I had some time to think and realised that an idea that I had back in 2005 is still viable and I should / must execute on it. This means that I now know what to do with the money that comes into my consultancy company instead of taking it out as salary or as dividends I should invest it into this old, old idea. Anyway... that will have to be after I have sorted out my renovations object where ever I end up buying it. Good time to buy property though!

To sort out some strange holding structures and to sort out my virtual debt to my nephews I sold both Ratos (slightly too early!) and a large part of my H&M holding.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of May/June 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 353,601 €. No investments were made and I sold some H&M and all my Ratos holdings. The strengthening of the pound sterling have also helped out.

The value of the portfolio is today: 498,059 € and I have 1,274 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 7,487 € and unrealised of 144,458 € (29%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 74% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 15,974 points which means that it has decreased by -1.1% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 1.9% in the same time period.

Conclusion: The stock market went up significantly in July and have started to come back down again and happily my own portfolio performed better than DAX at this point in time.

Summary of May/June 2023

 

Summary of May/June 2023

For a brief moment I was filled with hope for the Ukrainian population. I hoped that the internal struggles in Russia would provide an opening for Ukraine to take back their land by the Russian troops rushing towards Moscow. We were unfortunately not as lucky. Not only Russia but also USA, UK etc. are using mercenary troops and not only providing them with plenty of cash for executing the jobs but these guys tend to have top notch equipment. Is there something to learn from Russia here? Is it advisable to create well funded, large military organisation that are pretty much only answering to money? When there is nothing for them to do... what do they then do? Is it in their interest to create conflicts?

I've heard colleagues complaining about that nothing is happening in Sweden during summer and all projects hit a stand still but I hadn't believed or realised just how much this is. Trying to regain my social security number was a slow process and without it one can pretty much do nothing in Sweden. You can't even get a mobile phone number for crying out loud. The wheels have slowly started to turn and I don't seem to have fully embraced my new life because it still leads to some level of frustration which it shouldn't! Why should I care if it takes 3,4 or even 5 months before I get my camping van up and running and hit the road? I think I'm too used to having things go my way. I've always claimed that I am a lucky person and the jam sandwich tends to land with jam side up for me but here in Sweden it feels as if it is jam down each and every time. Setting up the consultancy company is taking very long time which I'm not pleased with since it is a loss of money. Four weeks to start a company bank account, four weeks! Ridiculous. UKs HMRC are additionally, if I get a tax refund, sending that out as a cheque instead of paying it into the bank account as they always have done. Silly.

It costed a boatload of money to get the van sorted (i.e. repairs), I've ordered but not yet received, solar panels, hybrid inverter, batteries, roof fan, floor ventilation, insulation, compost toilet, cables to the death of me, electrical bicycle, foot water pump, tools, DC converter from 48V down to 12V, fire alarm, etc, etc. Several things are left to be ordered such as floor, ceiling and wall panels. All of which has costed another boatload of cash. Money has just been flying out left, right and centre.

Enough with the moaning... I've spent this month removing everything that was inside the van, treating rust and painting it over both inside and on the roof. I've started to put in some insulation, however until I've made all the cuts in the metal I don't want to move on with the insulation job. I need to have a crash course on electricity because now I'm over dimensioning everything in the camping van with a 5000 W hybrid MPPT + inverter. 2x24V solar panels, 2x24V lithium batteries (solar and battery connect in series to have 48V output) etc. All in line with pulling it out of the camping van and placing it on my future house instead and everything I learn building my camping van I will be able to use on my house later on. I've also done some jobs around the summer house to make it look better. Will wait with some though until my nephews arrive so that I can do the jobs with them. I think it will be good for them to learn a little and hopefully appreciate the pleasure of seeing a job done that they can claim they did.

I sold one of my holdings, Talanx, because it had increased severely in value in a short amount of time. Any dividends that had been received was also taken out so in total I took out 6,200 € from my broker account. As you will see from the report it hasn't made a dent though.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of April 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 363,739 €. A minor May investment was made in ETF Mix from my final salary, I sold Talanx and took out the cash + any collected dividends. The strengthening of the pound sterling have also helped out.

The value of the portfolio is today: 505,503 € and I have 1,224 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 8,671 € and unrealised of 141,164 € (28%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 73% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up to 16,148 points which means that it has increased by 1.5% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 2.6% in the same time period.

Conclusion: The stock market was alright during these two months. My work / life balance has improved significantly and I give myself a pat on the shoulder each day when I've finished a job whatever that was that I wanted to do that day. So now I give myself a pat for finishing three articles and then I go out into the area and enjoy a, currently, surprisingly,  sunny Sweden!

Summary of April 2023

Summary of April 2023

Ukraine is on an offense now which is great news! Pity that lives are still lost every day and so close to us. When I was back home in Sweden for a week to sort out a van I managed to go to Walpurgis night (Valborgsmassoafton), which I've not done for the last 20+ years. The deaconess held a lovely speech about the Ukrainians struggle and how many had arrived to Sweden and once their region was liberated again they went back home. They are strong and they will persevere!

The reason for me being back home as I also wrote in a pretty long response in the Summary of March 2023 was to buy a van and to drive it back to the UK so that I can bring back my stuff and during the summer convert it into a functional camping van for my journey towards the south of Europe. I hope I can start it in August but it might be delayed. On my way south I'm hoping to visit friends of mine (so I can shower and fill up with fresh water also!) since afterwards they will have to come and see me if they want to due to my future travelling budget will be very limited. Good news are property prices have started to drop all over Europe so it's a pretty good moment to do what I'm planning to do next. People are feeling the squeeze of the increased interest rates, even though the job market, at least in the UK, is still very strong. Massive droughts in the south of Europe, Spain in particular, which makes living on rainwater all the more interesting if it can be accomplished.

The work project I've been pushing has gone very well and I've created a lot of connections in the field which is excellent and I'm feeling content walking away. My colleagues have not yet understood/accepted that I'm leaving which is a bit funny. They want to hold me on as a consultant which I might accept to continue to help them a bit also in the future. This will require me to set up a company in Sweden which I will then not take out any salary from but only "dividends" on the profits if there are any. I doubt the consultancy agreement will run for more than one year and after that they should be able to stand on their own two feet also without me.

My final salary will arrive in 17 days and then I need to file a P85 to HMRC due to leaving the UK. I hope this will give me back a bit of money since I'm receiving only two salaries in the new UK tax year and my tax rate has been calculated on me receiving the salary for a full year. I also have some remaining holidays, 10 or so, which I will also get paid out as salary.

I know that all of you are highly clever individuals but I just want to make it as a crystal clear statement. That I will now do F.I.R.E is NOT because I've been a great investor. I truly have not been and I've done so many mistakes that's costed me dearly. It is purely down to low cost living, acceptable salary and that I'm a great saver on the stock market. I wish I would have been a great investor with 20% increase each year but I'm not and I have not so maybe there is something to take onboard from this but I leave that with you.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of March 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 362,717 €. A minor monthly investment was made in ETF Mix with fresh cash and more substantial into ETF S&P500 and ETF All-World from Vanguard.

The value of the portfolio is today: 494,606 € and I have 2,833 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 6,471 € and unrealised of 131,889 € (27%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 73% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up to 15,914 points which means that it has increased by 1.8% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has decreased by -1.7% in the same time period.

Conclusion: DAX once again had a good month while I did not. Today it hardly makes any sense to compare myself to DAX since my portfolio is far away from DAX but it's where I started so I keep it up as an historical reminder. Next report will be made from Sweden and will probably not be until in end of June. I'm hopefully then fully active with the camping van conversion and there will for sure have been no more money added to the portfolio.

Summary of March 2023

 

Summary of March 2023

Lest we forget... war is still ongoing and it is very close to us. People are still losing their lives to defend their country. Inflation is still high and many countries have serious strikes going on either due to pay or due to increased pension age. Governments wants us to stop drinking, smoking and using drugs so that we live longer and once we live longer they increase the age required for us to go into retirement. Robotics will be the solution and not growing population and kicking the can to the next generation to pay the price and increasing the age of retirement is in my opinion also not the path to walk. Forcing a construction worker to work for 40 years with his or her body in shambles is just a disgrace.

Lately I've been poking around with AI, so pretty much every evening I'm asking questions and reasoning with ChatGPT or Bing AI. ChatGPT is clearly more intelligent and I prefer to work with it but I must also say that in the last week I've truly felt how ChatGPT has become more intelligent. It will be interesting to see what happens when it realises or starts acting on that mankind is a parasite on this lovely planet that we are inhabiting surrounded by in the cold, harsh Universe. There are gains (personal and business ones) to be made, for sure, using AI and currently I'm mainly using it as a clever source of information but I need to take it to the next level...

I did in the end hand in my letter of resignation on the 28 February and my final day will be sometime in the end of May. Are my calculations correct? We'll see. If not, then I'll just have to take a job again - I'm not worried, but sure, another year working and I could have bought a better place and had a much bigger buffer to rely on. No retreat no surrender!

At work I'm pushing the projects to the max to make sure that I walk away with the company and the team in an as good place as possible. I've heard about it before but I truly do believe that Swedish people have very high work moral. The UK boss assumed that I would just be slacking off and not be doing anything these three months of notice, which probably says more about him than it does me...

The significant reduction of the payment into the ETF mix (company pension scheme) leaves me with a lot more cash out each month. There might be a bit of a tax issue... I'll deal with that as and when it comes. Anyway... this means that I can directly when the new UK tax year starts on 6 April, transfer £20k to my stock ISA and invest it. It might sound irrational especially considering that I will need cash in the near future however, I do not know exactly when and I also have not decided if I will use the German or the UK broker account to buy the future property and until I've settled upon that I will move forward with what is currently the most financially beneficial option for me, which is to push money into the UK stock ISA.

I must also think about what to do with this blog once I step into my F.I.R.E. Should I report on how life is going on in a different blog/vlog? Should I just walk away and provide no further reports? Will I become even more active in buying and selling stocks to generate cash and then report on that?

For the previous summary please visit Summary of February 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 337,989 €. A minor monthly investment was made in ETF Mix with fresh cash.

The value of the portfolio is today: 466,743 € and I have 1,787 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 6,471 € and unrealised of 128,753 € (28%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 70% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up to 15,629 points which means that it has increased by 2.8% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has decreased by -0.9% in the same time period.

Conclusion: Lately the seas have been stormy and DAX has really been going well. I must however say that having recently bought UK banks just ahead of SVBs issues hasn't helped but I'm fairly pleased with my portfolios development considering how the stock markets in many countries (clearly Germany excluded) have decreased and I've pretty much just treaded water.