Stocks bought in December 2021

 

Due to a tax return and change of tax group I was able to make a more substantial investment than usual during December. I therefore decided to buy two holdings, one old and one new one.

The first one was that I increased my holding in Rio Tinto by buying 45 more shares at a price of 55.74 € with a total cost, including stamp duty, of 2,520.49 €.

I also decided to buy more ETF and I found Vanguard FTSE Developed Europe had a reasonable yearly price tag of 0.1% fee. I therefore bought 65 parts of this ETF at a cost of 36.16 € per part with the total cost of 2,350.69 €

I made one more investment <1k € but the company is so small that I do not want to bring it up and I will not include it in any updates. The two mentioned above will however be included in the next update.

During the weekend I managed to go to Berlin for Christmas market and to see my friends there. It was really nice but life for a non vaccinated person will not be very joyful in the future. Every restaurant, stores, cinemas etc all demanded to see proof of vaccination and ID card before you are allowed to enter. So people have two options: Either I get the vaccination or my life will be very much centred around me sitting at home and never doing anything fun. Germany takes a similar approach to winter tyres. There is no law about it but if you have an accident in winter without having winter tyres on then the insurance companies are not paying out... so you are pretty much forced to use winter tyres even though there is no law about it. It's a bit passive/aggressive.

I'm currently waiting for the PCR result before I'm allowed to get back into the office again so fingers crossed it comes back negative and I can be in the office tomorrow.

Summary of November 2021

 

Summary of November 2021

November turned out to be a month of worry. I and many with me booked trips and travelled to foreign destinations following all the latest rules and regulations and at the same time there are new variations spreading in the world which means travelling will soon get more restricted again - vaccinated or not. Many are starting to get concerned about Christmas now also and I hope that I will receive a booster jab shortly before going back to Sweden over the Christmas holidays. Future will tell.

I was very fortunate to be able to go to my friends in France this month and I had a wonderful time with them over an extended weekend. In the upcoming weekend I will go to see my friends in Germany and I hope that the travelling + return will be smooth. Will I need PCR or will the lateral flow be sufficient? Nobody knows as of yet.

Work is going well and the projects are progressing fairly smoothly which is always a relief. I've had all the end of year reviews with my employees and most of them are pleased with the year. I doubt there will be much to spend on bonuses and salary increases this year and I certainly hope that I do not receive one!

I filed the tax declaration this month and received some money back from that which will be useful to pay for the Christmas gifts, all the trips I booked, and continued issues with my car. Without that tax return I would probably not have been able to make a new investment from my next salary but now I'm certain that I can.

The big surprise was that my effect tax rate was ~23%. This is too low and it needs to be increased.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of October 2021 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.

The total invested value is now at: 243,837 €. Monthly investments were made in the Mixed ETF, Yum brands and Kyndryl (from IBM).

The value of the portfolio is today: 352,558 € and I have 1,516 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 2,498 € and unrealised of 108,721 € (31%) which is not good enough but it is improving. My ETFs are now up at a value of 61% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 15,257 points which means that it has decreased by -2.8% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has decreased by -1.0% in the same time period.

Conclusion: There was another dip in November which caused DAX to retreat a bit while my own portfolio went down slightly less. I will keep saving and keep investing. My German broker account arrived with new prices that I am not at all pleased with so I will have to think about what to do with that because it is truly outrageous and I just cannot take that one on the chin.

Dividends during November 2021

 

In a way I received dividends from two companies this month. One was standard approach of paying cash into my broker account and the second was handing me shares in a newly formed company.

I received 163.04 € for my H&M shares of which the tax man took 48.91 € which in the end meant that I got 114.13 € as cash on my broker account.

From IBM I received 5 shares in Kyndryl Holdings each with a value of 14.50 € so in total 72.50 € which was paid out as a new stock position on my broker account.

Stock bought in November 2021

 

A lot of people here in the UK love KFC and I would even say to the point of madness. There were people doing crazy things when there was a shortage of chicken supply and they were not able to receive their weekly KFC meal. All these issues are sorted since several months but the passion that so many had towards getting their KFC fix remains and likely will do for a long, long time.

I therefore bought 22 shares in Yum Brands at a total cost of 2,437 €.

This stock will be included in the next upcoming summary update.

Summary of October 2021

 

Summary of October 2021

This is a summary that combines the movements that have occurred during the month of September as well as October.

Dividends were received from several companies: BP, Nike, IBM, McDonalds, Shell and Rio Tinto.

I joined in the new share offers from both Easyjet and Lufthansa and we will have to see how that turns out.

When I started this journey I wanted to have a stock portfolio of 750k € in the year of 2033 during the course of it I readjusted my target to be 350k € and by having no debt and taking out ~4% with a early reduced stock portfolio this would then give me around 1000 € to live on each month (today working fulltime and having a rent of 600 GBP I manage to live on 1200 GBP per month) until the end of my life with no further incomes. There will be further incomes and it will be possible to live on 1000 € per month.

I keep going back and forth on what I should do next. Should I travel the world for one to two years? Should I move into my summerhouse (not ideal, owned by more family members), should I buy a house in Sweden close to my summerhouse and restore it? Should I buy a house in the south of France (I loved living there) and restore it and spend ~9 months there and ~3 months in Sweden when France is too hot? Difficult, difficult, difficult. Two of the options involves buying a house which I will have to do without a mortgage since I will not have employment. A restoration object can be bought in either country for <50k € and restoring it DIY style I just roughly estimate to another 25k €. I have now reached my 350k € target however buying a house and restoring it would require a total of 425k € which I am not yet at and more importantly I still have more to give to my current company before I am ready to walk away.

I had a lovely two week vacation in Sweden during the end of September seeing family and friends. Batteries were recharged for the autumn!

For the previous summary please visit Summary of August 2021 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.

The total invested value is now at: 241,819 €. Monthly investments were made in the Mixed ETF, Lufthansa and EasyJet.

The value of the portfolio is today: 351,849 € and I have 3,895 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 2,498 € and unrealised of 110,029 € (31%) which is not good enough but it is improving. My ETFs are now up at a value of 61% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 15,689 points which means that it has decreased by -0.6% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has decreased by -1.1% in the same time period.

Conclusion: There was a larger dip in September but already in October that was pretty much balanced out again. DAX ended up with a better performance than my own portfolio this time around. I have now reached my target but will continue to save and invest to build up a larger buffer to give myself more room to decide what to do next. The main driver is however that I have more to give to the company that I'm working for before I push the retirement button.