Buying a property: renegotiating after the inspection

In this post I want to share some tips about renegotiating the offer on the property after receiving the results of the survey (inspection) and valuation. I am not an expert negotiator and there are many real estate investors that are more experienced than me, but there isn’t much content about it. A post like this in the past would be a great help for me. The advice here is based on my recent purchase of a rental property in Dublin in which both the survey and the valuation showed some problems....

June 30, 2021 · Justyna

Buying a rental property in Ireland through the pandemic: sale agreed to keys in hand

My partner and I managed to buy a rental property with a Buy To Let mortgage in Dublin, Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic. It took ages though, just going from sales agreed to keys in the hand took over 6 months. In this post I want to describe how the process looked like for us after the seller accepted our offer. You can find a very good article about how this process generally works at citizensinformation website....

June 5, 2021 · Justyna

What I spend money on - 3 month review

In this post I will review three months of my spending, January to March 2021. I didn’t have any major expenses during these months such as medical bills, car insurance or home repairs, so I know that I should not be extrapolating the three month average to the whole year. I will not share my earnings in this post, but I have to admit that I am very well paid and I share my expenses with my partner, we have no kids....

May 1, 2021 · Justyna

Should you read Rich Dad, Poor Dad?

If you, like me, listen to real estate or financial independence related podcasts, you probably have heard people mentioning Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki as their favorite Real Estate related book. There is even a person who counted it! In about 300 episodes of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast, the guests mentioned it 135 times (source) ! So, should you read it then? If so many people recommend it, it can’t be a bad book, right?...

March 26, 2021 · Justyna

My reasons to pursue financial independence

I have been generally interested in the idea of passive income and investing for a very long time and I have been saving money since I can remember. But I haven’t really done much investing until 2018, when I stumbled upon Mr Money mustache and ideas of Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE). I got hooked up on the idea and started my FIRE journey. The recipe for FIRE is simple, but it’s not necessarily easy!...

February 28, 2021 · Justyna

How to pick your investing strategy based on risk and returns

How you should invest depends on your situation in life. If you are young and don’t need the money in the next 30 years you should be investing differently compared to if you are saving for a house down payment in 2 years or if you are planning to retire soon. The two most important factors to consider are the risk and the return. Another thing to consider is the liquidity of the investment, but let’s assume in this post that we are only investing in liquid assets (ones that are easy to sell)....

January 31, 2021 · Justyna

What is net worth and how to track it?

I started tracking my net worth at the end of 2018 and since then I updated it about 28 times. It has been very useful to me and in this post I would like to encourage to start doing it too. What is net worth? Net worth can be defined as your assets minus liabilities. Here are some examples of assets: cash stocks house expensive items, e.g. a car, a horse, a boat debts other people have to you And now some examples of liabilities:...

January 30, 2021 · Justyna

DIY index like portfolio, stock investment alternative to index ETFs that is better tax-wise

There is no doubt that stocks can be a great investment. Compared to other asset classes they are pretty easy to acquire, there is no need for tens of thousands of euros for a downpayment, they don’t require debt and are very passive. They give us an opportunity to be invested in businesses without having to create those businesses. Last ten years were great for the stock market, even the coronavirus crisis didn’t depress the market for long....

December 31, 2020 · Justyna

Best resources for analyzing buy and hold real estate deals

If you analyse your investment opportunity poorly or don’t analyse it at all you might get very poor return on investment or even lose a lot of your money (potentially your whole down payment!). So, tread carefully, just putting money blindly in real estate will likely not work very well. Luckily there are a lot of resources that you can learn from! I will present you some of my favorite learning resources and tools....

November 30, 2020 · Justyna

How did I get into real estate investing?

The pressing need for investing I have always been a saver. I would stash away the cash I got for birthdays and other occasions since I can remember. I saved up money through high school, I saved significant parts of my paychecks from all my jobs in Poland (where I come from). Obviously I would sometimes spend some of that money, but I had a solid habit of saving. When I moved to Ireland at the end of 2015, my Polish savings suddenly became much smaller - I got hit by the fact that now the one month of apartment rent was approximately 4....

October 25, 2020 · Justyna