Degiro vs Interactive Brokers - my experiences

If you are new to investing you might be asking yourself how to do it and which broker to use. In Europe there are a bunch of popular ones, but for serious investing people usually recommend either Degiro or Interactive Brokers. This blogpost is not an ultimate guide to those two products, I’m just a normal investor and I want to share some of my experiences. I also only use the web desktop versions as I don’t want to do investing (or trading) from mobile....

October 27, 2021 · Justyna

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

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

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 to get your spare room rented (contract template included)

You might be forced to rent one of your spare rooms to be able to afford the mortgage or you might use it to build your financial advantage. Renting a room in Ireland can be a fantastic opportunity to drastically improve your finances, because it offsets your housing costs and provides great tax benefits due to rent a room relief. If you are still on the fence about doing this, you might read more about the benefits of this approach in my previous post....

September 26, 2020 · Justyna

Accelerate your financial independence with renting a room in Ireland

Buying is cheaper than renting Rents in Dublin are quite expensive, especially in South Dublin and close to the city center and they keep increasing. There is a significant difference between what the rents were in 2015 and are now even with the rent control. Renting isn’t necessarily bad - it has its advantages, e.g. you don’t have to worry about the surprise repair costs, you can move easily. But financially in Ireland it’s not the best bet....

August 28, 2020 · Justyna

Evaluating buy and hold investment returns in real estate

Welcome to the second post in the series of evaluating real estate deals. You can see the previous post that discusses what are the sources of return here. Today we will learn how to know if the investment is a good investment looking at its returns. This is not a comprehensive ‘how to analyze deals’ post. People could write whole books on this topic. Instead we will take a look at some basics of investment returns....

June 28, 2020 · Justyna

What are the sources of returns in real estate investing?

Real estate investments in Ireland need significant capital. In general you can get a loan with a 20% down payment (or 10% in certain cases) when buying a property for yourself to live in. Investment property loans (Buy To Let) start with 30% down payments. It’s a big deal! Before you invest, you should check if it’s worth it. You will be locking down a lot of your capital. You could invest it in other ways, for example in a different real estate deal, equities and so on....

May 29, 2020 · Justyna