I read Ramit Sethi’s book “I will teach you to be rich” (don’t be misled by the title), there’s a lot of solid information on how to pay off credit card debt and save and invest your money.
However, most of that information only applies to Americans. As does much of the “best credit cards with perks” and “online banks with high interest rate” advice online because you need to be registered in the US to get them.
We just don’t seem to have many options for that stuff here in Luxembourg or in Europe in general.
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I’ve done some research on this and the best tools / banks /credit cards that I found are these:
\-Cr\*pto.com credit card with 2% cashback on all your purchases (anything you buy, you get 2% cashback in their CRO token which you can convert to EUR in the app and send back to your card (top up) to use again immediately)
\-Interactive Brokers to invest in low-cost index funds: I invest a certain amount every month and fees are as low as 1-2€ per order. (I buy only 1 ETF: [https://www.justetf.com/en/etf-profile.html?isin=IE00BK5BQT80&from=search#overview](https://www.justetf.com/en/etf-profile.html?isin=IE00BK5BQT80&from=search#overview) to make it very easy) Curious to learn what you guys invest in?
\-Trade Republic: German online bank, EU insured, very strictly regulated so I assume very safe. Pays 2% interest on money you have on there, up to 50k€ and free investing if you set up an automated plan (for example invest every month)
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No affiliation here or anything, just sharing what I have found and I would be happy to learn about other ways that maybe some of you have found to optimize my personal finance.
Thanks in advance!
3 comments
I slap my money in the ing investment plan
Wise has interest account, around 2.3% pa
Have been watching his netflix show and it’s quite entertaining but a bit American lol.
I am a bit of a numbers nerd so every year I do myself an excel sheet and try to forecast my expenditures and year-end balance then follow-up on it on a monthly basis and try to adjust my behavior when there is room for it.
As I am self employed and still burning a bit of cash on a monthly basis, I do so to assess the annual deficit and then decide to allocate x% of my savings in order to offset (well I try to lol) the deficit assuming a somewhat realistic yield (say 3%).
As I work in finance I try to invest it myself and I try to do it as systematic as possible to remove emotional bias but ironically my emotional biases are predicting a stock correction so I am currently not invested at all.
Edit: I have been using Saxo Bank broker but I am now trying to switch to Alpaca API. Interactive brokers is a very sound choice though.