Hello from Denmark! (yet another)

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Aurane
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2016 8:51 am

Hello from Denmark! (yet another)

Post by Aurane »

Hi everyone!

I am 25 years old and live in Copenhagen, Denmark, with my girlfriend. I study physics (the bachelor) at University of Copenhagen and wants to be an astronomer (hopefully hunting exo-planets), my girlfriend is a psychologist working in psychiatry.

I am glad to have found this forum (thanks to the Berligenske article which mentioned Jacob), and was pleasantly surprised to see so many other Danes around, especially because the vast majority of internet discussions I have read centre around the US, were not everything applies to here, and then also translate their specific terminology to something local.

Well, where to start. I became somewhat interested in finance and particularly personal finance around a year ago, it's hard to say what ignited the 'spark', but I think it came with the realization that it would only be wise to optimise one's financial situation, by being smart about it and educate oneself about the possibilities there may be, it seems to me that these 'possibilities' in regards to personal finance for the average individual are too often unrealized. I don't care much for money as a object in itself, so my fascination and interest comes wholly from the idea of optimising something that is deep, complex and for me unexplored. In essence, I am not interested in this because I specifically want to retire early, but because it seems stupid to not follow the principles of FIRE/ERE, at least some of them, regardless if one actually wants to retire early or not. The maths basically speaks for itself.

It was probably through Reddit, at r/financialindependence/ or r/personalfinance/ that I became aware of the FIRE concept first. My first endeavour into applying the concepts came with me researching 'Pension funds' in depth, to understand how they work and what options are available for a worker, in this case my girlfriend. In short, I concluded that the pension fund my girlfriend has is all right compared to the other pension funds in Denmark, but since it's an active fund their yearly expenses are higher than if one would personally invest in a passive fund. Unfortunately she cannot choose to invest the money somewhere else, as it's mandated by agreement by the union and the state. We could still open a private pension account, but we don't want to lock any more money up until the official age of retirement. So we are going to invest instead into a normal investing account at Nordnet.dk

I still haven't decided 100% to what portfolio to use, but I am quite sure most of it will consist of "Sparinvest INDEX Globale Akt Min Risiko KL", which from my research appears to be the one of best passive fund into the global market one can buy in Denmark. I'm considering whether to also add Sparinvest US/EU Mid/Small cap and EM indices as well, and I hope that I can explore this question at the meetup tomorrow.

Otherwise I'm currently researching if there are any predictors for 'future stock market returns' (financial recessions or downturns), I did find one very interesting article where the author found a parameter with very high correlation with US recessions, the article is quite detailed about the mechanism involved and gives very good food for thought. I will probably make a thread later to discuss the article and its merits, maybe the statistics can be picked a part. I do acknowledge the general wisdom that "time in the market is more important than timing the market", but I am curious and it seems there is a lot to be learned by exploring this.

Anyway, my girlfriend and I are soon going to invest 100-200K DKK most likely in a lump sum, and then invest monthly onwards.

My girlfriend really loves the idea of being able to retire early, even just 10 years earlier than normal, so she understands the logic of investing aggressively. Our main challenge will probably be to reduce expenses, and here we both have a lot to meditate on, whether to change this or that or sacrifice something to save more up. I think our first step here will be to track and visualise our monthly expenses, probably in Excel. I am looking forward to that :)

To end with, just something peculiar I noticed when I read Jacobs "about me" on the website. He also wanted to be a fighter pilot, and he also played Magic the Gathering a lot, like me, and then of course he is an astrophysicist :D

Looking forward to the meetup tomorrow, if we can join!

Eureka
Posts: 340
Joined: Fri Jun 10, 2016 11:03 am

Re: Hello from Denmark! (yet another)

Post by Eureka »

Hi Aurane,

Welcome on board! Yes, it is fascinating how many we are here from the Copenhagen area.

Hope to see you at the meetup in a few hours.

wolf
Posts: 1102
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Hello from Denmark! (yet another)

Post by wolf »

Welcome Aurane, good to have you here. I think it is very good that you and your girlfriend start very early on the path to FIRE. The earlier, the better. Start step by step and change little things. Over time there will be a huge progress.

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