Jean Galea

Health, Wealth, Relationships, Wisdom

How to Deposit and Withdraw Money from P2P Platforms

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n26 mintos

One area where investors tend to waste time and money is in deposits and withdrawals to P2P platforms.

If you use the right banks, you will be able to withdraw money and deposit it without any delays or costs

Many of my readers have reached out to ask how they can avoid fees that are charged to them by their banks when withdrawing or depositing money from P2P platforms, and I can offer you a good piece of advice on that front.

I have several digital bank accounts set up that help me avoid any fees and also enable me to do currency exchanges at the best rates.

I currently use the following digital banks:

I can recommend all three of them. They all give you a free debit card as well so you can use it for shopping or when traveling. They work just like your local bank account but will likely have a better user interface, the comfort of online support and no ridiculous fees.

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Best European Sustainable and Impact Investment Platforms in 2024

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Sustainable-investingInvesting through online platforms has grown tremendously over the past years. Typically the two types of online investment platforms that people look for fall in these two categories:

While those two types of investments have been rewarding investors with great returns, there is also a rising interest in sustainable investments, also called impact investing. I hadn’t thought of that angle, but I understand that people who are very ethically focused might not want to invest, say, in consumer loans. I take a more liberal approach myself, but even so, I think it’s a good exercise to do some research into sustainable investments.

Ethically-minded investors are strongly motivated by a desire to make a positive impact in the world through their investments. Thus they seek out socially responsible projects where they can get good returns for their money, diversify beyond the typical stocks and bonds, and help others in the process.

Trine

Trine sustainable investments
This is a Swedish platform founded in 2016 that focuses on sustainable projects. It uses crowd investing to enable people to support solar energy projects, while also delivering a return to the investors.

Trine is currently only available to European residents, although Trine is working on being able to accept investments from outside Europe as well.

Other platforms you should look at include:

  • Ethex: a UK-based platform that allows individuals to invest in a range of ethical and sustainable companies and projects.
  • Symbid: a Dutch equity crowdfunding platform that specializes in startups with a social or environmental impact.
  • Wiseed: a French platform that allows individuals to invest in a variety of renewable energy and sustainable projects.
  • BlueOrchard: a Swiss impact investment manager that specializes in microfinance and renewable energy.
  • Impact Hub: a network of impact-focused coworking spaces and accelerators that operates in multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany, and Spain.

Do you know any other sustainable investment platforms that I should consider? Let me know in the comments section.

How to Stop Spam on a WordPress Site

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I recently started getting a lot of spam comments on one of my sites, so I tried different techniques to stop that as the manual labor of doing it myself was getting exhausting.

Here’s what I tried:

  • Akismet – I install it on every site but it wasn’t enough to stop spam on this site
  • Project Honeypot – Ended up not implementing it as it was too cumbersome
  • CleanTalk Anti-Spam – Did not pick up the vast majority of spam comments
  • Anti-Spam – Did not do the job either
  • Removed the URL field in the comment form – Didn’t help

Finally, I ended up installing the hCaptcha plugin and putting up a captcha for comment forms. I did this against my wishes as I hate captchas with a passion, and even that didn’t prevent the spam commenters.

Next, I installed Comment Blacklist Manager and AntiSpam Bee. I also installed WordFence in the hope that it would stop the spammers from even accessing the website. Too many requests from spammers to submit comments can slow down your website and affect performance too. I’m still monitoring the effects of these last two actions.

If anyone knows a better, automated solution that doesn’t involve captchas let me know in the comments below.

Padel Progress Report – Year 3 (2019)

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My third year of padel was a real mixed bag. I started out 2019 at peak enthusiasm for padel, and I wanted to train even more regularly and as similar to a pro as possible.

I approached Marcela Ferrari, then coach of number one player Fernando Belasteguin as well as Gemma Triay and Lucia Sainz, to see if she could mimic their training routine for an amateur player like me. It almost worked out until I got hit by a mysterious illness that really threw my plans off course big time.

All plans thrown off course

The situation was that after certain matches, I would get a high fever and be weak and bedridden for the next 2 days, then the fever would disappear and I’d be back in full fitness again.

As you can imagine, there were several problems with this situation:

  1. I had a newborn back home to take care of, and I didn’t want my wife to end up taking care of both him and me.
  2. I was worried about this fever, as I had never experienced anything similar, so I wanted to know what was causing it.
  3. The fever seemed pretty random, so I could not plan anything, much less daily training sessions.

This was around February, so I had to abandon my plans to train at Marcela Ferrari’s academy, and notify my padel partners and other coaches of the situation, and that I might have to cancel things at last minute depending on how things went.

This obviously led to a decrease in my padel commitments, as I didn’t want to leave anyone high and dry due to a spontaneous episode of fever on my end.

I visited several doctors and they had me undergo a ton of tests, none of them which led to any conclusions. As a side note, I learned that with private insurance, doctors have an incentive to have you undergo as many tests as possible, while with the public system, it’s the other way round. The ideal is to be somewhere in the middle, but unfortunately, the onus on striking that balance rests on the patient, as doctors are incentivized to do otherwise. I have to say that I felt very frustrated with the situation, as it felt like nobody was ready to actually listen to me describe my symptoms and try to see what diagnosis could be had.

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Index Investing for European Investors

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I’ve been reading about investing in the stock market for some years now, although with the market rising and rising, there seemed to be better investment opportunities to attend to, such as crypto and P2P lending. This doesn’t mean that I have totally abandoned the idea of investing in stocks, however.

On the contrary, I had actually invested in some hand-picked stocks that I had a good gut feeling about, and sold them all off at 100% profits in recent months. Of course, investing based on gut feelings is not something that anyone recommends, but sometimes an educated guess does the trick. Or maybe it was just the fact that so many stocks have performed well over the past 4-5 years due to the bull run that we’ve been experiencing.

That’s one thing that makes this perilous territory in my view. You never know if you really have an edge on the market and can thus book some nice profits, or if you are just gambling and happened to get lucky.

I also have a few friends from the IT space who bet much bigger stakes than me on tech companies and have turned millions in profits, and while I find this inspirational, I’m again unsure if they had an edge or whether they gambled big time and luckily got the desired outcome.

When seeking success, I usually like to pick a topic, find the best performers and learn how they do things, and then try to figure out a winning blueprint. It’s worked for me in several endeavors through the course of my life, but I have yet to find that blueprint in the world of stock investing that I can really trust.

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Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete