Jean Galea

Health, Wealth, Relationships, Wisdom

  • Start Here
  • Guides
    • Beginner?s Guide to Investing
    • Cryptocurrencies
    • Stocks
    • P2P Lending
    • Real Estate
    • Forex
    • CFD Trading
    • Start and Monetize a Blog
  • My Story
  • Blog
    • Cryptoassets
    • P2P Lending
    • Real estate
  • Consultancy
    • Consult with Jean
    • Consult a Lawyer on Taxation and Corporate Setups
  • Podcast
  • Search

A Collection of Thoughts and Life Lessons

Last updated: April 30, 20235 Comments

Balance

These are some of my thoughts and lessons that I’ve learned over the years and want to share here. At some point, I might dig deeper into some of these topics and split this up into several articles. In the meantime, enjoy and do let me know if you have any thoughts of your own on these subjects.

The Meaning of Life

George Mallory, a mountaineer who led early British expeditions to Mount Everest in the 1920s, on the joy of climbing and meaning of life:

“People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end goal of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”

All In

I’m the type of person who is either all in on something, or totally out. While that has its advantages and disadvantages, I’ve designed my life around that trait and it works well for me. 

Quite beyond my own personality, however, there are many things in life that by their nature only work when you commit very seriously to them.

The excerpt below is from an excellent Farnam Street blog post on the topic:

Commitment means all in, all the time.

It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that if you put in half the effort, you can get 80 percent of the results. While that might work for some things, it doesn’t work for anything important.

If you’re half trustworthy, you’re not trustworthy. If you’re often reliable, you’re not reliable. If you’re mostly consistent, you’re not consistent.

The key to doing anything well is commitment. Not only does commitment help you become better at what you do, but it also makes other people want to help you.

If you see your job as punching the clock, not only will you never be great at it, but your employer won’t invest in you. The best relationships are the ones where both partners go all in all the time to make the relationship amazing.

If committing sounds like a lot of work, it is. That’s why so many people are half-in. The problem with half-in and half-committed is that it doesn’t get you the results you want. If you’re not committed, get out.

The committed person gets both the opportunity and the results.

All in, all the time.

Letting Go

When I was a young kid I was brought up to always strive for excellence in academic subjects and in sports, although it applied to most other areas as well.

Perhaps the area in which this strive for excellence had the biggest impact on me is academics. Education in Malta when I was in school was very competitive, with exams being a do-or-die affair that determined whether you would advance to the next year or not.

Failing, especially in the year-end exams, was pretty much unacceptable as it would mean a ruined summer studying for the resits in September, potentially losing all friends if you fail to advance to the next year, and feeling like a total failure. Not to mention the scolding to be received from parents and teachers for not trying hard enough.

I’ve always been inclined to do things my way and on my own terms; my motivation to do anything almost always comes from within and very seldomly from outward expectations. It was therefore a big struggle for me to find the motivation to study for what I regarded as pointless exams. I had to study subjects that I was not necessarily interested in, and for which I saw no future utility. On the other hand, teachers and parents knew that I was no slouch and had the ability to excel in any subject, so anything less was deemed as me not trying hard enough, not being disciplined, keeping bad company, etc etc.

This created a serious internal conflict in me, and in many ways psychologically scarred me. I still have nightmares involving me the day before an exam, not being confident of doing well and dreading the consequences. Thankfully they are not frequent, but the feelings are the same ones I had twenty to thirty years ago, which is incredible.

Over the past few years, as I was working with a psychotherapist to improve several things, this was one of the topics that came up, and was one of the hardest ones for me to work through. The thing is, that that as I grew older, this strive for excellence became internalized, and I no longer needed teachers or parents to be bearing down on me with their expectations. I became the one to set those expectations for myself and to judge myself if I fell short of any of them.

I suspect that this made things even worse than when the expectations and judgment came from others. As an adult, I had now the full freedom to seek my own choices in life, and as I’m interested in many topics, by default I set up all these internal goals that I was expected to reach. With hindsight, this dangerous cocktail set me up for years of stress and unhappiness. I was never really aware of what was happening until I started digging deeper in my psyche with the help of the psychotherapist.

Even with her help though, I struggled to understand if this was really a problem or not. You see, this internal drive for excellence was also the catalyst to most of my success in life. My initial reaction was to feel proud of my drive to excel and be the best at anything I put my mind too. And I had a string of successes to prove it. At the same time, with time I had to admit that it was also the source of unnecessary stress, anxiety and pressure, that was also affecting my relationships with others.

Like many other things, an attribute has a positive and a negative side. I think one of the most important exercises in psychotherapy is that of realizing what attributes one possesses and where they came from. This first step of understanding who you are and why you are so is extremely important. I went into my psychotherapy experience with a list of negative things that I wanted to eliminate, but discovered that most of those things also had extremely beneficial things on the other side of the coin, and that I really didn’t want to eliminate them outright.

Did I really want to get rid of my internal drive to excel? Would it make me a couch potato with no motivation to do anything? I had to come to terms that you just can’t have perfection in life. You can have the efficiency and productivity of northern European countries, but then you can’t also have the joie de vivre and friendliness of the southern ones. I realised that I’ve been trying too hard to optimise things and pick and choose attributes in myself and in my surroundings. I was on an impossible mission that would only bring internal strife and unhappiness.

I’ve been setting up many small and big goals that are not really that important, but I’ve been judging myself and feeling bad for not reaching them. We are surrounded by blogs and books that promise to teach us how to be more productive and achieve more success etc, and they all come with a long list of todos in order to reach the promised state. I think I’ve read enough and have enough todos to last me 5 lifetimes; what I really need is to let go and start enjoying the simpler things in life.

The coronavirus lockdown has been a great teacher for me this year. It came at a point where I was really maxing out my energy chasing several goals at once and the first two weeks were an absolute relief as I was forced to relinquish some of those goals and focus on fewer things. But then in the following weeks, I realised that I was again running out of time and feeling like I have too much to do every single day. It made it super clear to me that the problem was in my mentality rather than anything else.

It become crystal clear to me that the number of goals and things on my to-do list was hilariously impossible to achieve. I had been pretending to do all the things I had listed before the lockdown and aiming to achieve them, but even after being forced to stop training (which took up a good part of my daily routine) and several errands I still could not fit everything into my day. It was pretty obvious that I was taking on too many things at once. This has been a perennial problem for me and it is time to call an end to it.

Here’s one example. I decided to start waking up at 6 am and sleeping at 10 pm. It worked for a few days but I soon started shifting the hours again after the hour change due to the new season. I became frustrated that I was not disciplined enough to stick to the plan. The problem is the plan itself, however. It’s a much better idea to set a goal to sleep between 10 and 12 and wake up between 6 and 8 in the morning. The Spanish lifestyle and timezone make the evening much more active than in other countries, thus it doesn’t always make sense to sleep at 10, and even midnight feels early in seasons like summer. So why not be flexible and go with the seasonal rhythms instead?

As for me, my resolution is to let go of many arbitrary “goals” that I’ve set for myself, simply because they have been doing more harm than good. I look forward to enjoying more of every moment instead of continuously pushing myself harder and harder while the goalposts keep on moving.

Enjoying the Process

One of the main reasons why I get too stressed is that I am always too focused on the goal. That’s also been part of my childhood, as the thing that mattered most was always the result. Anything in between the start and the end was just there to be criticized and refined further until the final desired goal would be reached.

We all know that 99% of any journey consists of a process, and the rest of the 1% is the very start and the very end; minuscule parts in the great scheme of things. The beginning typically brings excitement and happiness, while the end can bring emotions such as relief, satisfaction and a sense of triumph over all the odds encountered.

But really, those two moments are very fleeting.

The excitement of the start of a new project almost always quickly takes a back seat as the hard work of whatever I’m working on becomes the new reality, with many challenges, obstacles and setbacks to deal with.

Once I finish something, I’m thinking about an improved version of whatever I’m working on, or moving on to a new project in no time.

Looking at it this way it seems very obvious why I’m setting up myself to be unhappy most of the time, even if I’m doing things that I enjoy. In recent years, there has been no clearer example of this taking place than during my padel journey. I was so focused on the objective I had set for myself that I lost touch with the amazing reality that I was improving and having a great time playing the sport and meeting people as well as learning about life as an athlete. In retrospect, I can see what a great journey it was, but at the time I wasn’t enjoying the process as much as I should have.

That’s a lesson I’ve learned and I now keep it in mind in my day-to-day activities.

Avoiding the Wrong People

Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.

It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.

We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later, you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later, you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you.

The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.

On Buying Things and Minimalism

Minimalism has become a poplar trend in the 00s, probably as a counter to the extreme consumerist culture that had been fostered in the previous decade or two. Most people in developed countries own way too many things, and this stuff can actually detract from quality of life. Again, no surprise someone like Marie Kondo achieved huge success off her idea of tidying up closets and getting rid of unused and old things.

Minimalism, however takes things to an extreme that does not entirely vibe with me. I actually love high quality products and derive a lot of satisfaction from owning, taking care of, and using things. Therefore striving for absolute minimalism does not make sense for me. A classic example is car ownerhsip. Most minimalists proudly state that they use public transport and have absolutely no need for a car, especially if they live in a big city. I’ve tried both, and owning a car is an infinitely better choice for me since it has opened up the door to having so many amazing experiences with one day trips or even longer trips around Europe. Not only that but I can also travel in comfort without being annoyed by other users on public transport systems. And when you have kids, I’d argue a car becomes kind of a necessity.

Perhaps my biggest issue isn’t with minimalism as a philosophy, but with people defining themselves as minimalists. Simply put, my style of minimalism typically involves owning more things than the typical minimalist.

The Magic of Three Goals

I’ve written about the shiny object syndrome and trying to do too many things before, but today I’d like to add one more realization, which I call the magic of three goals.

Basically, it means that the ideal number of goals or tasks per timeframe is three. For example, when playing a padel match, I usually think about all the improvements I am going to apply to my game in this particular match. In the past, I never thought about setting any limits. I eventually realized that it was impossible to apply a dozen improvements all in one match. More likely, I would end up too overwhelmed and just defaulting back to my usual game. When I started to limit myself to three particular improvements it became much more achievable and manageable.

The same applies to team meetings. Before we start a meeting, we set three objectives at a maximum. That way at the end of the meeting we can review our meeting and hopefully see that we completed our big three goals. Of course, there usually are more than three things on the agenda, which is great, but it’s important to select a maximum of three big ones. That way we are setting ourselves up for success rather than failure.

Having too many goals for one session, be it sports, a meeting, or even a workday, sets you up for failure and frustration. Set three goals and focus on achieving them.

I’ve also written about finding three life priorities and the importance of finding three hobbies. Seems like the number three is an important guiding force.

Enjoy Life in Your Twenties

Looking back at this decade and all the things I’ve done, I’m really amazed by how much I managed to fit in and the diversity of my experiences. In my view, the twenties are a time when you have maximum freedom, and you should make the most of it. If you haven’t started working after finishing your studies, why not take a year off to travel and get new experiences? Even if you do get a job, make sure you take regular time off and explore distant places to get a good idea of how other cultures work.

I partied hard in my early twenties and have no regrets. The party scene at the university in Loughborough, as well as the Maltese summers were just amazing. I made a lot of friends and explored their outlooks on life, from which I learned a lot. Use alcohol if it helps you enjoy the partying more and loosens you up, but don’t get drunk. There’s no fun in not remembering what you did last night or spending the night vomiting and the next day with a bad hangover. Whatever you do, don’t take up stupid habits like smoking that will damage your lifelong health. I never used drugs myself so I can’t comment on that topic, although psychedelics are experiencing a revival lately. I would only consider using them in controlled environments and later on in life.

Don’t be a Donkey in Your Thirties

donkey

One of my favorite podcasts is The Tim Ferriss Show, hosted of course by 4 hour workweek mastermind Tim Ferriss. If you haven’t checked out his latest book, head over to Amazon right now, you need to get a copy of it: Tools of Titans.

One of the guests on Tim’s show was Derek Sivers, and I’m also a big fan of his blog, especially his book summaries.

So in this interview Tim asks Derek what advice he’d give to his thirty year old self.

Derek replies: “Don’t be a donkey”.

I found the reply and it’s explanation very fascinating and it really hit home.

So what does Derek mean by that?

Many 30 year olds are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any.

Or they get frustrated because the world wants them to pick one thing, and they want to do them all. Why do I have to choose?! I cannot choose!

The problem is that they’re acting short term, as if you don’t do them all this week, they won’t ever happen. But the solution is to think long term; to realize that you can do one of the things for a few years, then do another one for a few years, and so on. 

The analogy with the donkey comes from a fable in which a donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other.

A donkey can’t think of the future, if he did clearly he would realize that he could first drink the water and then go eat the hay, or vice versa.

I’m in my early thirties and I can relate to this issue 100%, in fact I’ve already written about the shiny object syndrome in the past. I’m also currently stacking up books about decision making and going through them, precisely in order to help me make sense of the many opportunities that present themselves and avoid that dreaded FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and decision paralysis.

If I look back at my life it seems clear to me that my twenties were a period of experimentation and grappling at life to try to make some sense of things as well as try to enjoy my youth to the fullest. This was a journey that involved going abroad to study, being in several relationships, and trying my hand at different businesses. In the latter part of my twenties I also became a digital nomad and that was another huge personal growth spurt for me. Those were years of highly accelerated learning and changes in my outlook on life. They were enormously fruitful and led to what I can consider another section in my life, early thirties.

Derek was spot on with his analysis of the typical thirty year old. At this stage I feel that with the knowledge accumulated in my twenties I can do so many things and pursue different goals, many of them incompatible with each other or mutually exclusive. Clearly I can’t do everything but my mind still dreams and my heart still races at each different opportunity that I’m aware of.

I am therefore trying to follow Derek’s advice and think long term. I like to plan things on paper in terms of five year and ten year plans, and that helps me to space things out, but it’s still hard to actually choose what I want to pursue. There is a lot of pain in consciously giving up good opportunities to pursue others.

For this reason I am digging into research about decision making and strategy. Apart from that research proving essential in the area of business, I believe it will also help me on a personal level in order to make choices more rational and easier. Being able to clearly analyze an opportunity and describe why you choose to pursue it or leave it on the table is a very important skill to have and will be of great help against this “can’t choose, won’t choose” issue that Derek speaks about when he thinks of his thirty year old self.

Are you in the same boat? Are you a bit older and can relate to this? I’d love to know what others think and perhaps have some more advice on the topic.

Travel and live abroad

I lived in several countries, and every one of those experiences was incredibly formative. It helped me learn new languages, deepen my spirituality and explore other religions, as well as truly understand the global nature of humanity. It helped me let go of the notion of pride in my nationality or country of origin, and feel more like a global citizen, essentially breaking down the walls we tend to build to separate ourselves from people who look or act differently from us.

Be Entrepreneurial

By all means, try to build a business of your own. Even if it’s just a side hustle that goes along with your day job, it is an incredibly enriching journey to start from zero and build a business that gives you income every month and delivers value to other people. I was lucky enough to be successful in building a business that provided my main income and allowed me to travel and work remotely. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but I think everyone can try to have an entrepreneurial mindset.

Another alternative to building your own business or side hustle is to be intrapreneurial. This means that you can look at the processes of the company or institution in which you work and try to introduce a new way of doing things, or suggest the creation of some new product or service. If you have good bosses, they will appreciate your hard-working and creative attitude and possibly put you in charge of leading the changes, which can be just as rewarding as building your own business and provide similar lessons and value.

Continue Learning and Reading

Most people stop learning once they graduate from University and start their work lives. I can honestly say that I accelerated my learning after graduating instead, and it made a huge difference in my outlook on life and decision-making abilities. The difference becomes really apparent from the thirties onwards. I can clearly see the difference when I talk to people my age who haven’t read a lot and continued to study on their own after finishing formal education.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

Yes. To a certain extent. Money solves a lot of problems although it doesn’t directly bring you happiness. Those problems that money eliminates can definitely cause you a lot of unhappiness, on the other hand. One of the big leaps, as you make more money, is that you start focusing on quality more than price. I feel that that is a huge leap in quality of life and affects the most essential of things such as our health and our food choices, not to mention education. These elements are crucial in living a good life and being in a position to achieve a state of happiness.

You Will Get Screwed

Life isn’t fair. The sooner you accept that the better.

An important step towards finding happiness is to accept that fairness is an artificial human construct.

You can either complain about all the ways you’re being screwed and point fingers at people and situations or focus on stacking the odds in your favor. Your choice.

Am I Lucky?

Ever since my childhood, I remember friends remarking about how lucky I am. I’ve never believed in luck one bit and always felt it was just a different mindset that created this effect. What I do acknowledge is the obvious element of chance that determines where we are born and who are parents are.

I recently came across this podcast that very accurately discusses this topic; Dr Bush perfectly articulates my feelings on the question of luck. Looking at all the “lucky” moments in my life, almost all if not all of these moments were the result of an optimistic growth mindset and careful long-term strategies that I chose to follow.

Struggling with Perfection and Choice

According to Aristotle, happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. — that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life. This requires us to make choices, some of which may be very difficult.

One thing that I struggled a lot with before I made an important realisation, is the quest for perfection as well as a struggle of deciding between many things I could do.

Here’s a quote lifted from the amazing Sam Berns, which perfectly sums up the problem I had and the solution:

Be OK with what you ultimately can’t do, because there is so much you CAN do.

Facing Our Fears

Here’s a great lesson on facing fears, from the legendary Will Smith. He talks about the strong fear he faced the night before going skydiving and all throughout the run up to the actual jump.

As soon as he’s pushed off the plane he realizes that it’s the most blissful experience of his life. There is zero fear, the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear.

The best things in life are on the other side of terror or maximum fear. I’ve found this to be so true in my life, but Will illustrates the point in the best way in this video.

So what’s the fear that is currently holding you back from achieving your next breakthrough?

Spend a few minutes thinking about that, then take action!

Time is Our Scarcest Resource and Ultimate Wealth

An abundance of time is extremely hard to achieve, especially combined with the pursuit of money. Having time on your hands in our society seems to be associated with being lazy and comes with the pressure to do “something useful” or “work harder”. The default is to fill every minute with being productive and working.

I’ve managed to always have an abundance of time to do things I want to, by building income streams that do not require daily work. This is something I’ve focused on right from the early days of my working life. It’s an uncommon state to be in, and I wish more of my friends had more time so that I could do more things with them.

I also appreciate having time because it is essential for me to fulfill the most important mission in my life at the moment – that of raising my children and enjoying as many intense experiences as possible with them.

If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much. – Jackie Kennedy

It’s sad to see so many parents having to outsource the upbringing of their children and send them off to daycare or schools at early ages. I believe this lack of time for parent-child connections is having a very damaging effect on our society.

One intermediate step to being time-wealthy is to have flexibility on when you work. Since most people work during the week and have the weekends free, there are so many opportunities to have fantastic experiences during the week and during mornings, for example, but people lose out on them due to being at work or busy with other things.

Money

Money is the biggest problem for most people. It’s not a well-understood topic, and society pressures you to always want more of it. Our financial systems are built in such a way that it’s hard to save, meaning that you’re constantly in a rat race to earn more and more money to keep up. Bitcoin promises to solve this problem. Learn about it if you haven’t already taken a deep dive into that topic.

Some people are lucky enough to make money when they’re young and make it quickly – this oftentimes leads to cockiness and a know-it-all mentality. Making money is not that hard in the grand scheme of things, it’s keeping it over the long run that is the bigger challenge. If you strive for wealth according to my definition, you’ll enhance your chances of doing well over your whole life and not only for a few wild years while things are smooth sailing.

To sum it up, money is a real problem whether you have too little or too much of it. Too little and you can’t aspire to higher goals, while with too much of it you’re likely to unbalance yourself either by working too hard to keep that level of money or income, or by getting high on the money and doing stupid things with it.

Being at Cause

My biggest regrets in life have been things that I have not done, and not those that i did try. This means that there have been opportunities and situations that for some reason I have not taken action upon and now I regret the fact that I didn’t do anything about them. I wonder how many people feel the same way too, I would be interested to have some feedback on this.

For me and others who feel the same way, it clearly means that we have to start being less shy, more spontaneous and having a ‘Just Do It’ attitude. After all, even if things do not turn out as planned, it’s an occasion to get feedback and learn something useful for the future.

Now in order to empower ourselves in order to start taking action on whatever the problems/opportunities are, we need to step up our belief system and get rid of all the negative beliefs we have about ourselves, such as ‘I’m not a good talker, I’m not so attractive etc.’. I’ll go ino more detail on believe systems later on, however the basic principle is that most of us have alot of limiting beliefs which we need to analyse and eliminate as they are holding us back from achieving our full potential.

We also have to consider the Cause>Effect principle. It is important to be aware of whether we live our life at cause or at effect. It is quite rare to find someone who always lives his or her life at cause, indeed far too many of us live a large portion of our lives at effect — responding to the whims, desires or emotional states of others.

Being at cause means that you are decisive in creating what you want in life and taking responsibility for what you have achieved or will achieve. You see the world as a place of opportunity and you move towards achieving what you desire. If things are not unfolding as you would like, you take action and explore other possibilities. Above all, you know you have choice in what you do and how you react to people and events.

If you are at effect you may blame others or circumstances for your bad moods or for what you have not achieved or for your life in general. You may feel powerless or depend on others in order for you to feel good about yourself or about life — If only my spouse, my boss, my coworkers, my parents, my children, … understood me and helped me achieve my dreams or did what I wanted or what is best for me, then life would be great. If you wait and hope for things to be different or for others to provide, then you are at effect or a victim of circumstances. And really, how much fun is that? And how much fun do you think it is for others to be around you? Believing that someone else is responsible or making them responsible for your happiness or your different moods is very limiting and gives this person some mystical power over you, which can cause you a great deal of anguish.

Being at cause means you have choices in your life — you can choose what is best for you while ensuring the choice is ecological for those around you, those in your community and your society. That is, you consider the consequences of your actions on others, while not taking responsibility for their emotional well-being — believing you are responsible for the emotional well-being of someone else places a heavy burden on you and can cause a great deal of stress.

Those who live their lives at effect often see themselves or live their lives as victims with no choices whatsoever. The irony is that they do have choice and they have chosen not to choose but to be responsive to whatever is given to them.


With hindsight, traveling extensively has taught me that many things that we think are impossible are really possible with some lateral thinking and creativity, plus a whole lot of effort. Sometimes we need to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations and take risks to really achieve things.

Having grown up on a small island in a relatively protected environment, I think I spent many years living life at effect. However my curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit, coupled together with the right people and travel, have helped me move into being at cause. It’s not always easy to stay in this mindset, and it takes constant work and psychological training, but it’s definitely possible, and it gives you a much better chance at feeling fulfilled with your life.

Chasing Freedom

Freedom is an even higher goal.

I’ve always chased freedom ever since I was young, and in my mind wealth and freedom are very close relatives.

I wouldn’t consider myself free without the wealth component, but freedom incorporates one very important key aspect to the true quality of life. It’s knowledge. This statement needs some more unpacking.

To be truly free, you need to understand yourself at a very deep and intimate level and accept everything you are. The ultimate aim is to not only accept yourself but to learn to love yourself. That’s the first pillar of knowledge.

Second, you need to understand the world around you. This will enable you to see things how they truly are, free of indoctrination and the powerful forces of popular media, religion and politics.

Things you can do to seek this understanding of the world:

  • Study history – you’ll learn to recognize patterns in people’s behavior.
  • Travel – different cultures will teach you what the history books can’t.
  • Keep educating yourself on a daily basis

You’ll know when you’ve attained the required base level of knowledge, because you’ll realise that you have much deeper perspectives on many different topics than most people around you. You’ll also start to immediately spot the bullshit in mainstream media and political and corporate propaganda. People might also start labeling you in pejorative ways and accusing you of things. This is a good sign that you’re well on your way to become a free and independent thinker.

Finding Purpose and Meaning

Something worth reading is Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life.

I truly believe in breaking the conventions, doing something you love and that you are passionate about. Only by doing this will you ever be happy in your life.

I believe in playing throughout life, trying and failing over and over at the many things that pique my interest.

Don’t you have a feeling, like me, that most people spend their lives chasing a highly paid job or career promotion? That might give you more financial security, but what are you sacrificing?

Think about it.

What about the stress, being forced to fit into a system, the office politics, and going against your core values. All these are daily features of corporate life. At one point you will end up asking yourself: what am I doing with my life?

Life is not about how much money you have, or the heights you’ve reached in your career. It is about you and your talents, and how you are going to use them as best as you can, doing something you truly love.

Everyone has to find his own ingredients for a happy and fulfilling life, but some of mine are:

  • Exercise and keeping healthy
  • Having a close and valued circle of family and friends
  • Spirituality and an inner life
  • Fulfilling work
  • Enjoying good food and travel

Of course, it’s also true that you need money to be happy. It’s not something that will make you happy, but it will solve many problems that make you unhappy and prevent you from pursuing your dreams.

Amateurs VS Professionals

Over the past twenty years I’ve learned how to distinguish between amateurs and professionals. I’ve seen the difference in many areas of work and life and at the core it’s always the same concepts that differ the best performers from the mediocre.

So what are these differences between amateurs and professionals; what sets the great thinkers and action-takers apart?

The answer is nuanced and likely multifaceted.

  • Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a process.
  • Amateurs give up at the first sign of trouble and assume they’re failures. Professionals see failure as part of the path to growth and mastery.
  • Amateurs focus on identifying their weaknesses and improving them. Professionals focus on their strengths.
  • Amateurs complain about mankind’s flaws, biases, and contradictions; professionals exploit them for fun and profit.
  • Amateurs think good outcomes are the result of their brilliance. Professionals understand good outcomes are (also, largely) the result of luck and randomness.
  • Amateurs want money. Professionals want freedom.
  • Amateurs focus on the short term. Professionals focus on the long term.
  • Amateurs avoid risks. Professionals take and domesticate risks.
  • Amateurs think in absolutes. Professionals think in probabilities.
  • Amateurs seek to win the rat race. Professionals seek to escape it.
  • Amateurs look for problems. Professionals look for solutions.
  • Amateurs save money. Professionals both save and invest money.

Reference: Farnam Street Blog

Intentional “Mistakes” and Fake Apologies

One of the reasons that I am not interested in politics is the fact that most of what politicians say is just fluff and outright lies. When their lies and corruption gets uncovered later, they resort to apologies and pronounce them “mistakes”.

Big businesses, like politicians, have a habit of making very good use of the words “apology”, “mistake” and “sorry” for things that were not mistakes in the first place, and for which they are not really sorry in the original sense of the word.

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent Jalopnik.com article on this topic of fake mistakes and apologies, which I highly suggest reading in full.

Across the world, but particularly in the United States, people of power and import recite the word “mistake” as an incantation to disappear the harm they have caused.

When Volkswagen was caught making a series of engineering decisions to knowingly and intentionally cheat emissions tests around the world, Chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch said the company made not one mistake, but “a chain of mistakes,” which is a wild way to describe years of systematic trickery that also involved one of its largest supplier companies.

General Motors’ deadly ignition switch fiasco years ago may have originated with a single “mistake,” but the subsequent mishaps around it and alleged cover-up over several years cannot charitably be described that way.

“We know we all made mistakes and got some things wrong,” Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg told a Senate committee about his company’s systematic prioritization of profit over safety even as people inside and outside his company repeatedly warned they were making decisions that could, and ultimately did, kill hundreds of people. Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter called awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a very wealthy nation with a horrendous human rights record that is building the venues for the tournament on the backs of indentured servants, a “mistake” but that “one makes lots of mistakes in life.” (He was, of course, talking about how it was a mistake to award the World Cup to Qatar because it is hot there.)

Mark Zuckerberg said “we made mistakes” after a whistleblower revealed Cambridge Analytica harvested data from Facebook, a massive private surveillance company masquerading as a communications firm, to target 50 million Americans with political advertising that helped elect Donald Trump.

In 2017, while being deposed in one of many lawsuits facing her company, Elizabeth Holmes allowed that, as CEO of Theranos, a wholly fraudulent company whose only true product was secrecy and intimidation, “I know that we made mistakes.”

Labeling these as “mistakes” is re-defining horrifying, unconscionable evil perpetrated by supposedly respectable businesspeople as nothing better or worse than forgetting to pay a parking ticket on time. It is spreading a glossy sheen over the well-defined landscape of morality, implying my mistake is just like your mistake.

Yearly Reviews

At the end of every year, most people focus on new year resolutions, which tends to be a shallow form of thinking and most resolutions end up fizzling out after a few days/weeks. A better exercise is to conduct an annual report or year review.

Assume Positive Intent

assume positive intentMany conflicts, arguments and disagreements tend to stem from the fact that we assume the offending party set out to harm us in some way. In other words, they have an evil agenda or negative intent.

A better way of moving forward and making progress, be it as a global economy or even in our day-to-day interpersonal relationships, is to always assume positive intent.

In trying times, it is quite easy to fall into a mode of thinking where we look around and think everything is falling apart and nothing makes sense anymore. It might seem that everyone is out to get us and there is little hope.

If we take a step back, however, we can use tools like prayer or meditation to get into an objective state of mind and realize that everyone is acting according to their incentives and circumstances, and by and large, people are wired to be good to others around them, unless they suffer from some psychological problem that makes them act otherwise.

Once we assume positive intent, instead of defaulting to judgment and anger, we take on an inquisitive stance. We ask of the other party: “what are you trying to achieve by this behavior”.

Oftentimes, it’s even better to try to take a minute and take an educated guess on the other person’s needs and objectives. This is because many people don’t even know why they act the way they do. It’s often easier for a third party to understand someone’s behavior, which is why we have counselors, psychologists etc. to help us out.

When we start out from this position together with an inquisitive and non-judgmental attitude, it is guaranteed that we will at least be in a better psychological state ourselves. As a bonus, sometimes we can enter into a productive discussion that ends up changing the other person’s behavior or opinion, although this shouldn’t be our main goal.

What Would Jesus Do?

No, this is not a religious lesson…

Remember those WWJD bracelets that were all the rage in the 90s? The idea was that we would wear them to help us make better decisions daily.

How? 

The concept is simple. Whenever you’d find yourself in doubt about something, you’d ask yourself: “What would Jesus do?

Although I never wore these bands, thinking about them inspired me to implement a simple productivity trick in my life right now. Here’s how it goes.

  1. Think of the most productive/inspirational person you know of.
  2. Imagine being in his/her company all day. Act accordingly.

That’s it. Very simple. Imagine your favourite productivity guru flew in to your city and asked to spend the day hanging with you, just watching you go about your day.

Would you try to impress him? Do you think you’d be more productive that day?

For me, the answer is “Hell yeah!”.

But wait a minute, isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing every day? So why not act as if that person is accompanying me every day? You can imagine several people accompanying you if you want. When you hit the gym, imagine your fitness hero is your partner, so run that extra mile and do that extra rep to impress him.

Imagining that somebody is watching your every move provides real context to your actions. You naturally think differently, act differently, and likely make more positive choices than you would alone.

Cultivating Awareness

awareness

Awareness is our teacher.

A Buddhist zen master was once asked how he defined zen. His reply was sharp:

When you’re hungry, eat. When you’re tired, sleep.

The more awareness we can bring to our lives the more we’re able to see that we can shape our lives. When we apply awareness, the past doesn’t have to dictate our future; we can push outside of our comfort zone, make new choices, and take new actions. With awareness, the path ahead is ours to create.

We need a sense of awareness in all aspects of our being. Think about physical awareness, mental awareness, and spiritual awareness. It takes great discipline to maintain total awareness in your daily life.

That’s why the practice of meditation is so important. The aim of meditation is precisely that; full awareness and being in the here and now.

I’m a person who is easily distracted and my mind is quick to drift off into dreams and possibilities. Rather than looking at what I can do in the future, it also sometimes dwells on the past, regrets and all. The here and now thus gets squeezed out leading to me living either in the past or in the future.

Such a state of living is not at all healthy. There’s regrets from the past, anxiety about achieving future dreams, and a lot of time wasted by not being fully focused on the present and working hard towards achieving preset goals in a serene fashion.

The question then is obvious: How do we cultivate awareness? 

I am using the Calm app (available on iPhone and Android, as well as a web version) to meditate as often as possible. My aim is to meditate in some form on a daily basis. I can easily recommend this app as a way to make significant changes to your life and well-being. Another popular meditation app is Headspace. Both are good, just give them a try and see which style suits you best.

Outdoor Hydromassage Spas and Hot Tubs are Great for Relaxation

At one of my favorite gyms in Barcelona, I’ve experienced the amazing benefits of having an outdoor hydromassage spa, and this can be most easily replicated in homes with a hot tub. 

The best conditions to experience an outdoor spa pool are in a location that has clean air and an amazing view. This gym in particular ticks those boxes. Ideally, it is big enough for 4-5 people to fit comfortably, as you want to make it easy for multiple people to enjoy the spa without bothering each other, and it’s also great to have the ability to chat with others in such a nice environment. 

Owning or enjoying an outdoor hot jacuzzi offers a myriad of health and mental benefits that can really boost overall well-being. 

One of the primary health benefits of an outdoor hot jacuzzi is its potential to alleviate physical pain and discomfort. The combination of warm water, buoyancy, and targeted jets helps to relax muscles and ease tension. The water’s buoyancy also reduces the pressure on joints, providing a low-impact environment that can help promote healing and alleviate discomfort from injuries or surgery. For these reasons, I love using it in particular after training or after a padel match when the legs and feet are really sore. 

Another significant health benefit is the improvement of circulation. The heat from the jacuzzi causes blood vessels to dilate, resulting in increased blood flow and the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to various parts of the body. This improved circulation can help reduce inflammation, speed up the healing process, and even lower blood pressure for some individuals.

The mental benefits of owning or enjoying an outdoor hot jacuzzi are just as noteworthy. The tranquil setting and warm water work in tandem to reduce stress and anxiety, helping individuals achieve a state of mental calm and relaxation. This reduction in stress has a ripple effect on various aspects of one’s life, including better sleep quality, improved mood, and increased mental clarity. The particular outdoor spa I’m describing has a “bed” area where you can lie down and enjoy the feeling of bubbles and their sounds. I find this area great to have a 30-minute nap and feel supremely refreshed after. Even if I don’t manage to completely sleep, I do get into a deep state of relaxation and can process lingering thoughts and get the creative juices flowing, which is amazing if I want to do some writing straight after.

The social aspect of an outdoor hot jacuzzi should not be overlooked. As I mentioned, if you have access to a big enough spa it can be a place where your family or friends can congregate to talk in a relaxed atmosphere. I have enjoyed many a conversation in the spa and it’s one of the best places I can think of to enjoy a good conversation. 

So if you’re thinking about buying or building such a spa, I would highly recommend it.

Find Three Hobbies

Here’s one of my favorite quotes, although I don’t know its origins.

Find three hobbies you love: One to make you money, one to keep you fit, and one to be creative.

These can change over time, but right now for me these three are:

  • investing
  • padel
  • reading/writing

I really think it’s important to have these three, not only because they’re your best chance to live a healthy and fulfilling life, but also because they feed into each other.

For example, to improve in padel and investing I read and write about these topics, and I can apply what I learnt from investing into the sport of padel. On the other hand, padel training has given me a lot of discipline and methodologies that I can then apply to my writing and investing.

The concept of them being named as hobbies also aligns with my idea that ideally there shouldn’t be a hard line between work and play in life. In fact I always strive to build a life that I don’t need to take a holiday from.

I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living. – Richard Branson

Most people go on holidays to forget their daily life during the rest of the year, while the most fulfilled and high performing people I know don’t have this concept in their lives. They find joy and fulfillment in their daily routines and if they take a holiday they don’t really treat it in the way that most people treat it. For them, it’s most likely part of the yearly routine and has a specific purpose that fits an overall goal.

What are your three hobbies?

Assume Incompetence

Instead of getting mad when people make mistakes, just assume they tried their best. If you are a high performer, you can’t expect everyone to be a high performer. It’s better to assume they made an honest mistake or they just weren’t fortunate enough to get your kind of education and life experience.

In a similar vein, you can assume terrible days for everyone you are going to interact with on any given day. They might be struggling to make ends meet (especially true in the service industry), having relationship trouble, health issues, etc etc. They aren’t purposefully trying to ruin your day. 

Filtering People

The key to meeting new people is to do a filter without the filter. If you’re an expert in an area, ask the other person something about that area. They will rush to tell you their “opinions”. Since you’re an expert then follow up and ask if they consider themselves an expert in said area. If someone says factually incorrect stuff about something they “know well”, move on. Smile, nod, and agree. Don’t argue.

Filed under: Thoughts & Experiences, Top Post

Should You Buy Bitcoin Right Now? – An Expert Opinion

Last updated: April 02, 2024Leave a Comment

As Bitcoin goes through its ups and downs over the years, the question on everyone’s mind is whether this is the right time to buy.

“Hey Jean, do you think this is a good time to buy myself some Bitcoin?”

My inbox has been flooded with slight variations of this question, so I wrote this article to help my friends, family, and the general public process this decision and arrive at an informed decision.

I am a strong believer in the long-term future of Bitcoin due to its fundamental properties, which we’ll delve into later in this article. I have therefore been happy to buy at any price point since Bitcoin’s inception, as I think the price has a long way to go still and we’re in the early years of crypto, comparable to watching the dawn of commercial internet usage in the mid to late 90s.

I consider Bitcoin to be the best investment of our lifetime and will do my best to explain why I think so in the rest of this article.


How to Get Started with Bitcoin

I know you might now have time or even sufficient interest to read the rest of this long article, so again, if you’re already convinced about buying, here are my basic recommendations for entering the Bitcoin space.

In the meantime, if you’re already convinced and you came here looking for the best places to buy Bitcoin right away, here’s what you need to do next:

  1. Sign up at the leading crypto exchange Coinbase
  2. Transfer money (EUR, USD etc) from your bank to the exchange.
  3. Buy Bitcoin
  4. Start thinking about how you prefer to custody your Bitcoin.

There are hundreds of places you can buy Bitcoin from, but I would suggest that you stick to the exchanges that have been established for many years and have a perfect security track record. It’s important that these exchanges are regulated where applicable. These are my recommendations:

  • Buy Bitcoin on Binance – the exchange with the biggest volume worldwide) – read my review
  • Buy Bitcoin on Coinbase – the most well known exchange – read my review

They are the world’s safest, biggest and most reputable exchanges and you can’t go wrong with them.

I’ve also written a guide on how to buy Bitcoin in Europe where I go into further detail on how you can get your hands on some Bitcoin.

Once you have your Bitcoin, you can purchase a Ledger Nano to store that Bitcoin offline and away from any hackers.

Trade Bitcoin on Binance

If you just want to hold your Bitcoin while earning good returns, you can check out some crypto platforms that offer a savings account. My favorites at the moment are YouHodler and Nexo,but you can learn more about those options here.

Towards the end of the article, I will again discuss some of the ways that you can make money with Bitcoin.


Waiting to Buy the Dip

By far the most frequent follow-up question I get and the biggest block I see people facing, is this:

“What price should I buy at?”

I don’t believe in timing the market on any investment, unless there is a big macro event like the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the COVID dip of March 2020.

Therefore, for any investment I make, I’m typically looking 5-10 years ahead and thinking about how much value that investment can generate within that timeframe. The whole crypto space is still in its infancy, and Bitcoin has enormous room for growth, thus any price point is a good entry in my opinion.

I think we’ll be seeing many more similar tweets in the coming months and years:

#Bitcoin is $40,400 right now.

You could have bought it for $29,000 last week. Still waiting for the dip?

— Bitcoin Archive (@BTC_Archive) February 6, 2021

Unfortunately, people are really attracted to the idea of buying the dip. The problem is that the dip may never come, and if you know people who did buy some dip, it’s likely that they were in a position to buy at an even lower price a few months earlier but didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. If that’s not the case, in 90% of the cases I would attribute managing to buy a dip to pure luck.

Even in the case of the major macro events like the 2007 crisis and March 2020 dip, to make the most of those events you’d have had to have a lot of spare cash lying around and ready to be invested. Again, mostly, a question of luck.

See also: The Best crypto trading apps and exchanges

However, if you feel uncomfortable about choosing a particular price point to make your entry, consider investing a fixed amount periodically, say every month. In that way, you’ll smooth out any drastic price variances and you’ll be building up your Bitcoin portfolio over time. The disadvantage of that strategy is that Bitcoin might make a sharp move upwards in the meantime.

Ok, with those preliminary recommendations out of the way, let’s proceed with the reasons why I think Bitcoin is the best investment of our generation.


Why am I Bullish on Bitcoin?

In 2020, as a response to the COVID fears, Bitcoin dipped heavily in March and I had thought it was a great time to increase one’s Bitcoin holding, as the market was ruled by fear.

Since then, the price has risen steadily, breaking through its former all-time high in a dramatic way. As always, since we are still early, there are wild swings up and down, and that’s to be expected for an emergent asset class.

Before we continue, let me reiterate that nobody can predict Bitcoin’s price, and neither can I. Even if I had some hunch, I would not want you to blindly follow what I say, because I am against getting financial advice online.

However, I use this blog as my own small space to think about things, and writing is how I best formulate my ideas. As an added benefit, I get to interact with other investors and people whose ideas contrast mine, thus helping me further refine my thoughts.

The way I see it, Bitcoin seems to be following the stock-to-flow model when we view its price over the long term. Proponents of this model had predicted that the price of Bitcoin should reach somewhere between $100k and $200k at some point in the next few years. This is based on an analysis of the demand and scarcity of this asset, and comparing it to other assets like gold.

Read more: The Best Books about Bitcoin and Crypto

This is a very bullish target price, although it does seem realistic given Bitcoin’s ATH. Irrespective of the price swings, I remain very bullish on the Bitcoin network long-term, due to the fundamentals being stronger than ever.

Let’s now consider a few major themes that add to the bullish argument for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s track record VS the S&P500

Bitcoin has been the best investment asset within the past 10 years by a long stretch. Take a look at how it outperformed the S&P500 index during the past few years:

Bitcoin vs SP500

However, even with such a historical track record in place, I would suggest looking beyond the charts. The basis for my investment is a philosophical one based on my belief that Bitcoin solves a need as a totally independent store of value that is not at the mercy of any government or company. I am happy to invest some of my net worth in cryptos for this reason, and I know that I’ll be happy about my decision in the future whether prices rise or fall, as it is based on that reasoning and not just speculation.

Bitcoin as a Safe Haven

The US federal reserve printed ungodly amounts of dollars in 2020 and then pumped into traditional financial markets last year to keep them from faltering. The European Union followed suit. It’s quite logical that with more money in the system, the value of your existing stash will lose value as money is less scarce than it was before. Bitcoin on the other hand maintains its hard cap on the total amount that can ever be issued.

Hence we get a chart like this, where fiat currencies unequivocally lose value against hard assets like Bitcoin.

fiat vs bitcoin

Big institutions and corporate entities have understood this very well. In fact, their main play is that of protecting their financial reserves, rather than buying Bitcoin in the hope of exponential growth. They want to protect the store of value they have accumulated over the years, and they know that if they don’t buy a hard asset like Bitcoin that value will be greatly diminished by the effects of money printing and other fiscal policies.

The Great Upcoming Wealth Transfer

Check this report entitled “Inheriting USDs & Acquiring BTCs: How ‘The Great Wealth Transfer’ Will Fuel ‘The Great Bitcoin Adoption.’”

According to the report, if American Millennials were to invest at least five percent of their inherited wealth into Bitcoin (BTC), they could drive the price up to $350,000 in 2044. This would effectively give the generational group almost $70 trillion of value from a $971 billion investment.

With many older Americans on the verge of retirement, the report suggests those in younger generations who are not only more familiar with but more accepting of Bitcoin will have more options investing in the future.

“…a disproportionate percentage of the Millennials and Gen X will continue to be the driving force of adoption [of cryptocurrency] for the foreseeable future. While this can be explained in part by the fact that both generations harness a greater technological competence than their elders, we should also consider that bitcoin’s current volatility is unsuitable for individuals nearing or in retirement.”

Baby Boomers in the United States currently control approximately 57% of the total wealth, $50 trillion of which will pass to Millennials and Gen Xers in the next two years. This redistribution is referred to as the “Great Wealth Transfer”.

If younger people were to use just 1% of this wealth to then invest in BTC, the price could rise to $70,000 — if not more — in 2044. This is based only on investors in the U.S., meaning the actual numbers could easily be higher.

Bitcoin entering the Fourth Era

According to an analysis by Bitwise Asset Management, Bitcoin is entering its fourth era in which it will go mainstream, and if previous eras are anything to go by, we should be seeing a big run-up to $100,000 or more in the next 2 years.

European countries legalizing Bitcoin

As reported by Les Echos, Bitcoin now has the official status of money in France.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been qualified as a financial instrument in Germany. Portugal, on the other hand, is well-known as possibly the most crypto-friendly nation in Europe, and does not impose any taxes on crypto gains.

Bitcoin is the result of many previous projects and research

Many people seem to think that Bitcoin is a recent thing, even a bubble, but it can’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin has already been working for more than ten years, while being itself just the latest in a series of projects that tried to achieve the aim of a censorship-resistant and digital money and store of value.

Here’s a chart illustrating how far the Bitcoin prehistory goes:


The Biggest Hurdles that Bitcoin Faces

bitcoin problems

While I firmly believe that Bitcoin is here to stay and that we will see a massive increase in price over the coming years, there are still some big and important hurdles for this new technology to overcome before it can really go mainstream.

Investors in the crypto space should weigh both the benefits and problems of the space when putting their money into any crypto project or asset. The benefits and problems are not set in stone, both can change over time.

Many people believe that Bitcoin has already gone mainstream, but the reality is that outside of the world’s most developed nations and, ironically, some of the most troubled nations (Venezuela, Argentina are two examples) the vast majority of the world’s population has little or no knowledge of Bitcoin, let alone any holdings.

I, therefore, believe that it is still very early days for the crypto space, and that there is enormous potential for growth both in terms of technology and in terms of valuation. However, there are some important hurdles that need to be progressively overcome in order for this crazy experiment to succeed long-term.

These are the big problems that need to be tackled by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the coming years.

Bitcoin’s Confused Narrative

Bitcoin was created to serve as “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system”, to quote Satoshi Nakamoto in the whitepaper that was released in 2008.

Over time, however, the narrative has mutated and we still don’t have a clear idea of what is really the biggest purpose for holding Bitcoin.

In my view, at the moment, it is clearly the “digital gold” narrative that wins out over all other narratives. The peer-to-peer cash narrative never really took off. People in developed countries nowadays can easily send money to each other using digital banks such as Revolut or N26, and even traditional banks have developed ways for their users to easily send cash to each other. Big transfers remain a good use case for Bitcoin, but most potential users are not really seeking a solution for transferring thousands or millions of dollars between them.

Bitcoin’s Bad Reputation

There are a couple of things that hurt Bitcoin’s reputation, and that of the whole crypto space in general.

  1. The myth that Bitcoin is mostly used for nefarious reasons (money laundering, arms dealing, drugs etc). This myth has been disproved many times but was popular a few years back and many people still believe it.
  2. The second myth that Bitcoin is for those who want to hide their monetary activity and evade taxes. The reality is that Bitcoin only offers pseudonymous privacy and there are several blockchain analysis firms that can determine who is behind an account and to whom they are sending and receiving money from.
  3. Get rich quick schemes, which can be further divided into two:
    1. The ICO craze of 2017 – many people lost money trying to get rich quick investing in things they didn’t really understand.
    2. There are many scams that use crypto as a vehicle. They prey on people’s poor financial and technical knowledge by making ridiculous promises and either cheating them out of their precious Bitcoin or else use the lack of regulation within the crypto space to run their scams with impunity.

When people lose money, they tend to turn against whatever and whoever they blame for that loss, and write off that space completely. It is easier to do that than to admit that you went in beyond your head and didn’t know what you were doing.

The rational thing to do would be to double down on your learning and add a new and higher dose of skepticism when evaluating investments. The emotional thing that is most likely to happen is to write off the whole crypto space as money black hole and vow to stay away from it.

Then there are thoes people who are a bit more experienced and have seen their fair share of scams or even have been burned by some of them (not in the crypto space). Crypto enthusiasts tend to talk about their trading and investments in a way that is very similar to the marketing machines used by scams, so that usually puts these experienced guys on the alert. They then proceed to write off the investment due to this and it being “too complicated”.

Holding Bitcoin is Still Complicated, Cumbersome and Prone to Loss

Not your keys, not your Bitcoin, is a phrase we hear over and over in the Bitcoin community. The idea here is that you should take possession of your private keys by pulling your Bitcoin off exchanges and into your hot or cold wallet.

That’s all well and good, however, the majority of people don’t want to deal wit the anxiety, stress and technical complications of self-custody.

Self-custody usually involves a cold storage device such as a Ledger Nano or a Trezor, which has to be bought and set up. Then you have to transfer your crypto from the exchange to your device, which in itself can lead to losing all your Bitcoin if you copy the addresses incorrectly, although this is a relatively small risk.

Ledger Nano X - The secure hardware wallet

It’s too easy to lose or misplace a seed phrase. Inheritance of such crypto asset setups can be very complicated, as in many cases only the original owner has clear knowledge of how to access the crypto that was stored in cold wallets. The incentive of the holder is to prevent anyone else to have access to their Bitcoin, which is generally a good incentive but becomes a major stumbling block in an inheritance situation.

Solutions such as Casa are a move in the right direction, as they eliminate the need for the seed phrase backup and introduce multisig transactions. They introduce a 3 of 5 key setup. If you misplace one of those keys, it can be rotated out and replaced. By putting customer support in place they also hope that people will be more inclined to practice self-custody, as they are never alone in the whole process but have someone to call if they need help in setting things up or if they are having problems transacting or accessing your Bitcoin. This paradigm is much closer to how people think of their relationship with their banks.

Inheritance is also taken care of through Casa covenant. This involves a 3 of 6 key setup. The 6th key is held by your lawyer who holds it until you pass. Two other keys are accessible within the legal system upon your passing. One of them is held by Casa and the other one is held in a safety deposit box. The latter two keys require a court order issued upon the original owner’s passing to access them.

I think that although Casa’s solution is more robust when compared to a DIY setup, it’s still too complicated for the average person, hence adding one more stumbling block to mass adoption of Bitcoin.

Another solution for inheritance is the dead man’s switch, which passes on information about recovering your Bitcoin to someone else unless you take a particular pre-determined action within a pre-established timeframe. The problem, of course, is that if the owner forgets or is impeded by the tribulations of life from taking that action, then that critical information might end up being passed on before it was intended to.

I think Casa’s solution is a step in the right direction, but its cost might be prohibitive for many people, and hence is probably most suitable for people with significant holdings of crypto assets. The overall problem of Bitcoin/crypto custody remains.

The solution to this problem? I think it’s three-pronged.

  1. I believe there will be a rise of Bitcoin banks in the next few years. These will be licensed and regulated institutions that will be able to hold your crypto assets at a low cost while also insuring those assets against loss. Basically the same way we think of storing our fiat money in banks. This system has been in place for many years and people are used to offloading the responsibility for storing their assets to a third party, so we need to replicate that in the crypto space for mass adoption to take place.
  2. An improvement in the technology and user experience for hot and cold wallets and multi sig solutions. Once the technical barrier is sufficiently lowered, significant portions of the general population will be open to self custody, especially the younger, more tech-savvy generations.
  3. Companies like Casa and Unchained Capital will become ubiquitous and provide the sovereignty and non-confiscatory advantages of self-custody while providing the peace of mind and customer support typically associated with banking institutions.

There is probably another possible solution, and that is that the biggest exchanges will in time start having their holdings insured and become as robust as today’s banks in terms of guaranteeing their customers’ crypto holdings. In that case, self-custody will become less important from the point of view of protecting your investment from loss due to security breaches or bad actions on the exchange’s end.

As far back as 2010, Hal Finney had posted about this topic in the bitcointalk forum, saying that he thought the ultimate fate of Bitcoin would be as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash.

Time will tell, but it’s exciting to see all the different solutions being proposed and implemented at the moment.

Bitcoin’s Correlation with the Stock Market

Although Bitcoin is frequently touted as an uncorrelated asset and this is, in fact, one of its major narratives, we have seen how its behavior has at times mirrored the stock market very closely. It has behaved very similarly to a tech stock.

For those who are specifically looking for an uncorrelated asset, especially if they are looking at Bitcoin as a potential gold alternative, this is a major downer.

I don’t see this correlation as a big issue and expect Bitcoin to become less correlated as it matures.

Electricity Consumption

This topic has been discussed ad nauseum, and I really don’t think it presents any issues, although it is frequently mentioned as a downside or problem with Bitcoin. Read this article and this follow-up.

Safe and Easy Storage Solutions

Cryptos can easily be lost or stolen by inexperienced users; this is one of the biggest problems I see as most people simply find it too technical or daunting to buy and store cryptocurrencies.

For those investors who are technical enough and have the resources to invest heavily, on the other hand, there is the significant headache of storing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth (or even millions) of crypto. Thankfully, we are seeing new crypto custody solutions popping up, but it’s still early days.

Peer-to-Peer Payments are Still Hard to Do

Most banks have implemented systems that allow P2P payments between friends in a really easy fashion. Although Bitcoin was invented to enabled such peer to peer transactions of value of any size, there is still some way to go until we can say that the average person knows how to do that via his smartphone. Transaction prices are still high for lower transfer values (but the lightning network promises to change that).

Bitcoin Payment Acceptance is Low

There was a time where many online sellers and even brick-and-mortar stores were adopting Bitcoin as a method of payment, but I see less of them these days.

The tax implications of paying for small items with Bitcoin can be big, as in many countries every sale of Bitcoin is a taxable event. So you need to keep track of every item you purchase with Bitcoin during the year (including coffees and other low-value purchases) and calculate the capital gains tax at the end of the year. Few people want to bother with that yet.

Even if we ignore the tax consequences, paying with Bitcoin is still not easy from an app point of view.

In many countries, Bitcoin is not legal tender and cannot be used to purchase big items like a house, car or even pay your taxes. Some states in the US and some countries allow it, but we’re still a long way off.

2017 ICO and Crypto Bubble

Many people still have the 2017 ICO and crypto bubble in their recent memory, where cryptos rose very quickly in value only to come crashing down again a few months later. A lot of people jumped on the bandwagon when the price was rising without knowing what they were getting into, and then logically got burned when the prices declined sharply.

These people are more likely to have written off Bitcoin as they try to stave off the painful memories of losing money. Those who invested in ICOs fared even worse as many ICOs were outright scams.

It’s Not Easy to Get Hold of Crypto

Many banks are still blocking transactions to and from Bitcoin exchanges, and without a way to get their fiat currencies onto an exchange people are thus blocked from getting hold of Bitcoin. The alternative would be to exchange services for Bitcoin, but I personally don’t know anyone who would be ready to pay for services in Bitcoin, so it’s hard to get hold of Bitcoin in this way.

Unclear Legislation

Many countries still have not clearly stated their position with regard to cryptocurrencies, while others have outright banned cryptos. It is important for people to know the following from their governments:

  • Whether the buying and selling of cryptos implies a VAT-able transaction.
  • Whether there are any capital gains taxes when selling at a profit.
  • Whether the holding and usage of crypto is legal or not.

The answers to those questions mostly lies in what financial instrument it considers cryptocurrencies to be. Some treat them as currencies while others treat them as intangible assets; those are the two major categories we’ve seen so far. ICOs, for example, fell into a grey area as what a lot of the companies were selling were actually securities, and they needed to be classified as such.

Some governments also opt not to tax long term capital gains, while others due, implying a huge difference in the ultimate tax bill for investors.

China has banned crypto exchanges from operating in the country while India has announced a ban on the purchase and sale of crypto currencies.

To conclude, while it’s anyone’s guess where the value of Bitcoin will be in a few years time, or whether it will still be the leading cryptocurrency, there’s little doubt that blockchain technology is here to stay, and even institutions like banks and governments are investing huge amounts of money and resources into this technology.


Profiting from Bitcoin

Since I know many people visit this article with the idea of making money from crypto, here are some of the ways you can do so. I purposefully left this section towards the end of the article as it’s very important to educate yourself before you dive in.

Do your own research always, as this is a very volatile space that is in its early stages. Having said that, for those who know what they are doing, the returns can be incredible.

Buy and Hold Bitcoin

If it’s your first time getting into Bitcoin, an easy strategy would be to just buy and hold this crypto. I recommend buying from these exchanges:

  • Binance
  • Coinbase
  • Bitpanda
  • CoinSmart
  • Changelly

I would recommend then storing your Bitcoin and other crypto-assets offline using a Ledger Nano or Trezor. You should store the 24-word seed phrase on a Billfodl or Cryptosteel.

If you want to read more about custodying your Bitcoin, read my in-depth article on that subject.

Need Cash? Take a crypto loan instead of selling

‍If you need quick liquidity, you typically sell-off some of your assets. Anyone can run into an emergency situation.

But there are alternatives to selling. Crypto backed P2P loan platforms are very popular, big holders of crypto prefer to get loans in fiat currency using their crypto as collateral instead of selling their crypto.

You could also use your crypto to earn interest using platforms like YouHodler.

While buying and holding has traditionally been the easiest and probably best way to profit from the Bitcoin boom, there are several other ways to make money by getting involved with Bitcoin.

Arbitrage Trading Software

A common scam – avoid outright. There are many websites that promote their software that purportedly generates insane daily profits through some proprietary genius trading and arbitrage techniques.

Predictably, they are all scams and Ponzi schemes, and you are sure to find a referral program meant to be the main driver of any returns. Examples include Bitconnect, Arbistar, Mind Capital and Kualian.

bitcoin in europe

Bitcoin’s rise has been truly remarkable to see. However, the crypto market is little more than a decade old and is still very much in its early stages. Now is as good a time as any to enter this space. So, before we talk about how you can buy Bitcoin with Euros, let’s look at the remarkable rise of this revolutionary asset.

The Rise and Rise Of Bitcoin

A little over six years ago, cryptocurrencies were looked down upon as scams and shunned by the corporate world. It is pretty hard to believe how far BTC, and the entire crypto market, has come along over the last 2-3 years. Once thought of as the dark web’s favorite mode of payment, Bitcoin has risen to become the premier store-of-value and the perfect hedge against financial fluctuations.

Companies such as MicroStrategy and Tesla have purchased billions of dollars worth of BTC. Investors like Ray Dalio, Stanley Druckenmiller, and Carl Icahn, who handle multi-billion dollar portfolios, have openly discussed holding Bitcoin. Plus powerhouse companies like Paypal, Starbucks, and Yum! Brands (parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and others) accept or test bitcoin payments in various territories.

So, if you are ready to dive deep and buy Bitcoins with Euros, read on.

How Can I Start Buying Bitcoin With Euro?

Alright, so you have decided to get your hands on some Bitcoin. Awesome. But this is where the research part begins. You now need to find a cryptocurrency exchange which:

  • Offers local funding methods for Euro like SEPA
  • Has a simple and straightforward interface which is crucial if you are a beginner.
  • Is secure enough to protect your holdings from potential hackers.
  • Has done the homework needed to fulfill all regulatory requirements.
  • Has low fees and enough liquidity.

Coinbase ticks all these requirements. Use its simple-to-use interface to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Stellar, EOS, Cardano, Bitcoin Cash, and Tether with EUR. Getting started with Coinbase is very easy. These are the steps you’ll need to follow:

  1. Create a Coinbase account and complete your KYC verification.
  2. Deposit EURO into Coinbase using SEPA from your bank account.
  3. You can also fund your crypto purchases using your credit card or deposit crypto that you already own.
  4. Buy Bitcoin or the other major cryptocurrencies with your EURO balance.

The deposits are credited to your account the same day they are received. Along with these features, Coinbase has comprehensive tutorials and industry-leading customer support to make cryptocurrency accessible to everyone and anyone.

Concluding Thoughts

I think we should focus on the long term, the big picture. If you have faith in this technology you know this is the worst time to panic sell and the best to keep hodling, or better yet, buy more crypto.

The other alternative is to engage in trading, if you have the right skills to do so. In shaky times like these when the price tends to be quite volatile, trading can be a very profitable endeavor.

Given the huge upside potential and promise for Bitcoin, I think that the easiest and most fool-proof strategy right now is to just buy Bitcoin and store it safely. Wait a few years and if all goes according to the ideas exposed above you will be sitting on a nice increase in your net worth.

I like to use the Whatifihodl tool to figure out how much a current Bitcoin stash will be worth in the future based on price projections. You could also use Hodlcalc to see how much Bitcoins bought in the past would be worth today. It’s a great tool if you fancy ending up kicking yourself for not getting involved earlier than you did 🙂

Alternative Currencies to Buy

While you can profit off trading on many cryptocurrencies, if you want to adopt a buy and hold long-term approach, then there is not much worth investing in beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Taxation

You also need to keep in mind that in most countries crypto trading is taxable. Read about how crypto is taxed around the world or how crypto investors have scored a great deal with Portugal.

If you already know how your country taxes Bitcoin and you just want to find a way to quickly prepare your taxes, I strongly suggest you take a look at Cointracker.

This is a service that only tracks your crypto portfolio across various exchanges and cold storage devices, but can also prepare your taxes for you in a few minutes. They can also execute strategies like tax loss harvesting. If you do any trading or use bitcoin for payments this is an essential tool as you will have many transactions to record for tax purposes, and you can’t afford the possible mistakes that come from the tedious manual work of calculations.


In conclusion, I think that we are seeing a clear trend toward Bitcoin adoption. Whether or not you “believe in bitcoin,” it’s here to stay.

It took 12 years, but it’s gained acceptance and there’s no going back.  The companies, asset managers, and governments that stop fighting the rising tide and decide to surf it will be the ones that fare the best.

If you’re ready to buy Bitcoin and cryptos and want to read more about the buying process, do check out my guide to investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Over to You

What are your opinions on Bitcoin and the whole crypto space in general? What are the hurdles that you see going forward, and do you agree with my ideas? Let me know in the comments section below.

Filed under: Cryptoassets, Money, Top Post

Should You Buy Ethereum in 2025? – An Expert Opinion

Last updated: April 30, 20251 Comment

ethereum should you buy

Buy Ethereum

Ethereum has gotten a lot of flak over the past couple of years, but I believe it has the potential to provide better gains than Bitcoin itself in the immediate future.

It has a smaller market cap and does not have as much global recognition as Bitcoin does, which I view as a growth potential aspect.

Ethereum is one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world and has use cases that go beyond just a cryptocurrency. For example, Ethereum is the number one smart contract platform, with the vast majority of smart contracts and dApps based on the Ethereum blockchain. The upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 saw several improvements in Ethereum, the most prominent of which is the switch from a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism.

Ethereum is a technology with a host of use cases, and one of its biggest advantages is its flexibility. The Ethereum blockchain is also used for Non-fungible tokens, Decentralized Finance, and enterprise blockchain solutions. A significant criticism of cryptocurrencies is that they consume a colossal amount of power. However, Ethereum is making the switch to more energy-efficient mining processes giving Ethereum another public opinion advantage over cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.


How to Get Started with Ethereum

I know you might now have time or even sufficient interest to read the rest of this long article, so again, if you’re already convinced about buying, here are my basic recommendations for entering the Bitcoin space.

Buy crypto on Binance

In the meantime, if you’re already convinced and you came here looking for the best places to buy Ethereum right away, here’s what you need to do next:

  1. Sign up at the leading crypto exchanges Binance
  2. Transfer money (EUR, USD etc) from your bank to the exchange.
  3. Buy Ethereum

There are hundreds of places you can buy Ethereum from, but I would suggest that you stick to the exchanges that have been established for many years and have a perfect security track record. It’s important that these exchanges are regulated where applicable. These are my recommendations:

  • Buy Ethereum on Binance (the exchange with the biggest volume worldwide) – read my review

They are the world’s safest, biggest and most reputable exchanges and you can’t go wrong with them.

Once you have your Ether, you can purchase a Ledger Nano to store that Ether offline and away from any hackers.

If you just want to hold your Ether while earning good returns, you can check out some crypto platforms that offer a savings account. My favorites at the moment are YouHodler and Nexo, but you can learn more about those options here.


What is Ethereum?

According to a thesis by Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman:

Ethereum is a foundation for building an alternative Internet-based financial system. This financial system has the capacity to be completely open and trustless. This new financial system needs a native money to operate. Financial applications in this new landscape need a trustless form of collateral for their operation, and the only truly trustless asset on Ethereum is Ether.

See also: Best crypto trading apps

As a result of this demand, Ether has become an economic-trifecta; a “triple-point” asset, satisfying all the requirements that a new economy needs, all at once. As a result of this, Ether has become the best model for money that the world has come up with.

The thesis essentially states that ETH is 3 different types of assets at once:

  1. A capital asset (staked ETH)
  2. Consumable/transformable asset (consumed ETH/used for gas)
  3. Store-of-Value ETH or collateral ETH (ETH held as a SoV/ETH used in DeFi)

How to Buy Ethereum

Ethereum is the second biggest crypto in market cap and is considered the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. You can easily buy it on practically all crypto exchanges, including the major ones that I have recommended before

    • Buy Bitcoin on Binance – the exchange with the biggest volume worldwide) – read my review
    • Buy Bitcoin on Coinbase – the most well known exchange – read my review

All of these exchanges above have fiat onramps, so you can deposit several fiat currencies (EUR, USD etc) and then buy Ethereum (ETH). Make sure you do buy the right currency (ETH) and not Ethereum Classic (ETC) which is a different project and does not have the same growth potential.

If you’re interested in earning interest on your crypto holdings, many Ethereum-based tokens are ideal to get started. You can read more about the topic of interest accounts for crypto on my blog post on the subject.

How To Buy Ethereum With SEPA Transfers?

SEPA allows citizens of the European Union to send and receive payments into their accounts. It is also a popular method to buy cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and bitcoin securely and instantaneously. Now that you have decided that you want to invest in Ethereum, you need a cryptocurrency exchange that offers the following features.

  • An exchange that offers funding methods for the Euro, such as SEPA
  • An exchange that has a simple and user-friendly interface is a crucial factor when you are a beginner.
  • An exchange that has robust security measures in place to protect your assets from hackers and other external threats.
  • An exchange that offers its users low fees and high liquidity.
  • An exchange that complies with all regulatory requirements

Further Reading

Websites

  • Ethhub

Books

  • Check my list of recommended crypto books

Articles

  • Ethereum: The Money-Game Landscape
  • Bitwise Investments – Why Ethereum has value
  • Ethereum will beat Bitcoin by 2025

Courses

  • Blockchain Developer Bootcamp

What is your view on Ethereum? Do you agree that it is setting itself up for a big rally in the coming months?

Filed under: Cryptoassets, Money, Top Post

📈 Best Apps for Trading Crypto in 2024

Last updated: September 07, 202453 Comments

binance crypto trading app

Trade crypto on Binance

If you are looking to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies on your smartphone, you’ll be pleased to know that there are heaps of options in the market. But, with so much choice, this can make it difficult to know which trading app to go with.

For example, are you looking to focus on an app that offers industry-leading fees, or are you more concerned about trading a specific pair? Either way, you need to perform in-depth research before taking the plunge.

Here are my top suggestions right away:

[geot_filter exclude_region=”” exclude_country=”US” ]

Spot crypto trading apps

  • eToro – Best all-round crypto trading app
  • Binance – Best range of tradable pairs
  • Coinbase – most recognised global exchange

Exchange and Earn Interest

  • YouHodler – read my review
  • Nexo – read my review

Tokenized Stocks

  • Bitpanda – read my review

Trading Bots

  • My article on the best crypto trading bots

Buy Gift Cards, Vouchers and Top Up Airtime

  • Bitrefill

Debit cards

  • My article on the best crypto debit cards in Europe

[Read more…]

Filed under: Cryptoassets, Money, Top Post

🏠 Best European Real Estate Crowdfunding Platforms in 2025

Last updated: November 28, 202444 Comments

real estate crowdfunding europe

Real estate crowdfunding is one of the easiest ways to invest in property and one of my favorite forms of investment together with P2P lending.

Until recent years, the only options to enter the real estate market were to either buy property directly or to invest in a REIT.

Now, we have real estate crowdfunding sites, which are somewhat between those two forms of investment. If you want to learn more about the differences between these types of investments in the property market, check out my article on REITs vs Crowdfunding VS Private Investing.

Here’s a quick list of my favorite European real estate crowdfunding platforms:

  1. Raizers – best for French real estate – my Raizers review
  2. Fintown – real estate in Prague – see my Fintown review
  3. LANDE – agricultural real estate – see my LANDE review

How Real Estate Crowdfunding Works

So let’s explore what real estate crowdfunding entails.

There are three basic ways of buying a stake in a real estate crowdfunded property: secured loans, unsecured loans, and equity investment.

Here is a short recap of what each of these means for the investor:

  • Secured loan (senior debt) – collateral is offered to secure the loan. The collateral can be real estate or some other asset, including a personal guarantee. With this type of loan the investor is the first in line to receive their payout, and in case of any problems the collateral can be sold to minimize losses. However, the existence of collateral means that the risk (and therefore the yield) is lower and one should definitely investigate the asset that is offered as collateral.
  • Unsecured loan (mezzanine loan) – while mortgage holders are usually first in line to receive payments, an unsecured loan means exactly that. It is not secured by collateral. This means that the interest rate offered should be higher than for a loan that is secured. If the project is unsuccessful, there are no assets to sell to recover any funds (i.e small loans). In this case, one should pay a lot of attention to whom they are loaning their funds in and how well the platform is equipped to handle problematic customers.
  • Equity investment – with this type of investment one should note the structure of liabilities – the company will pay debts to employees and creditors first and only then investors may receive their payments from the remaining assets of the company. In case of failure, there is a real possibility that the earnings of the investor are reduced to a 0. When the project succeeds, however, employees and creditors usually receive a fixed interest rate while the equity investor earns more. So, in this case, one should make sure that they assess the probability of failure. Is the project understandable? Are the numbers presented in the project realistic?

As a rule of thumb, it is good for an investor to remember – the lower the risk of the project, the lower the expected yield. And if you are considering investing in real estate that offers a 20%+ yield per annum, be sure to be very critical about the contents of the project before investing. Most likely it is not a secured project meaning a significantly higher risk level for the investor.

So, be sure not to look at just the yield but rather the investment. It is important to always know what you are investing in, who you are trusting your money with and to be realistic in terms of expectations.

My Experience with Real Estate Crowdfunding

Before we talk about my favorite real estate crowdfunding sites, let me remind you that I’ve been investing in real estate through online platforms since 2015, and I’ve used many platforms targeting various geographical regions.

On average, my returns have been around 5-7% per year.

The Spanish investments have been my biggest disappointment, largely due to either the incompetence of the platform team or the horrible government legislative changes.

Investments in the UK have also not provided me with much joy, but apart from the Lendy scam, the other platforms have been quite well managed and the big issue with property in the UK has been the Brexit event which was quite unexpected and threw everything off the rails.

On the other hand, the Baltics have provided some excellent returns, and this is what I consider to be the hottest real estate market in Europe at the moment. The German and Austrian markets have also provided me with stable returns – these are mature markets and the platforms in these countries tend to be run by serious and ethical people.

Investing in real estate online can be a daunting prospect to many new investors, as they might not be used to mixing an offline asset like property, with the technology and intangibility of the internet. And that is why I’d like to guide you towards what I feel are the best and most trustworthy platforms.

See also: How to evaluate private real estate investments

Keep in mind that within each platform there are different modalities of real estate investments. I’ve written briefly about these in my article about risk vs yield in real estate investment.

I would love to also invest in the US via top platforms like Fundrise and RealtyMogul, however, unfortunately, these platforms are not open to European residents. Nevertheless, here are the best European alternatives and top platforms.

1. Raizers

raizers

Raizers is the platform of choice if you want to invest in French real estate. It’s a platform that has been operating for 5 years with zero defaults. Go ahead and read my Raizers review if you’re looking for investing options in France specifically.

I’ve had the pleasure of discussing Raizers and the French real estate market with Raizers co-founder Maxime Pallain on my podcast, check out that episode if you want to learn more about Raizers. I found Maxime to be very open and knowledgeable and I have no problem trusting this platform based on their track record and solid team.

Invest with Raizers

2. Fintown

Fintown is an investment platform powered by the Vihorev Group, which boasts over a decade of experience in the Czech real estate market. The platform offers investors the opportunity to invest in real estate developments across Europe, with a particular emphasis on Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic. Fintown’s mission is to make real estate investing more accessible to individual investors, enabling them to diversify their portfolios and benefit from the potential high returns associated with property investments.

The account opening process with Fintown is user-friendly and efficient, requiring basic personal information and identification documents for verification. Once verified, investors can deposit euros—the sole currency accepted on the platform—with a minimum investment threshold of €50. The platform’s dashboard is designed to be clean and intuitive, facilitating easy navigation and management of investments. Key features include daily interest accrual, zero commissions on deposits and withdrawals, and no fees for participating in investments, enhancing the platform’s flexibility and appeal.

Fintown primarily focuses on real estate investments, offering a variety of opportunities in European property development projects. The platform meticulously vets and selects projects based on factors such as location, potential returns, and overall risk, instilling confidence in the investment opportunities presented. Many projects involve rental apartments in Prague’s Smíchov District, allowing investors to gain exposure to this burgeoning market. The platform requires a minimum investment of €50, with available investments generating annual yields between 9% and 12%, accompanied by monthly interest payments. Notably, the Fintown team invests at least 20% of their own funds in every project, ensuring alignment of interests with investors.

The short-term rental market in Prague has experienced significant changes in recent years. Following the global pandemic in 2020, the market faced a substantial drop in demand due to lockdowns and travel restrictions. However, as restrictions have eased, the market is rebounding, bolstered by Prague’s enduring appeal as a tourist destination and the city’s thriving startup scene. These factors contribute to the attractiveness of investing in short-term rentals in Prague, and Fintown offers a convenient avenue for such investments.

While some may view Fintown’s promotion of its own projects as a potential conflict of interest, this approach can be advantageous for investors. By promoting its own ventures, Fintown ensures it has a direct stake in the success of each project, aligning its interests with those of the investors. This active management and investment in the projects offered create a higher level of accountability and transparency.

The investment process on Fintown is straightforward. After reviewing available projects and selecting one that aligns with their investment objectives, investors decide on the amount to invest and complete the transaction. The platform provides updates on project progress, keeping investors informed about their investments’ performance. Fintown offers two investment formats: mezzanine loans and participative loans, both carrying higher risks compared to loans secured by a mortgage.

Fintown projects typically offer attractive returns, aiming to provide investors with a combination of capital appreciation and rental income, depending on the project’s nature. Each project has a specified minimum term, ranging from 9 to 24 months, indicating the lock-up period for funds. After this period, investors can withdraw their funds at no additional charge. Early exit is possible through a request on the platform, subject to an exit fee based on the remaining term duration.

Invest with Fintown

3. LANDE

LendSecured investment opportunities

LANDE was started in 2019, when two experienced professionals from the secured lending sector Ņikita Gončars and Edgars Tālums became aware that there is a niche in the crowdlending market, as none of the existing market players offered low-LTV investment deals.

LANDE is going after the agricultural loans niche. There is currently a big gap between the financing needs of farmers in Eastern Europe and what’s available to them from banks and other lending providers.

Read more: My full review of LANDE

All projects are first rank mortgage, which is the most secure type of mortgage you can get. Other platforms offer second-rank mortgages which are riskier, but can have higher interest rates.

I would recommend having a look at LANDE as it might be one of the most innovative players in the space going forward. It’s worth mentioning that LANDE also has skin-in-the-game for every project launched.

Invest on LANDE

The real estate market is in constant flux due to the numerous factors that affect it, and you, therefore, need to do your homework properly before deciding on an investment. For example, the duration of the investment can be the main differentiating factor between a successful investment and a disastrous one. Some markets offer time-limited but very lucrative investment windows, while other markets have certain properties that make them really stable and thus ideal for long term investments, perhaps at lower rates of return.

I also recommend that you check out my article about the taxation of P2P and real estate platforms in Spain. Although I wrote that article with Spanish residents in mind, the same concepts apply to most other countries in Europe.

Do you know of any other platforms that I have not mentioned? Let me know in the comments section.

Filed under: Money, Real estate, Top Post

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

Latest Padel Match

Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete

Follow @jeangalea

  • My Padel Experience
  • Affiliate Disclaimer
  • Cookies
  • Contact

Copyright © 2006 - 2025 · Hosted at Kinsta · Built on the Genesis Framework