Milestones for 2019
2019 has finally arrived. And with a new year come new financial and personal targets. First things first though, how did I do in 2018?
Final status 2018 milestones
Well, I already made a few milestones that wanted to reach before the year-end, but in the end, I only reached one personal milestone. The second personal one was harder to reach than I thought, so I didn’t get it.
As for my financial ones, only the dividend payout amount was too farfetched. I meant what I said my the first reached milestone post: this year will be different.
Defining 2019
This year I want to have well-defined targets.
Starting with the personal ones, I will set a reading target for myself once again. The big difference compared to last year will be the books’ topic. Instead of books about blogging or improving my writing, I will focus on personal finance and economics. This means I’m following a similar path of other FIRE bloggers, which is unoriginal but since it’ll help me improve my knowledge, it’s still the best course of action for me.
Regarding my financial targets I want to set the same as last year but this time more challenging though still realistic if I stick to my planned deposits and purchases.
Financial milestones
Let me start with the most important financial milestone: keeping a strong Savings Rate (SR). In my look-ahead I estimated an SR range of 72.57% to 77% with a stretched ambition of 80%. Given I reached an average SR of 76,766% in 2018 my aim for this year is 75%.
While this seems easy to reach because my personal situation changed I estimated higher expenses and I’m certain I missed some expenses. I do wish to achieve at least 3 times a Savings Rate of 80%, i.e., my stretched ambition.
This one is straightforward I’d say. Over the course of 2019, I’d like to evenly distribute at least 12,500 EUR during the year in order to avoid entering at a possible the top and average out my cost basis. I got this result by looking ahead and taking the amount I’m likely to deposit per month (€ 1,000) based on what I’ll be able to save per month (€ 1,900) and multiply it by 12 plus a bit extra.
I want to reach at least 200 EUR in dividend payout. This time I didn’t just pick any number. You see, Lynx offers a very interesting tool called Portfolio Analyser that gives me a detailed overview of my portfolio status since inception (or any time period for that matter). One of these views is Projected Income (see image to the right). Based on this projection and the plan to add some additional dividend-paying ETFs, I’m aiming for 200 EUR at least.
Personal milestones
As explained in my introduction, this year I’m going to strive to finish 8 economics or personal finance books. While 8 doesn’t seem like a lot, for someone that spends a lot of time behind a computer and spends the majority of his work behind one as well, it is certainly a lot. Heck, of the four books I wanted to read in the 3 weeks of holiday I had, I only finished 1 and barely started on the second one.
In evening classes
My final and second personal milestone is learning a new language. I always had an eye on Spanish but I never got around to really starting it (besides trying a few apps from time to time). However, my girlfriend is Spanish-speaking so I now have a lot more motivation to learn the language. This one is definitely a challenge for me since I’m not that good with Romance languages (i.e. French). I will have to wait for Q3 because it’s only then that evening classes start again.
Hi there! It’s great to learn about other people in Belgium pursuing FI, thank you for starting your blog and sharing your journey. What made you choose Lynx as the platform to use? I’m in the process of deciding between IB and Degiro…
Hello Fellow FIRE enthusiast,
First off, thanks for dropping by. In regards to brokers, I actually have a blog post about that: https://www.fighttofire.com/my-preferred-brokers-small-retail-investor/
To answer your question more directly, I choose them based on my future plans (at the start). I originally planned to trade in options and maybe a bit of forex. This hasn’t happened though. I’m only buying stocks through them atm.
For this alone, I admit they are not as cheap as DeGiro (ThePoorSwiss has a good article about it, it holds true for EUR accounts as well: https://thepoorswiss.com/degiro-cheaper-interactive-brokers/). However, Lynx doesn’t have any hidden costs. In case you go for something like a custody account with DeGiro you need to pay attention to the charges on stuff like dividends. If you don’t take a custody account with DeGiro they lent out your shares.
I like Lynx’s service as well, especially because they are from Ghent they offer great support when it comes to taxes. Their offline trading tool is archaic though, but their online platform does the job if you only trade stocks.
Also important to note, DeGiro isn’t as cheap anymore once your portfolio grows into the 6 digits (see the linked article to ThePoorSwiss for more info) though this is something for the faaaaaar away future most likely.
All-in-all, I’d say, go with DeGiro and if you don’t mind that they lent your shares (which really doesn’t matter that much for a small starting investor like you), you can’t get better.