Finance

I manage my money with N26 (great in EU). When I lived in UK, Monzo was great.

I try keep a minimum of 2000 euro on the account at any time (to cover emergency spending + monthly bills). Often this is aspirational and I can barely afford food.

I budget the next month (make sure enough money is on main account for the month) as well as rebalance my investment portfolio of stocks/ETFs (if necessary) at first day of each month as part of a monthly look back. I also invest into ideas that interest me & support open source projects & people I love. Currently I do this in Notion and it looks like this:

It's a lightweight variation of YNAB methodology which lets me be more mindful of my expenses so as to not get accidentally shocked by anything. I try to be mindful of more expensive things I buy & try to never disregard spending on quality healthy food and essentials for my well being. Both N26 & Monzo track spending into categories and do a good job of it. In future I want to build native apps to do this part of budgeting for me. Something simple like the above structure (put predictions on expenses, it automatically calculates expected money for next month, easy entry, ..) but it also connects to my bank in real time and tells me how much I actually paid (something like Nordigen or Tink should work, hopefully not too expensive for personal use), it then tells me how much I have left for next month and whether my predictions were right as it has the real transaction log and also ideally the categories (already generated by N26/Revolut and most other apps, just not sure if they expose it, otherwise have to write my own code for tagging transactions). Ideally everything happens in real time too so if I bought another coffee in some cafe as an example, it notifies me that I am 'over my prediction budget' for this kind of activity (i.e. cafes). Actual Budget is close to this idea but has too complex UI and doesn't let you connect to EU banks. This person's Notion setup is close to the idea too.

It would also be nice to automate moving money from main account to good ETFs. FIAT tends to deprecate quickly so it's good idea to own hard assets (good ETFs being the safest investment).

Mercury, Column or Wise are great company banks.

I found Stripe Payment Links to process online payments to have nice DX but their pricing is insane compared to alternatives so avoid Stripe now in favor of Adyen.

Lemon Squeezy or Paddle seem nice for processing payments too among other options. My goal though is to minimize the fee I pay on each transaction over how nice DX is as I can abstract that away.

Would love to build some things on top of global payment infrastructure and get those fees closer to minimum as possible. Perhaps by building on something like TrueLayer as you need a banking license to innovate in fin tech at least in US.

Use Invoice Generator or Cakedesk to create invoices but want to make something even nicer and more automated for my use cases.

Ongoing subscriptions

I use Bobby iOS app to track my ongoing subscriptions. I review it monthly as part of my finance check up. The app I mentioned above will cover the use case of Bobby too so hopefully I won't need this app in future.

Tracking what to buy next

I use 2Do to track what things I want to buy next. These are just tasks with buy tag in 2Do sorted by priority. Here is how it looks:

Notes

FI is possible everywhere. The idea stays the same, save more than you spend, try generate passive income through stocks, dividends and property.
I think most people are going to mention credit cards in some way, but for me, it was how my actual bank accounts don't matter. It doesn't matter if I have $X in my savings and $Y in my checking account. I have $(X+Y) to budget and I need to budget $X for an emergency fund.
- Also, having $Z left over after budgeting doesn't mean I have $Z to blow. I have $Z to budget for next month since I already budgeted for my frivolous spending. That doesn't mean I don't just move $Z to something frivolous anyways.
It's a different way of thinking about budgeting. It's an envelope system. You have a pile of dollars (real dollars - these are all the dollars you own, right now, in your accounts), and a pile of envelopes. You begin stuffing dollar bills into envelopes - some into the bills coming due before you get paid again, some for groceries until you get paid again, some for gas until you get paid again, and with the smaller pile of dollars after those needs are taken care of, you begin to stuff dollars into your True Expenses - things like Car Maintenance, Insurance Payment, etc. When you run out of dollars, you STOP.
- You stop, because you can't put imaginary dollars into envelopes.
- YNAB is all about the now - about giving jobs to the money you have. Not to the money you might have later on. It is a different way of thinking, but once you make that mental shift, it comes clear and works beautifully.
Invoiced has great invoice generator.
IBKR trades currency for you on the actual market at whatever price it's currently trading. No fee. Perfect for exchanging FIAT.
After the financial crisis, banks were more tightly regulated, had to hold more capital, and the fed eventually started paying interest on excess reserves, so it should be fairly obvious that this means banks are encouraged to just park (some) of their reserves.
You have 2 ways of receiving money, as an individual or as a company. If you need to spend your money you are going to be subject to personal income tax laws. There are 2 ways to reduce this kind of tax, run a legitimate business that enables you to write off big day to day spends (like run a catering company and you eat the food it buys) or move to a country with favourable income tax breaks for new residents (Greece/Spain). If you plan on saving your money then you can start a legitimate business in a country with low or zero income tax (Estonia, Caymen islands). That business could be to buy property or an investment vehicle, that way you can benefit from keeping more of the money pre tax accumulating in interest before it's taxed on your personal income tax. Saying all that, it's a lot of work to figure it all out and make the pieces fit, or expensive to hire a good accountant to figure it out for you. Especially if you have an average income where your only saving a few thousand I'm tax a year.
If someone not paying their invoices for long time: First, create a paper trail of contact. Call them and follow up with an email documenting your call attempt and repeat your collection message. Continue this several more times as needed over several days. Only then escalate to an attorney letter. This process gives your attorney more firepower for the letter. Let them know they have x days until litigation, cc them with records of contact so they can't deny and let draft a very formal letter letting them know you have already taken steps to contact the people to take this to court. The very threat of having to deal with the court proceedings usually does the trick. I had the same thing happen (for less money mind you) after the letter was sent they paid almost the same day.
I call our cell phone/ internet company every once in awhile and ask for a discount. It's normally works. Just got a $25 discount off our cell/internet bill today. You can always look up rates of competitors and then claim you are going to switch. That normally gets them to go lower.

Finance

Ongoing subscriptions​

Tracking what to buy next​

Notes​

Links​

Ongoing subscriptions

Tracking what to buy next

Notes

Links