11-07-2015, 11:27 AM
Hello all,
I want to introduce myself on the forum. I'm Dutch, 36 years old living together with my wife and our little girl (10 months now).
We saved some money and have it on a bank savings account with abysmal interest rates. So I was searching for better ways to get some returns on it. After a lot of research I stumbled upon DGI, was directly interested and started to learn more about it. Now I wish I found out about this 10 years earlier, but as they say, better late than never, right?
Since most people will be from the USA here is a little background on Dutch stock investing. In our country we don't have something like an IRA. Actually, I don't even know exactly what a IRA is, but I know it's something in which you can invest without paying taxes right? What we do have is the following:
- We pay 1,2% wealth tax over all the money we have above 42k in Euro's (for a couple that is)
- We can deduct all the taxes paid over dividends (to a maximum of 15% tax on dividends) from this 1,2% wealth tax. The Netherlands has a tax treaty with almost every country where you want to buy stocks which states that a Dutch person can request to get all the taxes back from that country if you have to pay more than 15% in tax on dividends. This makes dividend completely tax free, but we have to pay the wealth tax.
- We don't have to pay tax if we sell a stock with profit.
For the future I have some sort of financial plan. First of all, if we retire (age 67) we get a base amount of money paid by the government. It's called "AOW" and it's something like 730 Euro's for both my girl and me. Besides that, we build up a pension for each year of employed labour. This means that we don't have a financial problem after the age of 67.
We have bought a house with a mortgage of 260k in Euro's. We never have to repay 100k of it. The rest will be repaid automatically in our monthy payments in 30 years. Our goal is to repay 5k / year extra and we repay it on the part we don't have to repay. This creates a situation where we don't have a mortgage anymore after 30 years and if we continue to repay 5k/year extra, than it's repaid sooner. At the moment we pay somewhere around 700 Euro's month I guess. WE don't have to pay this anymore after the age of 64 since we have the mortgage for 2 years now.
Next to this I want to build up passive income. I started with 5k for stocks (just a month ago). I want to contribute an average of 500 Euro's a month, so 6k a year. I buy stocks with amounts of 1k per transaction, so 1k per stock until I build up a diversified portfolio of 30 stocks. After that I have to look at how to progress. The goal is to create as much passive income as possible and maybe stop working earlier (55 would be great? No idea if it's possible).
Well, I guess that's enough of a story. Looking forward to this adventure and I hope everything works out as planned!
I want to introduce myself on the forum. I'm Dutch, 36 years old living together with my wife and our little girl (10 months now).
We saved some money and have it on a bank savings account with abysmal interest rates. So I was searching for better ways to get some returns on it. After a lot of research I stumbled upon DGI, was directly interested and started to learn more about it. Now I wish I found out about this 10 years earlier, but as they say, better late than never, right?
Since most people will be from the USA here is a little background on Dutch stock investing. In our country we don't have something like an IRA. Actually, I don't even know exactly what a IRA is, but I know it's something in which you can invest without paying taxes right? What we do have is the following:
- We pay 1,2% wealth tax over all the money we have above 42k in Euro's (for a couple that is)
- We can deduct all the taxes paid over dividends (to a maximum of 15% tax on dividends) from this 1,2% wealth tax. The Netherlands has a tax treaty with almost every country where you want to buy stocks which states that a Dutch person can request to get all the taxes back from that country if you have to pay more than 15% in tax on dividends. This makes dividend completely tax free, but we have to pay the wealth tax.
- We don't have to pay tax if we sell a stock with profit.
For the future I have some sort of financial plan. First of all, if we retire (age 67) we get a base amount of money paid by the government. It's called "AOW" and it's something like 730 Euro's for both my girl and me. Besides that, we build up a pension for each year of employed labour. This means that we don't have a financial problem after the age of 67.
We have bought a house with a mortgage of 260k in Euro's. We never have to repay 100k of it. The rest will be repaid automatically in our monthy payments in 30 years. Our goal is to repay 5k / year extra and we repay it on the part we don't have to repay. This creates a situation where we don't have a mortgage anymore after 30 years and if we continue to repay 5k/year extra, than it's repaid sooner. At the moment we pay somewhere around 700 Euro's month I guess. WE don't have to pay this anymore after the age of 64 since we have the mortgage for 2 years now.
Next to this I want to build up passive income. I started with 5k for stocks (just a month ago). I want to contribute an average of 500 Euro's a month, so 6k a year. I buy stocks with amounts of 1k per transaction, so 1k per stock until I build up a diversified portfolio of 30 stocks. After that I have to look at how to progress. The goal is to create as much passive income as possible and maybe stop working earlier (55 would be great? No idea if it's possible).
Well, I guess that's enough of a story. Looking forward to this adventure and I hope everything works out as planned!