Crowdestor gets a facelift and adds 2FA – yay!

Crowdestor gets a facelift and adds 2FA – yay!

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Quick update from your friendly neighborhood Total Balance guy!

Crowdestor announced last month that they were gonna give their website an overhaul, and it has now arrived.

Why should you care, you ask?

Well, I think it’s noteworthy when a young company decides to completely re-vamp their website and add extra security features at the same time. Kudos to Crowdestor, for taking security serious, unlike some other folks out there! It tells me that they are serious about their business 😉

Lets have a quick look at some of the new features!

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Crowdlending platform (in)security check

Crowdlending platform (in)security check

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On Oct 14, I received a disturbing E-mail from one of the Crowdlending platforms that I currently have investments with. This was the exact message:

Kuetzal website was attacked this Sunday, it was successfully reflected by Kuetzal, but for security reasons, some passwords may be deleted. If you can’t sign in your account, please use “reset password”, or contact Kuetzal support team.

Ahem, WTF?

I obviously immediately attempted to logon to my account, but couldn’t. – So I had to use the “Reset Password” feature. I then received a new randomly generated password, in clear text via E-mail. Forgive me if I’m being too technical here, but this is a huge no-go! It was not a temporary one-time password that I was forced to reset after using it, so that only made it worse.

When someone sends you a password in clear text to your E-mail, you should be worried about your (or your data’s) safety! (You should receive a unique link to reset it via a web-form!)

This experience prompted me to run a few common security-related “tests” (no systems were harmed during this test 😉 ) on all the platforms that I’m currently using (14), to uncover whether this poor security hygiene was a widespread issue.

What I uncovered was fairly shocking!

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Monthly Update #14 (October 2019) – The Golden Shuffle

Monthly Update #14 (October 2019) – The Golden Shuffle

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Here we go again! Another month blew by, and it’s thus time for another riveting financial update from yours truly!

It has been quite an eventful month!

I sold some stuff, bought some new shiny “stuff”, entered 3 new crowdlending platforms and exited 1 (actually planning to exit a few more). I also received my biggest payout to date, which I had been waiting for for an entire year! It feels good to harvest the first fruit from a seed that was planted more than 1 year ago!

I also teed up for another Brickshare investment, which I promised in last months update (see the project here). It didn’t quite make it onto the books this month though, as the payment hasn’t been processed yet (not sure what we are waiting for, but I will let you know, once I know more!).

Anyway, enough jibber-jabber – let’s get to it!

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A lazy mans guide to budgeting

A lazy mans guide to budgeting

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I know.

It was bound to happen eventually, right? – “How to do x-y-z” is the most boring blog posts of them all. I do believe we even refer to them as “filler posts”. Something we use to fill the void between the good stuff, right? – But not this guy! I’m here to tell you that this IS the good stuff! Why? Because, it involves the use of technology to help me (and you) to facilitate my favorite activity: being lazy.

Thanks to the somewhat monopolized payment industry, I no longer have to lift a finger to control my spending. How is that, Nick? You might ask. Well, to be fair, the monopoly doesn’t exactly help me control my spending – but it helps me categorize my spending, which is pretty much the most important part, of budgeting…

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Crunching the numbers of Year One

Crunching the numbers of Year One

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Since I’ve now been on the path to FI for more than a year (and recently wrote a somewhat philosophical rant about my first year on FIRE) I thought I’d spend some more words, looking into how the numbers have progressed during that first year. I (somehow) managed to grow my Total Balance by more than 40%! However, only 2.5% of that came from my investments (primarily crowdlending). That’s a little weak, Nick! You can do better than that!

Well, as always those numbers don’t tell the whole truth, in that I’ve made a big investment, which doesn’t pay out until the year 2023. I also have a substantial investment with Bulkestate, which doesn’t pay monthly interests, so there’s a bit of a “backlog” here, waiting to be paid out in Q4-2019. I also made a small investment with Brickshare, which is not scheduled to pay dividends until Q1-2020.

BUT, if we look at my property #1 investment and imagine that instead of a big payout in 2023 (which is currently the schedule) I’d get smaller installment payments from year 2020, the numbers certainly paint a different picture!

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Monthly Update #13 (September 2019) – Business as usual

Monthly Update #13 (September 2019) – Business as usual

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Another month, another update from yours truly! 😉

I threw out a little teaser in my “One year later” post, and promised that a little excitement was on the horizon for the coming months. Well, the excitement is still in the making, so it won’t be until next months update that I can reveal, what I’ve been up to 😉

I will say this though; Brickshare announced a new project in September (in Vanløse), and they have another one on the ramp (Rødovre). I plan to invest in both. How, Nick?! You have no cash! Oh ye of little faith; where there is a will, there is a way – and I have a way 😉

Anyway that’s for next months update! Let’s have a look at what happened in the Total Balance household in September.

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One year later

One year later

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I wrote my first post on the 25th of September 2018, which makes today my blogs first birthday (I also started to get those domain renewal reminders a few weeks ago).

Much like real babies, it takes some work before they actually come out – so obviously the blog started way before that – but I figure it’s fair to consider the day of the first post, as the “official birthday” 😛

Since that first post 1 year ago, I have published more than 50 articles and received more than 300 comments (thanks for the support guys, I really appreciate it!) from over 4000 visitors. I know these stats might not be very impressive in the professional blog-o-sphere, but to me they are pretty awesome. I really didn’t have any expectations, going into this whole blogging universe, so seeing that people actually read my ramblings (on a regular basis!) has been one of the best parts of this journey so far. I love all my readers, so thank you all for reading 🙂

Lets look back at what happened in my first year on FIRE…

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Monthly Update #12 (August 2019) – Goodbye Summer, hello September!

Monthly Update #12 (August 2019) – Goodbye Summer, hello September!

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Welcome to my Monthly update #12. The 1-year anniversary month of the Total Balance blog has arrived!

I wrote my first post on totalbalance.blog on the 25th of September 2018! So, I will save the birthday celebrations for another 25 days (give or take). This is a monthly update, so let’s focus on the month of August, for now? 😉

Astute followers will probably have noticed that it’s been a while since my monthly update has included an updated LEGO-model of my Total Balance progress (which I started a while back). The reason for this is quite simple: I ran out of bricks…In the search for 2nd hand bricks I realized that LEGO’s aren’t cheap! Spending €20-€30/month on bricks, JUST to model my progress, would kind of undermine my current measly crowdlending income, of around €100/month. And since my (not so) trustworthy mascot, Russel the LEGO guy has gone AWOL anyway (my daughter magically made him disappear), I figured it might be time to lay off the LEGO’s for a while.

And thus, a new era of the Monthly updates can commence! 😀

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Why to use multiple banks and payment services

Why to use multiple banks and payment services

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According to a study, recently conducted by the independent danish bank advisor mybanker.dk, only 48% of the danish population is a customer in more than one bank. Historically, the danish bank customers are very loyal too. 60% of them have been a customer in their current bank, for more than 10 years.

It probably comes as no surprise to my readers that I’m not part of those 60%. I have accounts in 5 different banks (6 if you count Revolut as a bank), and I regularly switch bank (according to my wife, I switch bank as often as I switch my underwear and my job. That’s not entirely accurate, but it’s close! 😛 ).

When I told my sister-in-law about this, she immediately asked the obvious question: BUT WHY?! (she obviously only has 1 bank, and she’s been with that bank for more than 10 years)

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Why consistency (and time) is the only thing you need to become a decent investor

Why consistency (and time) is the only thing you need to become a decent investor

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That’s right. You heard it here first (not really), people! The main trait you really need to become a decent investor, is time and consistency.

We’ve all heard (or read) the term “Time in the market beats timing the market”. I’m not a big fan of this saying to be honest, but I understand the message that it’s supposed to convey;

If you have money that you are willing to invest, do it now rather than later.

It doesn’t matter which asset(s) you choose to invest your money in – as long as you believe it will yield a decent return (and compound on a regular basis, preferably). As long as you invest in something you’re better off than if you invest in nothing (or worse; buy new cars and expensive gadgets on a regular basis 😛 ).

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