Hi again and sorry for not replying anything for so long.
I thought I will do a short follow-up as this topic generated interest from some members.
@efree You are right about the loan - I meant the 2% being the fixed part. The second part is Euribor which currently is in minus but can raise at some point in the future. Experts don't expect it to go to plus in the next 5 yrs though.
I ended up taking around 100K mortgage with 1.9% interest rate for 12 years (the interest can increase if Euribor raises above 0). So I took around 50K more than I actually needed by the time of purchasing the apartment. This meant that I didn't have to sell any of my active investments which I had by that time + I could invest 25K of the loan money.
Main reason why I didn't take even more loan money was that I didn't believe that it would be the best time to go with it to the stock market. I know it's not wise to try to time the market but you also don't want to use loan money to enter the stock market at it's peak pre-crash.
I didn't want to take the loan for the maximum of 30 years, as for one, I want to own the apartment once I might have a wish to move to a bigger place in 10+ years time. And second because it's always a good decision to be debt-free.
@efree Yes I know P2P and I have less than 10% of my invested money in 2 of the most trusted platforms (one is Mintos which is now the biggest P2P platform and one that I definitely can recommend). I haven't had any defaults in 5 years and the average interest has been 13%.
However, I agree with
@Bicycle_B to be extremely careful with these kind of investments and to keep them just a small part of the overall portfolio because by now 2 of the platforms that efree mentioned came out to have been scams - investors lost 10s of millions of money. Probably the scammers are hiding now somewhere in the tropics with all the money untraceable in crypto. Read this article for example:
https://www.politsei.ee/en/news/were-envestio-and-kuetzal-a-fraud-1151 Thankfully I was never interested in those untested platforms, so I didn't lose my money, but thousands did.
I know that our net salaries can seem big for this part of the world, but we are lucky to be where we are and hope to achieve FI in 10-15 years. I know it's probable to achieve it even earlier but I love my work and want to give my investments a longer time to compound anyway.
@sisto some of those 'unaccounted' 3K a month go into investments, but I expect our costs to increase as the goal is still to enjoy life and not to save and invest for the sake of it. So far it seems that we can put on average around 4K per month into investments.
Now my main worry is if it's a good time to invest all the money to ETF's which are all at all-time highs. I have so far invested into 25 mostly US growth stocks that I believe in and plan to keep for 20+ years. My pension and some other parts are in ETF's though.
I keep around 20% of money in cash at the moment (I know it's not ideal, but what would you do?) to be ready to go all in once the recession hits and start buying from low. Instead of using the bank loan to finance more of my investments I would consider taking Interactive Brokers 1.5% margin and use it against 10-20% of my portfolio. Do any of you have experience with investment margins? Is it a great idea to wait a bit longer and go all-in (+ the margins) after the next crash as we all know that we should buy aggressively when others sell...
Thank you for any ideas.