Author Topic: Investment advice from our bank  (Read 3407 times)

havregryn

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Investment advice from our bank
« on: October 01, 2017, 03:15:03 AM »
While we are definitely in a very specific market and many things taken for granted on this forum would not necessarily apply here, I still have to share this piece of wisdom here, as it is downright surreal to say that "a novice investor should be looking into real estate as it's easy to get your foot in the door" in a place where the minimum price of a studio would hover between 300 000 and 400 000€ (350- 450 000$).

https://my-life.lu/en/real-estate-or-the-stock-market/?utm_source=FACEBOOK&utm_campaign=la-bourse-ou-la-brique&utm_medium=AD_EN

This is even better put in perspective if I tell you that here it is considered you made a really good investment if your yearly gross rent is 3% of property value. Meaning that if you can collect 15 000 gross rent on a 500 000 property, you're doing well and it probably means you bought it a few years ago because by now the prices have inflated well past that point.

It's not really funny as these investors are inflating the prices for those of us who want to buy something to live in (and the whole "but renting is super cheap" argument doesn't hold as well for many reasons such as that the tenant is supposed to do most of the maintenance of the property and that it is not generally possible to sign a long term lease) but really, I felt this article had to go here.

gooki

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Re: Investment advice from our bank
« Reply #1 on: October 01, 2017, 03:45:51 AM »
Shocking, but then mortgages are cash cows for banks, so I'm not surprised.

AMandM

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Re: Investment advice from our bank
« Reply #2 on: October 01, 2017, 10:11:44 PM »
Can't you buy mutual funds in Luxembourg? It's not as though RE and individual stocks are the only two options!

havregryn

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Re: Investment advice from our bank
« Reply #3 on: October 02, 2017, 07:25:29 AM »
To be honest, it seems so complicated to buy anything here that we *facepunch* just keep amassing money on our account waiting to figure it out. Before we sent money to Sweden where we lived before and have investment accounts but we realized that was stupid due to taxation issues...it's probably just as stupid to have 50 000€ on the account but well.
To even be able to access any kind of online trading through our bank we had to fill out a bunch of forms in which we acknowledged that we are completely ready to lose all of our money. Literally. Like, you need to convince the bank that you are really into risk if you want to have access to any form of investment that is not real estate.
But anyway now I can click on it but it seems whatever we want to buy we have to e-mail our bank guy first so that he confirms we are allowed to buy it according to our "investor profile". And because we have a joint account for husband and me, we had to fill out two of those and we may have different profiles so God knows if we can even buy stuff that would be too risky for the more risk averse profile. So, in the mean time we have 50 000€ on the account wondering what the hell.
We probably need to get some serious advice from a Mustachian who understands Luxembourg but I'm not sure where to find one. This place seems like the epitome of anti-Mustachianism.

FI4good

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Re: Investment advice from our bank
« Reply #4 on: October 10, 2017, 03:24:12 PM »
I found this whilst scouting around the internet after reading about your investment advice , good luck FI4

https://www.expatica.com/lu/finance/Tax-efficient-savings-in-Luxembourg_103974.html

 

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