About Me

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I’m a 35 years old happily-married Lithuanian guy who loves investments, economy, sports. I am working as an IT engineer in a Scandinavian bank but investments was always a field which fascinated me. My hobbies include sports (running, triathlon), gaming, reading, watching TV series. I participated in a few Half-Ironman (Ironman 70.3) events and am planning to complete full Ironman race one day.

I decided to write this blog to keep myself accountable and to share my journey to a safer retirement (or maybe financial independence before my retirement age). Currently, I would hit my retirement in 2053 (according to current policies) so I have ˜30 years to prepare for that. Ideally, I would like to retire earlier than that so the goal is to reach financial independence before the official retirement age (or at least work part-time). I will try to achieve that by combining passive income (dividend investment and other forms of income) and constantly saving part of my income.

20 thoughts on “About Me”

  2. Awesome to meet you and thanks for letting us follow your journey. I was curious – do you have a certain savings rate you try and achieve? That, above most things, is going to tell us (and you!) whether or not you’re going to be successful in achieving your retirement goals. Take care!
    -Passive Income Dude

    Reply

    1. Hi Dan,
      Thanks for visiting! That’s a great question! I definitely wouldn’t call myself frugal – me and my wife go to a restaurant a few times a month and treat ourselves with some snacks quite often. We could also save some money on our rent if we were living in a cheap apartment far away from our jobs. However, these are the things that we really value and they bring joy to us so we are making a compromise here.
      I am targeting to save ~30-35% of my income at the moment and I am able to do so usually. Most of my savings during last year went to our wedding which happened earlier this year, though, so I am only back in the dividend game recently. However, I don’t regret a penny I spent for our wedding because I will remember this day for the rest of my life, and I couldn’t imagine it to turn out any better.

      Reply

    1. Hi Torsten,
      Thanks for visiting! Sure, I would love to be included. Is there anything that should be done from my side? 🙂
      BI

      Reply

    1. I am glad that you like it!
      Wow, finishing Ironman is an amazing achievement. I still haven’t committed to the full distance Ironman training but it’s in my future plans 🙂
      Heading over to your blog now 🙂

      Reply

    1. Hey Paul,
      I’m using Interactive Brokers since November of last year. Are you also investing or trying to choose the platform at the moment?

      Reply

      1. Currently I’m investing only to p2p and looking how to diversify this portfolio as it’s getting bigger and bigger. And we know that p2p is quite risky 🙂 Anyway, talking about stocks, isn’t Degiro cheaper than Interactive Brokers? Have you done any research with numbers and etc. before choosing the platform? What platform did you use before 2018 November?

        Reply

        1. I agree that P2P is quite risky, I am keeping up to 10% of my portfolio in this platform (currently ~7%).
          Yes, I did quite a bit of research and Degiro was looking the best option. However, it’s not available for Lithuania. I heard about some workarounds and tried to get a German bank account from N26 but they also stopped providing services in Lithuania.
          That’s why I decided to go with Interactive Brokers (via Myriad Capital in Lithuania). It’s also quite a long story. It turns out that starting from last autumn Interactive Brokers no longer require a minimum deposit of $10k, so if you are planning to trade/invest a lot, I would go with opening an account with Interactive Brokers directly. The only advantage of Myriad Capital is that it doesn’t apply the monthly $10 minimum fee, if you don’t generate it from trades. Otherwise, the commissions are lower in Interactive Brokers directly.
          Before that I was using a Lithuanian bank (SEB). Since I like investing to dividend-paying companies, there were a lot of disadvantages in SEB: 30% tax on dividends (instead of 15% now), higher commissions for buying/selling US companies and exchanging EUR to USD (and vice versa) was with really bad rates and big spread.
          I assume you are from Lithuania? Let me know if you decide which platform to use. Perhaps there are some new options available which would be nice to know 🙂

          Reply

  6. Hey BI! Just ran across your website tonight. Not gonna lie, pretty awesome! With what little time I have to read these days due to running my site, I will definitely try to fit you in. We focus a lot of posts on individual company analysis, so if you’d like, we’d be happy if you wanted to publish a post for us. Let me know what you think, and keep up the great work.

    Dan

    Reply

  7. It’s a long process to blog about financial progress and reach financial independence. Although it’s a great community and everyone tends to be helpful. I just added you to my blogroll and if you would add mine in return, I’d really appreciate it.

    Reply

    1. Thanks a lot Dividendbelegger! I am glad you liked my blog 🙂
      I had a look at yours – it seems that we are on a similar point of our journeys. Good luck and I will keep an eye on how you are doing! 🙂

      Reply

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