today I'm going to show you exactly how I've been investing on a year-by-year basis from 2017 all the way up to now in the end of 2024 my journey has been far from perfect in fact it was quite messy at times especially the first half of it I tried out a ton of different Investments throughout the last 8 years some of which even lost me a good chunk of money but that's life everyone makes mistakes the important thing is that my wife and I ended up being right on the vast majority of where our Investment Portfolio was allocated over the years as result we're now closer to our early retirement goals than we could have ever imagined 8 years into our journey in this video you'll see how our investment style evolved over time and what we experienced as investors let's start things off with when our journey started in 2017 in January 2017 as my knowledge as an investor was still very limited I started investing in the stock market via a robo advisor scalable Capital the reasoning made sense I wanted to make my new life as an investor as simple as possible without ever needing to Reb balance or think of anything myself the robo adviser would take care of everything and pick the right ETFs for me just 2 months later after reading a handful of books and doing a ton of research into the world of passive Index Fund investing I realized I could just buy ETFs myself I would be saving myself 0. 75% in yearly management fees which the scalable robot adviser was charging on top of each etf's internal total expense ratio another bonus was that I would have full control over how my money was invested as I didn't like how it was being allocated at the time now that it was all up to me I did what so many people do when they first get into the world of ETFs I got a bit too excited and over complicated my portfolio by buying a total of six ETFs at the time I was convinced that I could beat a single Global ETF by selecting an ETF for every region and sector I wanted to cover with a precise percentage allocated to each one 20% in the S&P 500 for US Stocks 20% in the stocks Europe 600 for European stocks 15% in the MS Pacific which I think you can even find ETFs for anymore 10% in msci emerging markets and for extra exposure to smaller companies I allocated 10% each to USA small cap and Europe small cap ETFs the plan was to rebalance on a regular basis and to hopefully outperform a simple World ETF that way but in practice this added complexity and costs I hadn't factored in things like taxes when I were selling a position that's in profit for rebalancing for example or the amount of work that would be involved as well as trading fees which is why I ended up selling five of the six ETFs I was holding in September of that year and switched to a simpler 2 ETF strategy 75% MSI World 25% MSI Emerging Markets this is when my wife started investing in ETFs as well using the same strategy this reminds me you can find the best local Brokers for ETFs linked down below which is a great way to support me if you'd like to 2017 was also the year I first got into the emotional roller coaster better known as crypto by buying Bitcoin and ethereum blinded by both of these shooting up in price and my limited experience as an investor at the time I ended up making an extremely risky decision I invested a total of 20,100 a large share of My overall Investment Portfolio into these highly speculative digital assets that year let's see what happened next in 2018 well the year started with me feeling like a genius as my high-risk investment tripled in value and ended in major disappointment after an 88% drop with my speculative Investments suddenly being deep in the filled with regret for not selling any of it earlier I left my crypto untouched for the next 2 years Meanwhile my wife and I kept adding money to our ETF portfolio and decided to simplify it even further at the end of 2018 by only buying a single ETF the Vanguard fi o World covering both developed and Emerging Markets on a market cap basis we held on to our existing mcii World ETF shares though since these were nicely in profit and there's no point in selling them and having to fully tax these already now instead of later on in retirement when we actually need the money that same year I also started investing on a handful of peer peer Landing platforms due to the high interest rates they were offering combined with a false sense of security since they advertised a buyback guarantee for non-performing loans which brings me to 2019 to 2020 which wasn't an easy period either in early 2019 my wife and I made a major mistake it was the only time where we blindly trusted the experience of a friend who had managed to double his money via automated Forex Trading without fully understanding any of it ourselves the strategy had great returns at the start which which we felt encouraged by but then things turned South and we ended up losing a total of €1,000 that was a painful lesson and we never touched anything like it again to make things worse in 2020 a few unregulated PP Landing platforms closed down and stopped withdrawals citing covid as an excuse I was shocked to have lost access to around 6,600 so abruptly and felt horrible for ever mentioning any of them on my Channel all of a sudden I realized that PP Ling came with an entirely different set of risks I hadn't even considered before luckily most of our savings were going into our 1 ETF investing strategy throughout this difficult period and our returns of 31. 7% in 2019 and 5.
3% in 2020 made up for our setbacks not only that by the end of 2020 Bitcoin had more than recovered and my crypto Holdings were back to their alltime Highs at around €60,000 I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice so I finally took out my initial € 20,100 investment which I moved into our ETF I decided to leave the remaining two thirds invested but now it's going to be a lot more relaxed about whatever the outcome would be then came 2021 to 2022 and our investment strategy became even easier at the start of 2021 we switched to the accumulating version of the Vanguard fozi o World due to it being a bit more tax efficient and easier to manage longterm compared to the Distributing version where we would need to reinvest the quarterly dividends manually ourselves more than 90% of our monthly savings were going into the single ETF during this period of time once again we held on to our Distributing ETF shares since these were nice in profit and we wanted to avoid unnecessary taxes at the same time Bitcoin and ethereum continued their rally and I realized further profits in 2021 which I also moved over to our ETF to avoid being Overexposed my plan was to keep my allocation to this high-risk sector at around 10% longterm and after seeing it crash again in 2022 that turned out to be a good call meanwhile I became less and less interested in peer-to-peer landing and its proportional share in our overall portfolio decreased further which brings me to 2023 and 2024 which is about TW as the ECB raised its rates due to high inflation in Europe we were finally able to earn an attractive interest rate on our Euro cash reserves without taking on investment risks since the German bank and broker trade Republic is passing on the ECB rate one to1 to its users and our money is secured by 100,000 bank deposit guarantee we've been using it as a high yield savings account ever since earning a total of 972 in interest so far on money that would otherwise have been earning zero on our Austrian bank accounts two more notable things happen in this period first we decided it was finally time to exit peer peer Landing completely in mid 2024 and to simplify our Investment Portfolio even further 90% low cost ETFs and 10% Bitcoin that's it and second since we're speaking of low cost ETFs and vanguards fees had now become comparatively high at 0. 22% as the asset manager has now left them unchanged for over 5 years a complete contradiction of what the company is supposed to stand for was finally time to consider another ETF accomplishing the same with l fees so for about 5 months now we've been investing our monthly savings in invest C accumulating fi o World instead due to its lower total expense ratio of 0. 15% per year as well as a better tracking difference since its launch all right let's do a quick recap of how investing strategy evolved over time and where we are today we started with up to six Regional ETFs and now we only buy a single accumulating all World ETF with ETFs making up around 90% of our portfolio as for peer-to-peer Landing it at one point had a share of up to 25% of our portfolio but now it's share is closer to 0% as we've decided to cash out meanwhile we were way Overexposed to crypto at one point as I got fully caught up in the hype in 2017 while we're now aiming for a long-term share of around 10% in our portfolio with a focus on just Bitcoin as for our cash reserves and emergency fund they were earning zero on our AUM Banks before and we're currently earning the ECB rate which is 3.
