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Finance ​

I use Wise as my bank and like it. When I lived in UK, Monzo was nice too.

I try keep a minimum of ~ 3000 euro cash on my account (for emergency spending + any monthly bills). Rest in invested in strong assets. Often this minimum goal is aspirational and I try to get by with what I have.

Tax wise, at least in Europe, you pay ~ 21% VAT every 3 months. You then pay income tax once a year, at least in NL all that's done through a website. Income tax is often progressive so amount you pay depends on how much you earned in the year.

I found asking ChatGPT questions regarding taxes/finances very useful. Do double check though as model can hallucinate.

There are ways to avoid paying the tax if you don't stay a tax resident in any one country for prolonged time (usually 180 days). But I haven't tried doing that.

I do budgets on quarterly bases as I send in my revenue for 3 months to pay VAT tax. Anything beyond the 3000 cash goal gets invested into my portfolio of stocks/ETFs at each end of month. Might automate it at some point.

Aside from investing in ETFs, I use the money to invest in ideas that interest me. Pay open source contributors whose libraries I like. And generally try to give back to community on whose work I build on.

I try reflect on my progress both financial and otherwise as part of my look backs.

I want to build an app to help manage my finances better as well keep track of invoices I send and which invoices I paid out more easily too. Currently it's quite messy. I tried using Notion for it and it looked something like:

In some ways it's a light variation of YNAB methodology. Goal is to be mindful of how the money gets spent monthly to make projections into future. Thus removing anxiety for potential future unforseen expenses.

I try to be mindful of more expensive things I buy but do try to never disregard spending money on quality healthy food and essentials for my well being. All modern banks including Wise track spending into categories automatically.

As mentioned above, I want to build an app that would automate all things financing, safe investing & bookkeeping for me. Where tax is optimized based on all information that is available to me and payment of tax is easy as all the bookkeeping details are neatly organized.

Fey app looks interesting in this regard although it's focused on investing. Also Mercury seems like a great bank I might move to. I am still new to managing finances in startups.

The app should:

  1. Read live data from my bank(s)
  2. All expenses automatically categorized (I should be able to instantly see how much was spent on what and how that change over last month or any other time period) (can get categories either from bank itself or write my own classifier)
  3. Ability to make projections based on historical data
  4. Ability to set goals on total value of assets
  5. Ability to set limits on categories and ideally have the bank enforce those limits or at least remind me when I went over the limit as the app reads live data from the bank as each transaction gets made

For connecting to real time bank data, maybe Nordigen or Tink can be used. Hopefully it's not too expensive to do.

Actual Budget is in some ways close to what the UI for such an app should look like but it doesn't let you connect to EU banks.

This person's Notion setup is close to the idea too.

It would also be nice to automate moving money from main account to good ETFs I select. FIAT tends to deprecate quickly so it's good idea to own hard assets (good ETFs being the safest investment).

I use Interactive Brokers currently to make investments but honestly wish there was something better. The UI/UX of IB is horrendous but you can't easily purchase ETFs in any other app as EU citizen (I think at least).

If I needed a bank in US, I'd probably use Mercury or Column

In EU, I'd use Wise.

For processing payments on websites/apps, Stripe Payment Links are easy to setup but the pricing is steep so avoid Stripe now in favor of Adyen.

Ideally Adyen builds better integration points with as much care into integrations as Stripe has.

Lemon Squeezy is nice tool to simply sell items online. Paddle is nice too. There are other options though.

My personal goal though is to minimize fees I pay on each transaction over how nice DX is as I can abstract that away. Thus Adyen seems like a perfect company.

In future I'd love to build some things on top of global payment infrastructure and get those fees closer to minimum as possible. Perhaps by building on something like TrueLayer as you need a banking license to innovate in fin tech.

Use Invoice Generator or Cakedesk to create invoices but I do need to make something even nicer and more automated for my use cases.

Ideally anything related to finances is automated as much as possible for me.

Minimum Viable Finance is a nice article to read to get a better sense of things you need to know as you try finance your own startup.

Want to study all the financial crisis that happened across history and understand the root causes of each one. Specifically I don't fully understand the importance of raising/lowering interest rates and how it influences the economy.

Ongoing subscriptions ​

I use Bobby iOS app to track my ongoing subscriptions. I review it monthly as part of my finance check up. The app I mentioned above will cover the use case of Bobby too so hopefully I won't need this app in future.

Tracking what to buy next ​

I use 2Do to track what things I want to buy next. These are just tasks with buy tag in 2Do sorted by priority. Here is how it looks:

Notes ​