investor toolkit 2021

Last Update: May 6th, 2024

Here is a list of all the investment accounts I use on a regular basis. Since it’s quite a long list, I figured it would be easier to have it all on one page and not spread out across the website.

I also added some extras that I use on a daily basis at the end of this page.

Investments

Let’s start with my investments in Peer-to-Peer Lending. Some of the platforms currently offer an investor bonus for new registrations using my links, which you can see in brackets next to their name.

P2P Lending

Here’s the full list of currently available bonus offers and their conditions in the P2P lending space:

💰 P2P Lending Bonus Offers

Next, let’s have a look at the largest part of my investment portfolio, ETFs.

ETFs

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to keep this part as simple as possible, while being diversified all over the world. That’s why I just buy a single ETF, the Vanguard FTSE All-World (VWCE, IE00BK5BQT80).

Let’s start with my international brokerage accounts, which are likely available for most people in my audience.

ETF Brokers (International)

  • Interactive Brokers – This one is my favorite. IBKR is one of the most trusted, most reputable brokers in the world, for good reason. Extremely low trading fees, no account fees (monthly inactivity fees were removed in July 2021!), recurring investments and fractional shares, no dividend fees and no share lending by default. You can’t go wrong with Interactive Brokers. I just wish it was a bit easier for beginners. Here’s my guide and my comparison with Degiro.
  • Trade Republic – No account fees and only 1€ in fees when buying or selling ETFs and stocks (any amount). No investment fees when buying via saving plans. Not only that, since October 1st 2023 they’re paying 4% interest p.a. on cash deposits (protected up to 100.000€ via a bank deposit guarantee). I moved my cash reserves there already in January when the rate was still at 2%. They’ve also recently added the ability to buy bonds starting at only 1€. The broker is now available in Austria, Germany, Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic and Cyprus. Watch this video for more details.
  • Scalable Capital Broker – Currently available in Germany, Austria, Spain, Netherlands, France and Italy. No account fees, only 0,99€ in trading fees and commission-free saving plans (recurring investments) for ETFs.

ETF Brokers (Germany & Austria)

Some of these have even better conditions than the international brokers I mentioned. The only downside is, they’re only available for investors from Germany and Austria.

  • Flatex Austria – No account fees and free saving plans on 300 ETFs and only 1,5€ in fees for other ETFs (more details in the pricing table). They take care of the taxes for you if you’re a resident in Austria, which makes things a lot easier if you’re just starting out. I currently have a large part of my ETF investments here, due to a long running savings plan for the Vanguard FTSE All-World ETF I had running the beginning of every month.
  • Trade Republic – See details in the International section and my review.
  • Scalable Capital Broker – See details in the International section and this video guide.

High Yield Savings (Bank Deposit)

As I already mentioned in the brokers section, my wife and I are keeping our cash reserves (incl. part of our emergency fund) on Trade Republic. Here we’re getting 4% interest per year with a 100.000€ bank deposit guarantee and instant liquidity (no lock-in), with interest being paid out monthly. Since March 2024 we’ve also been using the new Trade Republic card, since it gets us 1% saveback on all of our expenses up to 1.500€/month (so up to 15€ saveback each month). You can find more details, my comparison with Revolut and my experience with it so far here.

Cryptocurrencies

Here is where I’m currently buying my small portion of highly speculative investments, which mostly consist of Bitcoin and Ethereum:

  • Bitvavo – This exchange has become my favorite ever since 2023. Bitvavo is based in the Netherlands, has some of the lowest trading fees on crypto (0,15-0,25%) and most digital assets are stored at custodians (insured up to €755 million). Additionally, the exchange offers a unique account guarantee of up to 100.000€ per customer if someone else were to gain unauthorized access to your account and withdraw funds.
  • Bitpanda – A well-trusted exchange based in my home country Austria. Sadly fees are relatively high compared to Bitvavo, especially since Bitpanda Pro was removed.

I store most of my crypto offline using a hardware wallet instead of keeping it on an exchange. The Trezor Safe 3 is my favorite and the one I currently consider the most secure based on my experience with crypto since 2017. Since security is paramount, make sure you only order it directly from the official website and never buy one used!

Investment Tracking

  • Getquin – A free service I use to track the performance of my investments in ETFs.
  • Portfolio Performance – Another free tool I use to keep track of my investments. I wrote a guide a while back, which you can find here.

Extras

This part has nothing to do with my investments directly, but I figured it’s worth sharing as well.

Email & Privacy

  • Protonmail – I moved everything from Gmail to Proton last year and I couldn’t be happier with the switch. Emails are stored end-to-end encrypted and nobody except me is able to read what’s in my mailbox, not even employees at the company (unlike Google). I’m using the Proton Unlimited, which enables me to send and receive emails from three of my domains via Proton. You usually get the best deal by paying for 24 months in advance and switching the currency to USD. Proton also has an excellent VPN, which is included in my plan (just like Simplelogin Premium below).
  • Simplelogin – A fantastic email aliasing service, which I like to use in combination with my Protonmail account. Great for when you don’t want to hand out your real email address. Instead, you’re able to create up to 10 email aliases like company.newsletter@slmail.me, which then forward emails to your actual inbox. The best part: You can reply to those emails via your inbox, while keeping your actual email hidden from the recipient (they see it as being sent from company.newsletter@slmail.me). And you can easily delete any of your aliases whenever you want, to never receive emails from that source again. The free plan offers up to 10 active aliases, while you can create unlimited ones (+ use your own domains) via a paid plan. I’m using a paid plan currently. Note: Simplelogin was acquired by Proton, so the Premium plan is now included in some of Proton’s paid subscriptions (eg. my Proton Unlimited).

Encryption, 2FA, Password Manager

Watch this video of mine about the importance of securing your accounts, encryption and privacy first.

  • Bitwarden – The best password manager, hands down. It’s open source and offers everything you need in the free version.
  • Cryptomator – Free, open source tool to create encrypted drives (eg. on OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox), so that you can be 100% sure nobody else (not even the cloud provider’s employees) can access your files in the cloud.
  • YubiKey: The safest and my personal favorite two-factor authentication (2FA) method.

VPN

These are my three favorite VPNs. I currently have accounts to all of them, as I usually share my account with close friends and family members (bringing down the cost) and ProtonVPN was included at no extra cost in my Proton Unlimited subscription. You can see my detailed comparison and some of the reasons why you may want to use a VPN in the first place here.

  • Proton VPN – Open source, zero logs (audited), based in Switzerland, great at unblocking Netflix, excellent speeds, included in Proton Unlimited
  • Surfshark – Zero logs (audited), based in the Netherlands, decent at unblocking Netflix, excellent speeds, least expensive VPN on this list
  • Mullvad – Open source, zero logs (audited), based in Sweden, not a good option for Netflix, excellent speeds.

YouTube & Blogging

Every once in a while, someone reaches out to me to ask how they can start their own blog or YouTube channel. Here are the services I use:

  • WordPress – I use this free CMS for my blog.
  • NameHero – I moved my websites to NameHero in summer 2020 and I couldn’t be happier with the combination of speed, reliability and the quality of the support I received so far. I use the Plus Cloud Plan in the Netherlands (NL) Datacenter.
  • TubeBuddy – I use a TubeBuddy license and the Chrome extension to help manage my videos (and SEO) on YouTube.

Some of these are affiliate links, which help support me, the website & YouTube channel. I only link to services I use and am convinced of myself, none of the links are sponsored.