My journey into the world of financial investments started in October 2018, when I fully paid off my credit loan. I wanted to start gaining some way of making money passively, but I did not want to feel guilty that I am taking money from my account and probably throwing it into something that will not make money. Since I was never thought that I should leave a portion of my income and place it into an investment account, I needed something that would help me shift my mindset. Then I decided to change the way I act during lunchtime at work and when going out.

The first steps I did was to calculate how much I was spending on lunch, this was quite a simple calculation. Two days a week I go to a vegetarian place and spend there from 7-9 euros, Fridays I usually eat Chinese food which costs 7 Euros the other two days I buy things in a supermarket where I spend 6 Euros on my food. In total that makes on average 35 Euros per week on work lunch, that is 140 Euros per month. I took 40 Euros and spread it on my groceries and bough additional rice, veggies, and fruits. This meant that now I would be bringing my lunch to work, but I would have 100 Euros to invest in something.

Then I thought that I could use this strategy on one other aspect of my life and that is going out with friends. Going out with friends is a great part of my life, but I wanted to find a way how to reduce my expenses and at the same time improve the quality of my time with friends. My first and only success was to replace a Friday of going out with either a quiet drink and dinner at someone’s place, which reduced the costs of going out by a lot. Now instead of going out and staying out until 4 or 5 in the morning and spending 50-100 Euros on things that destroy your body and make the next day a living hell, we were having interesting conversations and learning new cooking skills. This saved me an extra 50-60 Euros a week.

Now my total monthly savings were 100 Euros from lunch and let us say an average of 180 Euros from going out, which is a total of 280 Euros. The important thing is that I did not reduce my quality of life I was eating healthier and the drinks and dinner event improved my relationships with friends.

Then came the moment when I needed to put my money somewhere and I had no idea what to do because all the investing sites or blogs that I visited were made for the American market. This is the moment when I decided to go with the first thing that provided a sign-up bonus and low fees. This is where I discovered eToro, they were offering a $100 bonus for new members that invest $200. The fee model is a bit more complicated and you can read about that in my blog post. But I liked eToro because it offered the social trading aspect, where you trust in a person who performed well over the years and you copy his actions. After some time I found a cool person and I invested my first 300 Euros. At the end of 2018, I gained a whopping 5.19 Euro in 2 months. Keep in mind the amount of time I invested was 2-3 days of investigation on who has a good rating on eToro.

This eToro journey turned into my diversification on P2P platforms like Bondora and Mintos, crypto investments into crypto.com (Use my referral LINK to sign up for Crypto.com and we both get $50 USD :)) and me reading a lot of books on how to invest. You can find links to books in my book section. I am at the end of my one-year investments journey, starting from 300 Euros invested in eToro and fearing every day what is going to happen, I have reached a goal where I have a small portfolio of stocks on my eToro platform and 1000 Euros invested in P2P platforms and 500 Euros invested in crypto.com.

The message of this post would be that if you change the smallest things in your daily routine you can reach a level where you can invest your extra cash into something that really can make your life easier in the long run.