Hey Friends,

It has been some time! Today I want to share:
- Housing & Investing Situation in Denmark - Hot Takes for 2023
- My Favorite Things of 2023 So Far
- Some Perspectives

🏡 Update - Housing & Investing in Denmark

It wasn’t a “bloodbath”, but property prices in Denmark had a significant drop the second half of 2022. Moving into summer, it appears that prices have found a floor and - even - that they started to rise again:

(The above is apartments in Copenhagen, but you can see a similar trend in other parts of Denmark and for e.g., houses as well.)

This is interesting as interest rates remain high (and are expected to remain high in the short term) and because there are still a ton of properties up for sale in the market.

When I talk with people in-the-know, their views are:

- It appears that some people had postponed buying for a year or six months, but now just felt they needed to pull the trigger - and hence we see demand proving resilient.
- There are still the new property taxes kicking in in 2024, and people in the cities want to buy before they’re implemented. (There’s a ton of coverage in the Danish press on how even like just a few months away from implementation most people haven’t received indications or overviews on how much these taxes are going to be. It’s a mess.)

If you’re planning to buy now, in my view the time is still ripe for negotiation. Don’t get “married” to just one property, but get 2-3 you like and then negotiate hard.

ALSO - I just launched “Dream Home Denmark”, a new toolkit that combines my most popular material from the past years (cost models, mortgages deep dive) with a ton of new content as case studies (houses, apartments, rækkehuser) and actionable negotiation tools.

My Latest "Save Money in Denmark" Video:

Investing or Paying Back the Mortgage?

We’ve - so, me and my wife - paid up only 20% of our mortgage. We took an interest-only loan and then only paid the (very low) interest until now. This worked for us as we:
- Ended up with low fixed costs, and
- Had ample free cash flow to invest in whatever we wanted

Now, the context has changed a little bit:
- For Reference: we’ve a complex setup - with two mortgages: one fixed interest, and one with variable interest. (This is not common.)
- The interest on the variable loan went up from like ~0% to ~2%, and we now pay more on that. It’s not a ton (esp. after the tax deduction) but it’s also not nothing.
- The kurs on our fixed interest loan has become very competitive, which means that if we owe, say, 1.4m kr, we could cancel the loan with just 1m kr or so.
- (If this sounds crazy to you, I explain the setup in Dream Home Denmark and else in some of my YouTube videos.)

This in a context where our investments in 2022 lost money. (2022 was terrible for almost any type of investing.)

So, I’m toying with the idea of: should we pay back our mortgage? (Meaning: do a big one-off payment of ~50% of the total mortgage outstanding).

I’m just “thinking out loud here” - no solutions for now, but these are the factors that come to mind:
- If we use the “kurs” advantage, we’ll shave a good chunk of our loan away and end up with very low costs at home.
​
BUT:
- That would demand us to close most of our investments. (Not all - I don’t think closing a max-ed out Aktiesparekonto is a good idea in almost any situation).
- We would end up with a big majority of our net worth in just one asset (our house), with all the risks that come from that.
- 2023 could be a good year for investing: because the market has recovered, and because of the shenanigans of Denmark’s ridiculous investing taxation we’re all but sure to have more cash in hand by keeping the money in the markets.

So … I don’t know. If you have thoughts or ideas in a situation like this, let me know what you think. I’m not in a rush either way, and I’m grateful that I’ve the option to even think about these things 😊.

My Exact Expenses for 2022:

❤️ Favorite Things in 2023 So Far

ChatGPT and GPT-4 APIs. I don’t need to tell you about ChatGPT, but some things that I found incredibly exciting are:
- You can train “ChatGPT” with your own data. For example, I use Obsidian for note-taking and trained the model basis all my notes: my journals, past videos and newsletters, all my book highlights, etc. This is wild as I can now tell GPT to write a script or a newsletter in my style and drawing from my own thousands of notes. It’s wild stuff. (This all built into Obsidian itself via a plugin).

I also pay for the ChatGPT Plus ($20) option. It gives you unlimited access to the newest model (GPT-4) and (soon) plugins e.g., use ChatGPT on the web.

​MidJourney. MidJourney is an image-generation AI, and it’s also incredible. I’ve been meaning to create a fantasy world for like forever, and had so much fun sketching ideas with the (ultra-fast) tool, like this take on a city half in the underdark:

​Readwise Reader. I love Readwise as a database for my book highlights, and been using their new app Reader for close to a year now. It keeps getting better: it’s the ultimate reading experience for books, newsletters, PDFs, and even YouTube videos (!). They even included GPT via a “GhostReader”: you can ask the AI to summarize the main points of basically anything you’re reading (and much more). Strongly suggested you check it out. I’ll make a video about it soon.

​Duolingo. I’m trying to revive my Japanese (I used to be good, but was painfully bad - or, even, non-existent - last time I was Japan) and picked up Duolingo as a quick solution. I’m impressed by how well designed the app is: the bite-sized lessons, the whole gamification piece of it, the social angle. I’ve now a 100+ day streak and a noticeable improvement in Japanese.
- I still believe that making and studying heavily your own Anki cards is a superior way of studying, but for a side-project like Japanese is for me, this works.
- The “hearts system” sucks (it’s a money grab), but found a loophole: you can get most of the “Duolingo Super/Premium” benefits for free if you open a “Classroom Account”. It takes five minutes and then you’re good: no ads, unlimited hearts, unlimited legendary - all free.
- If you want, you can add me as a friend: @Mario723473

I’ve also been reading a lot (in Readwise Reader, lol), and I took almost 200 notes in Peter Attia’s new book on longevity Outlive. The gist is: if you think you’re healthy (eating well, good sleep, in good work out shape), Attia makes it clear that you probably need to do a lot more 😝. Just one concrete point:

📚 Perspective

I set the goal of writing one newsletter a month this year, and … Oops.

But, behind the scenes, things have been quite good:
- I think I’ve a solid plan for the year, and trying my best to execute the top priorities.
- I just launched Dream Home Denmark and updated all my "real estate email course" last week.
- Next up I’m almost done sketching a new free email course on "part time entrepreneurship" (in Denmark). If that sounds like your cup of tea, you can click here and I'll start sharing next week. (The link will only take you to a YouTube video for now).
- Then, of course, managed a bit of traveling - including Seychelles (#137) with the family and Bangladesh (#138) on my own and my first visit to Buenos Aires since 2019. Coming up, thinking of either cruising Alaska or Greenland over summer. We’ll see.
- It’s of course harder to execute with two kids vs. just one, full-time job and everything - but managing so far so good 😀

How are you doing? What is your favorite thing of 2023 so far?

Thank you for reading,

Mario