Welcome to the Portfolio update of April 2022. Increased the side-income stream to 2.9k CHF and got another call from the jewelry store. Also our net worth increased by 90k CHF.
Personal update
Due to construction work in the office March was another work from home month. Fortunately we had a nice company retreat in Davos in the middle of March. We’ve stayed at the Hardrock Hotel which had a very nice Spa area. Snow excursions and drinks with coworkers were also a very nice alternative to the sad work from home setup.
During the drive up to Davos I’ve got a call from my trusted jewelry store that my Rolex Submariner is ready for pickup. There was just a little problem, since I’m heavily invested I was somewhat short on cash. I however found a solution and tried out the IBKR margin loans. Funneled 10k CHF out of the portfolio for 5 days until the bonus from my previous startup gig arrived.
Using that same bonus I’ve upgraded my crypto.com credit card to the Icy White tier (that means 5% cashback on all purchases) by investing 25k CHF more money (I’ve already invested 3.5k EUR which appreciated to ~10k EUR since September last year). I then immediately used that increased cashback to buy the Rolex which gave me a nice 480 CHF cashback. The rest of the bonus went to the repayment of the margin loan and some new computer parts for my gaming rig.
In middle of March my brother in law arrived and stayed for 12 days. And we tried to show him around Switzerland as good as possible. The Grocery and Food expenses were therefore a little increased.
I’ve also moved my incoming salary payments to the new bank to optimize the banking costs a little.
After the great returns of the Polkadot/Kusama validators I’ve decided to spin up another one and optimize both as good as possible. A financially worthwhile decision, netting an extra 2’925 CHF on the side. I will however need to start paying additional taxes on that income (and social security money etc.)
Savings Rate: March 2022
Cash flow: March 2022
Total Income: 59’043 CHF (+45’555 CHF vs. February) – Regular salary plus ~44k CHF bonus from last job, plus 517 CHF in dividends plus 726 CHF from a sold home cinema system plus the previously mentioned 2’925 CHF in crypto from the validators.
Total Expenses: 13’039 CHF (+8’650 CHF vs. February) (excl. the Rolex Submariner which shows up in the assets) – It’s easy to life style inflate with the income. With the guest we spent an extraordinary amount on food/groceries (3’500 CHF combined) and 4’097 CHF in new electronics is also not something usual (new home cinema system Sennheiser Ambeo soundbar & new computer components (well basically everything except for a new GPU)). Then 2k CHF in maintenance payments and almost 400 CHF for train tickets (incl. renewing of the half fare card for my wife – 165 CHF).
Savings Rate: 77.46% (+10.46% vs. February) – Kind of easy with an income like this.
Net Worth: 1.1M CHF (+110k CHF vs. February) – Stock market and cryptos recovered very well towards the end of March and gave a nice net worth boost.
Stock Portfolio
Stock Portfolio value: 264’017 CHF (+12’477 CHF vs. February)
| Stock Symbol | # Shares | Current price | Unrealized P/L |
| VT | 1708 | 101.29 USD | 20’792 USD |
| ARKK | 364 | 66.29 USD | -16’783 USD |
| AVUV | 552.72 | 79.86 USD | 3’990 USD |
| AVDV | 436.51 | 62.58 USD | -96 USD |
| ABBA | 48 | 21.28 CHF | 534 USD |
| Fundsmith T Acc Mutual Fund | 721 | 5.52 CHF | -543 USD |
| Total | 4480 | N/A | 7’361 USD |
I fixed the Fundsmith accounting. I’ve invested another 5’000 CHF in the stock market this month and will invest 4k USD in Penny stocks of mining companies.
Crypto HODL Portfolio
Current HODL portfolio value: 332’935.76 CHF (~6.2 BTC / 105+ KSM / 238 DOT / 92100 CRO) (+90’350 CHF vs. February)
Easily the biggest contributor to get us back in the CHF net worth millionaire club. Cryptos went up significantly starting around 20th of March. Nice!
Crypto Gambling Portfolio
Gains/Losses this month: +1’319 CHF
I’ll just post my Binance portfolio picture here:
I’ve traded 1 or two coins and left some spare change (~500 CHF) on the account while I was funneling thru the 44k CHF bonus.
P2P Portfolio
I will remove the P2P Portfolio section completely next month, eventually writing off the remaining portfolio of 16k EUR. While I found some profitable platforms the gains there are silly compared to the crypto space.
Noteworthy updates:
I liquidated a total of 204 EUR of my P2P Portfolio in March.
Blog statistics
Views: 1015 (-77 vs. February) somewhat small decline, that’s ok
Visitors: 421 (+15 vs. February) I rather have an increase of unique visitors than page views.
Followers: 47 (+2 vs. February) two new subscribers 🙂 Very nice.
I posted 1 blog post in March, the monthly update. If you have ideas or are interested in more details let me know in the comments.
That’s it for this month. Like last month let me know if you like the style and the ordering of topics.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave a message below or contact me by email. I try to answer all comments and emails.
Thank you for the blogpost – as always an interesting read!
How much time and experience do you need to spin up a e.g. DOT validator?
It’s less complicated than I thought but I do have almost 20 years of Sysadmin experience so YMMV. I just rented a new box at Hetzner and I’m running the node software in Docker. Search for polkadot-ansible on Github that’s what I used to setup mine. The polkadot.js.org account setup was a bit more complicated. For KSM one needs 10-50 KSM as a self-bond and for DOT technically 5000 DOT however I got in thru community contributions with only 10 DOT self-stake.
The ecosystem has a programm called thousand validators which helps new node operators to become nominated.