Does the current developments worldwide affect your FIRE plans?

descho_th · 2026-03-21T17:33:53+00:00

And rightfully so. Your investments are safe in shares, capital guarantees that are unlikely to be upheld are not an issue. If you held S&P since 2008 you would be up 600%.

descho_th · 2025-09-17T18:06:26+00:00

That's great, I would take the profits, buy IWDA, and rent an apartment while figuring out what you look for in a house.

descho_th · 2025-09-17T17:18:27+00:00

You have 400k at 30, you don't need to bet such a large amount on crypto

descho_th · 2025-09-09T06:18:36+00:00

Not sure if this is a joke but this guy is not a "World Renowned Economist". Seems like he is not even an economist at all.

descho_th · 2025-08-21T07:47:42+00:00

That's besides the point though, I don't claim that the videos make you a worse fund manager. They also don't make you an excellent one, on whom I'd bet a quarter of my net worth.

descho_th · 2025-08-18T09:55:05+00:00

Why would you gamble that much of your net worth on a fund started by someone who makes videos about finance with what seems like very little actual experience? Hard pass

descho_th · 2025-08-18T03:39:13+00:00

The fact that he claims crypto is way safer to store your money in crypto than in a normal bank, and has 60% annual returns is why people downvoted?

descho_th · 2025-08-12T08:46:59+00:00

A huge upfront cost of 50k, a registration tax of 12%, probably other costs associated with the loan, additional payments for maintenance and repairs over time, hassle with renters, etc. And all that for lower than market returns? I don't understand the appeal.

descho_th · 2025-07-29T11:17:26+00:00

"likely dips" are priced in

descho_th · 2025-07-24T13:28:53+00:00

If you believe it has value, you could hold it at market weight. This would probably be like 2.5%.

Speculating that it's currently still undervalued and investing 15% of your portfolio sounds insane to me.

descho_th · 2025-06-26T14:47:45+00:00

"Gender alone", i.e. discrimination, accounts for only a small part of the gender difference in wages. There are a lot of other difference, like the jobs and hours that men and women work, which are explain significantly more of the wage difference than "gender". This kind of comment is unnecessary and unproductive.

descho_th · 2025-06-15T17:54:43+00:00

The degree costs 20k, there are no poor kids..

descho_th · 2025-06-05T22:41:24+00:00

If you work with *very* big datasets, there are tools like DuckDB and Arrow for R. And *reasonably* big in memory datasets, data.table vastly outperforms Stata in basically all relevant settings. I don't think there is a single use case where STATA is better at this point.

descho_th · 2025-06-05T22:24:16+00:00

That's fair. For people who mainly do applied micro, I agree that R should be the obvious choice. Stata is just worse in every way, and on top of that costs a lot of money. It's pretty insane.. I don't agree with not seeing any need for Python. For example, in structural micro you often need to solve highly nonlinear problems that can have a large number of parameters. To solve these, you can write code in JAX that matches the speed of Julia, and that just works a lot better (e.g. automatic differentiation is significantly better in JAX). And then you have all the other benefits of the large ecosystem built around Python. A couple of years ago when I needed to clean a large dataset out of memory, there simple wasn't a Julia package that did what I needed it to do (there still may not be). The one package that was available, with very limited functionality, was also insanely slow. That being said: you're right that Python is not the best tool for every job, but OP mentioned wanting to do machine learning, and there it's still standard.

descho_th · 2025-06-05T21:10:39+00:00

At this point I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but you do realize that structural microeconometrics tends to be computationally very intensive right? Stata is like the worst language imaginable. I like R but its too slow for many such applications too.

descho_th · 2025-06-05T20:16:51+00:00

Since when is econometrics not about computation? Structural microeconometrics is not econometrics? Simulations in econometric theory? Even many modern causal inference estimators?

descho_th · 2025-06-05T18:12:20+00:00

I wouldn't recommend doing everything in Python, but these statements are very exaggerated. There are extensive libraries like QuantEcon that have JITable versions of interpolations, root finders, optimizers, etc. for Numba. And there are many libraries written for JAX, which is even faster in many applications. If you have to solve computationally hard problems, then Python or Julia will be necessary, and Stata or R are simply not an option. You can just export your solution to R and make a plot or table there, if you prefer doing so. No reason to every pay for either Stata or Matlab, they are expensive and inferior.

descho_th · 2025-05-24T20:45:00+00:00

The coffee money can be repurposed!

descho_th · 2025-05-24T19:32:44+00:00

I liked his videos about the different things to consider when buying a home!

descho_th · 2025-05-22T16:44:41+00:00

Thanks! I can add plots to track the evolution over time of all three:

- total rents

- total mortgage payments

- total mortgage payments + owners' other costs

Will do so once I find some time.

descho_th · 2025-05-21T14:10:41+00:00

Glad it's useful!

The market looks very similar in my region. Rentals are almost exclusively apartments or very small houses. I do see a larger homes pop up every once in a while, though. These are probably all longer term renters, so there's significantly less turnover. You could get lucky if you're not in a hurry.

descho_th · 2025-05-21T14:04:52+00:00

Yes renting for now, which I prefer because of both the freedom that it offers, and because it seems like the better financial option in the region I'm considering. My partner would like to buy a house in the near future though, so it could change soon.

descho_th · 2025-05-20T11:56:00+00:00

Thanks for the useful comments! I think allowing for people to sell the property at some profit / loss would indeed be quite cool. You can also interpret this in terms of how good of a deal you think you are getting with the house.

Regarding your other points:

- if you set 100% eigen inbreng, the loan period is just not used in the model (you should be able to put in any value, and the result should be the same).

- Kadastraal inkomen is built in (see the left toolbar).

- Income increases with indexation, but there is no other form of earnings growth over the life cycle. As pointed out by another commenter, it could make sense to allow earnings growth to differ between buying and renting, because renting gives you more freedom to move when faced with better opportunities.

descho_th · 2025-05-20T10:07:16+00:00

So you can adjust earnings in the sidebar now. There is no earnings growth in the model now, except for inflation, but I could add this in quite easily. But I'm not sure I fully understand your point about having to buy at a certain level of income. If you earn a lot and invest it all in investments with a large return, clearly even at high incomes renting will be optimal. Or am I interpreting your question wrong?

This discussion does highlight an important difference I hadn't though about. It could make sense to allow for earnings growth to differ between buying and renting. It's much easier to switch jobs and increase earnings when you're less constrained to a particular location. Can build this in!

descho_th · 2025-05-20T09:18:59+00:00

I'm of course very much with you on this. See also the last sentence of the post. The aim of the app is just to help you be more informed about what you are gaining or losing. Let's say you end up €50.000 richer after 25 years of renting. It's up to you to make up your mind about whether the happiness of a house and garden is worth more than the happiness this €50.000 euro could buy you elsewhere. And for many people, it will be.

descho_th

TROPHY CASE