FIRE'd after bootstrapping and selling a tech company.

In 2012 my software business was doing well enough that I could buy a home outright. I was very proud to own a place and enjoyed remodeling it exactly how I wanted.

14 years later, after changing homes every three years, I am happily paying rent again.

Renting would have been the better option the whole time, and I couldn't see it.

• Prices are at an all-time high now. Combined with high mortgage rates, renting is likely the better financial decision right now. I would rather hold liquid assets and wait for a downturn than buy at the top. Buffett is sitting on cash on the sidelines and I am doing a much smaller version of the same

FIRE'd 8 years ago after bootstrapping a tech company and selling it. My wife and I moved from Austria to Portugal a few years ago for the ocean.

I like to plan ahead of time, so I worked with an advisor to see what our move between EU countries meant for me. I thought this would be a no-brainer, and tax-efficient between two EU countries. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Exit tax

I knew that there would be an exit tax, but I was shocked by their new findings. All unrealized gains at the time of our move would be owed to Austria. Based on an EU law, I could delay the owed taxes until I sold them in Portugal.

Unbelievable, but Portugal would not take those taxes into account, as it h

As a perfectionist, I struggled to finish products. As it turned out, garbage for me was not a bad product for users.

I always found something that needed to be done. A nice button icon was missing. A new bug made it impossible to hit publish.

Annoyingly, I saw indie hackers pushing out products at lightning speed. I didn't like the products that they were releasing though. I thought they were never gonna be successful. Oftentimes the first replies on their initial launch were bug reports.

As I learned over the years, by not shipping, and not taking part in the game of finding users, I made the biggest mistake of all.

I started to push myself and release earlier and earlier. It was diff

I have been interested in investing for a while now. But I owe a lot of the progress I've made to these people:

**Charles Ellis ** (Winning the Loser's Game)

The comparison of tennis to the game of investing really stuck with me. In professional tennis, the winner is the one with the winning shots. In amateur tennis, the winner is the one who makes fewer mistakes and returns the balls. So I learned that, as an amateur investor, the goal is to minimize costs, taxes, and fees. I learned that index funds are the game that I should be playing.

Benjamin Graham

Warren Buffett studied Benjamin Graham's books and was later a student of his as well. I learned a lot about Mr. Market

I have been investing in ETFs and stocks since 2015 and manage my portfolio myself. I live off the capital growth and dividends, so it is important for me to be mentally prepared for a recession. That is why I have studied more than 20 investment books in the last 10 years.

Stock market valuations are at an all-time high right now. Warren Buffett is holding record-high cash reserves. Many top investors argue that the market is at a record high, and some predict a crash soon. No one really knows when, or if, a crash is coming — so what should you do?

I set myself a stock allocation target of 50–60%. My stock portion consists mainly of an MSCI World ETF, an MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, and som

Over the last 20 years, I built a habit of reading books.

I read over 115 books in the last 10 years, and 16 new books last year alone.

A big part of my personal growth came from building knowledge through books and actually practicing what I learned.

When I started my company from the living room with my dad in 2006, I needed to build a lot of knowledge fast.

Whenever I needed to learn about a technical or business topic, I grabbed a book and tried to put it into practice.

That is how the habit started for me.

Why I like reading books

• Distraction-free focus on one topic
• Deep, condensed knowledge from someone who spent years, sometimes decades, thinking about a subject
• Blue li