Very important questions indeed.
But thank you for your feedback, I will give it a try. Any reason why you need a 2nd broker?
FYI MoustachianPost is working on a very detailed step by step guide on how to use IB, so maybe you want to wait for that to come out before deciding for a different broker 
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Good question. I am asking it myself. I just want to know the best practice of people who already have a bit more saved than me. Let’s take it further: is it perfectly save to keep 1 million USD in VT at IB, if this is all your wealth? Are there any risks? Intuition tells me there could be some potential problems, with a very low probability: broker gets hacked, your account gets hacked, broker goes bankrupt and it takes many months until your assets are unlocked. I just don’t know what really rich people do, how they protect their assets.
Jesus, forget it, forget the Java app. You can do everything in WebTrader, including FX exchange.
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I just searched the forum for “webtrader”, this is the first result, my post from Sept 2017 with screenshots. Read on a few of these posts, you will also find a step by step guide to FX exchange.
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Sounds good.
Is there a sexy way of displaying your assets?
The WebTrader doesn’t do FX, it just lets you buy currencies on the Market which then take 2 days to get settled. (Or at least I haven’t found a way.) And it always adds those weird virtual positions.
It’s much easier to do everything from the User Portal where you can also manage your account data (the “white” modern page). Also FX only takes a couple of minutes there.
WebTrader is better to initially find the ETFs you want to buy. There’s a text search on the top right somewhere, which shows exact details of the ETF you searched (not just some short tracker symbol). Then you can add them to your watch list and switch back to the user portal.
I meant that you can exchange currencies with WebTrader, with a live exchange rate, maybe that’s not a fully fledged FX platform, but it’s enough for most of us.
IB’s venue for executing Forex trades, referred to as IdealPro, operates as an exchange-style order book, assembling quotes from the largest international Forex banks as well as other IB clients and market makers.
With WebTrader you have access to IdealPro, so I would say that you can indeed execute Forex trades. Settlement of 2 days is something that is also standard for stock trades. If you want to instantly trade then you need the margin account. But I had the impression that we are all just buy and hold simple investors here?
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But IB has a decent FX platform. You just have to login in the other view instead of WebTrader. That’s what I was trying to point out, since it’s easy to miss that on the account management page there’s a much simpler and better trading interface.
Yes your assets are displayed very nicely. Nice smooth modern graphs with the growth over time.
There’s even a portfolio analyzer that shows you what sectors and stuff you have in there, and compares your performance to the indices you want. It even creates professional looking portfolio performance documents, as if you were some big hedgefund manager. 
The reporting possibilities are also great. It lets you choose every time period you need, lists all your assets, all your trades, your profits over time, … everything you could possibly ever need for archival or tax purposes.
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Well… I’ve been reading people around and I did a test between Revolut and Transferwise.
I have a “real” US account in Transferwise, Routing number, account…etc… not IBAN.
I sent money from Revolut (50 US$) to my account in transferwise using the routing and number (as indicated by TD if you have an US account, not the international wires) and worked perfectly.
I sent 50, I received 50 without any commision or fees.
I suppose will work the same with TD… to be verified as soon as I have the account opened in TD.
I have been using them as my main banking account for almost 10 years now and never had any problem. Opened up a Depot some years ago, but never started using it as I am using onvista-bank.de for that because of slightly better pricing until recently.
If I would start now, I would probably use dkb.de, as their Sparplan for 1.50 EUR is now one of the cheapest I know of (independent of amount of Sparplan in contrast to onvista), and also 10 EUR for a normal order is okay.
IB is for sure better if you buy US-ETFs, but as far as I know IE-ETFs are not that cheap there as well, so I am still with a german broker. 
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Is tax wise everything also ok? I.e. not that the broker automatically pays German taxes or something.
When I officially moved out of Germany, I just got a form that I do not live there anymore, gave it to the banks and since then there are no taxes deducted, neither on interest (DKB), nor on capital gains, dividends etc (onvista). If you never lived in Germany before, that should be even less of a problem.
Why?
There is an entire thread (or rather, multiple of them) dedicated to show how the IB user experience is indeed not as taxing as some want to paint it.
And yes there are already “step by step” guides on this same forum, no need for another one.
Maybe the admins could just extract the relevant posts into one topic and lock it for further posts (until something else useful comes up).
Yes, Google sheets for one 
Jokes aside - IB does have portfolio views and reports which are decent, yes.
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Damn that looks awesome. Care to share your file?
The admin is MP, who is not active on the forum. Plus there are two moderators: @Julianek & me. We did create a wiki section at some point, some threads are enabled for everybody to edit. But of course it is a community effort to build a sensible FAQ etc. If we were all a bit more disciplined, we could link to useful posts each time they pop up. But in the end it takes some curation and editing to make something easily accessible for a newcomer. If you can do the search through the forum and make a guide, that would be great.
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Absolutely, happy to share!
Feel free to copy the doc from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ifBr45rDuNe1WZHaM647s6pa-Iw5N_-mbVR8fo5CSNA/copy
Few notes:
- Data is dummy
- You need to add your personal entries to: columns B, D, F, K (or A too if you have more platforms); cells M22, N18:N20
- Tab 2 contains your transactions to/from IB - I use it to calculate “absolute” (paid in vs. current state) gain in CHF in column M (as opposed to converting the USD gain)
- Tab 3 filters just for the ETFs, in order to build the ETF geography chart easily
- VIAC proportions in column N I copy over directly from VIAC app from time to time
Shoot if any further questions. 
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Yeah but Revolut have a monthly limit.