I am reviving this thread to ask similar question tuned for my particular case: I just graduated and decided to stay in research (PhD) and move to another European (EU) country. I do have some savings as well as (moderate) income and I project I could hit the 100’000 USD mark in about ~3-4 years (if following 1), see below). Being still de-facto a student, my needs are relatively modest and nobody depends on me. I am well informed on the general investment strategy throughout this forum and agree with it. I am not interested in FIRE, but being still quite young and having some extra savings, I am considering how put them to work and have compound interest work for me the longest.
My questions are:
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If I invest for long term, should I invest at Degiro or IB? So far I looked almost chiefly into US domiciled, USD based ETFs (sth like this). Although IB would incur higher fees (inactivity below 0.1M mark), I would run up some extra costs in currency conversions at Degiro and overall I the differences over the few years would not matter much. Ultimately, I reason IB is the best choice (wider selection, lower fees, forex), but it may be worth considering to start with Degiro and transfer later (which would again come at costs, but would be a natural opportunity to diversify also between brokers).
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Shouldn’t I invest for short-term instead? Due to some aspects of my job (mainly the need to move around few times) I cannot predict when and where I would be settling. I approximate that this would be in about 7-10 years. At this point, I am not hugely inclined towards buying a property at that time and it may not even be a wise idea, but it will certainly be an decision I will revisit once its conditions become more concrete. It is possible that buying a property would be a financially sound decision at that time and if I decide to start investing long-term now, I will limit the sum I would be able to use as down-payment (mortgage would be anyway necessary) at the time of property-purchase. I estimate that following 1), I will cut my disposable funds to about half (assuming I do not withdraw from 1) and hopefully still allowing 15-20% of property buying price). I have an option to put my money to 6-yrs government bonds with inflation-adjusted (= inflation rate + 0.5%; expected around 2.5 %) interest. Which would be low-yield, low-risk alternative to what I described in point 1 and even would allow me to pull out the money once-a-year and at no charges. Although low-yield, I am wondering whether this option may not be a good idea also due to the fact that following 1), I may be jumping in relatively high-up the curve (but this is purely speculative and as I aim for long term, this should not matter anyway).
Please do not hesitate to ask me any questions, should you have any!
Thanks for your input.