Hi everyone,
I wanted to start early to build something for the future of my two godchildren. So I invested €25 a month in each of Union Investment’s ESG funds—solid, straightforward, and at the time it seemed like the best solution because I couldn’t find any suitable ETF alternatives. “Buy and hold” was the motto: driver’s license, first car, first apartment… none of that exactly gets any cheaper. At least it was convenient that Union Investment automatically reinvested the returns without an upfront sales charge.
But then everything changed suddenly.
Privately, we bought two condos to rent out—and suddenly there was immediate liquidity became the most important issue of all. The mortgage hadn’t been registered yet, so we had to cover the €6,500 in real estate agent fees ourselves. And it’s precisely at moments like this that you realize how long money transfers can take: With Scalable Capital, a withdrawal can easily take one to two banking days compared to Trade Republic. Fortunately, the real estate agent was accommodating and extended the deadline.
That’s when it dawned on me: a situation like this could also arise for my godchildren someday. Selling a fund simply takes two to four banking days. And when you need to act fast, that’s a problem.
That’s why I decided to change the structure—to $VWRL (+0,63 %) and $XSX7 (+0,39 %), possibly supplemented by $O (-0,4 %) and $MAIN (+0,79 %). Dividends currently yield about 2.25%. The return might not be 100% identical, but the flexibility is simply worth its weight in gold in an emergency. And if there’s too much cash sitting around later on, interest and dividends can still be reinvested or used for rebalancing.