Lessons Learned

Broken Trust @ Savings4Freedom
The big mistakes that totally destroyed my entire savings prior to starting Savings4Freedom. First, trust in the wrong person and placing all my savings into a single asset class. Second, buying a car on credit.

2012 – Trust in the Wrong Person & All Eggs in the Same Basket

When I got my first pay-check, I immediately started saving a regular amount for the future. At the time I had no idea on how to invest and passively kept my savings in a simple savings account.

The economic instability of the 2008 financial crisis lead the gold price to jump from €550 per ounce of gold to more than €1,000 per ounce by 2010. At the time, I was sharing my life with a person with family relations to a Scrap Gold Business. This is a business that heavily relies on big volumes of cash and based on that opportunity, my partner started managing my savings and using them on a direct lending agreement with her family. Her family respected the deal, she did not. Based on my personal naivety, I never imagined that I was being robbed. I lost all my savings until 2012.

It was a very expensive mistake, but in the process, I got rid of a poisoned relationship and after found my wife and true love.


Car on Credit @ Savings4Freedom

2016 – Buying a Car on Credit

After 2012 I was broke, but happy. I met my wife and together we started saving money for our wedding. However, we had the need to buy a car. My old FIAT Punto was incapable of supporting long travels and we decided to find one. Worst than knowing that cars are a liability, was the need to purchase it with borrowed money. To lower risks, we decided to purchase a used car, and negotiated the monthly payment taking into account the projected total purchase price and our income. Paying the credit on the shortest time period possible was the main priority, but our savings suffered in a significant manner.

To complicate this equation, my old FIAT was stolen at the end of 2017. But instead of repeating the same mistake, I was able to find a cheap used car capable of answering my needs and keeping consumption, maintenance and insurance costs low.


Ponzi Scheme @ Savings4Freedom

2019 – P2P Ponzi Schemes: Kuetzal & Envestio + Monethera & Grupeer

In 2018 I started an organized effort towards saving & investing. Peer-to-peer lending appeared to be the most easy and simple manner to earn interest from my savings. After one year of concentrated investments in two main platforms, Mintos and Viventor, I decided to change my investment strategy towards business lending. Among my platforms choices were frauds: Envestio and Kuetzal (January 2020) + Monethera and Grupeer (March 2020).

Looking back, the red flags of Kuetzal were visible in such a manner that were hard to miss, but I was too greedy and fell for the most stupid explanations that were presented to me in person during the 2019 P2P Conference in Riga. Also Envestio, with a perfect payment performance for such a long period of time was too good to be true.

By the end of 2019 shit hit the fan. The majority of the operations performed by these P2P platforms was fraudulent and thousands of investors (myself included) lost their savings. I decided to join a group of investors of both platforms that are currently trying to recover part of the funds, but I don’t have illusions and only seek justice for the people responsible for these frauds.