Sometimes Your 25-Year-Old Self Deserves a Stern Talking-To

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

We’ve put the absolute most focus on our private investments over the years, which has come at the expense of properly reviewing our work pensions.

Now that our private portfolio is more up to date, we’ve finally started looking at these as well. We’ve been dealing with them in order of size and maturity, leaving me with just one small remaining policy — just over 90,000 SEK.

Today I logged in to review the holdings and possibly make some changes. Instead, I found myself staring at something completely unexpected.

Apparently, in 1995, at the tender age of 25, I took out a traditional pension insurance with SEB Trygg Liv. I managed to pay in just over 30,000 SEK before I wised up and switched to a different solution less than three years later.

That 30,000 SEK has now, after 30 years, grown by roughly 200%.

A banker at SEB tried to tell me that SEB Trygg Liv has delivered “over 10% return since 2015.” Given that the Swedish stock market has done around 11% per year in the same period, I found that statement… optimistic. But I chose not to argue with her. An individual banker shouldn’t have to take the blame for my 25-year-old self’s terrible financial decisions.

This whole episode just confirms my long-standing thesis:

No one will ever care about your money as much as you do. — Liza Dewlar

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Per Bolund and the Northvolt Scandal: No One Wants Accountability

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

Per Bolund’s gentle questioning in the KU — and the media’s subsequent light tap on the wrist — didn’t even come close to reflecting the massive damage he inflicted on future Swedish pension savers.

During his time as Minister for Financial Markets, Bolund actively changed the regulatory framework for the AP funds to prioritize “green” investments. He then sent clear political signals to the funds, after which they created a special joint investment vehicle (4 to 1 Investments) specifically designed to circumvent the ban on direct investments in unlisted companies. Through this construction, the AP1–AP7 funds invested approximately SEK 6 billion of pension capital into Northvolt. (Source: Joint statement from the AP funds regarding the investment in Northvolt)

Now Northvolt is bankrupt, and Swedish pension savers are left with massive losses. (Source: AP Funds comment on Northvolt bankruptcy)

When will politicians actually be held accountable for their decisions?

Do all politicians have their hands in the same cookie jar since no one really calls this out?

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Let’s Give Them Exactly What They Say They Want

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

For years the media and the political Left have worked hard to divide us into “us and them” — by skin color, gender, identity, and grievance.

Fine. Let’s take them at their word.

Elon Musk should create a new sovereign city-state or special economic zone where the only entrance exam is proven competence. Skin color, gender, or background is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver results. No DEI. No quotas. No sacred cows.

A training camp for civilization before we become multi-planetary.

The Government

  • Chief Executor: Elon Musk
  • Economy: Javier Milei
  • Technology & Energy: Elon Musk
  • Innovation: Peter Thiel
  • Foreign Policy & Defense: Tulsi Gabbard
  • Education: Jordan B. Peterson
  • Healthcare: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

I, and millions of other exhausted, logically minded, hard-working people, would move there in a heartbeat.

And let the Left keep the rest. They can finally build the equitable society they’ve always dreamed of — without all those awful competent, high-achieving people ruining it for them.

Win-win.

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The World’s Most Perfect Teenager’s Last IB Exam Went “So and So”

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

Which, in teenage language, apparently means he “bombed”.

I’m still not fluent in teenager, but I’ve learned the most important phrases the hard way.

I do understand the immense pressure these kids are under. One preparatory year + two intense years of study all condensed into 13 exams that will determine their final IB Diploma result.

Both my husband and I went to what was then considered one of the best municipal schools in the world. Since then, the pendulum has swung from the era of our parents — where physical punishment was routine — all the way to today’s Swedish “flum school”, where everyone passes… even if they can barely read or write.

On a brighter note, my son and his classmates will finally get their grades and learn whether they passed the IB Diploma — just two weeks after graduation.

School really does prepare them for adult life, doesn’t it?

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The Turnberry Agreement: Europe’s Latest “Victory”

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

The EU and the US have reached a political agreement known as the Turnberry Agreement.

In practice, this means the EU will face up to 15 % tariffs on the majority of goods exported to the United States, while the US receives 0 % tariffs (or very low duties) on a wide range of its industrial goods, aircraft, pharmaceuticals, and certain agricultural products entering the EU. Read more about the agreement here (European Parliament)

It will be fascinating to watch European politicians try to spin last night’s clear loss into a win.

Ursula von der Leyen and others have already started the damage control, talking about “stability” and “better than 30 %”. Classic EU diplomacy: declare victory while the hard-working European taxpayers foot the bill.

The reality is simple. Europe swallowed a bitter pill to avoid an even bigger defeat. We gave the Americans significantly better market access while accepting higher barriers for our own exporters.

We will now see the “Fake it until you make it” mindset deployed in many creative ways by EU politicians in the coming weeks.

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I Still Don’t See It as Real Money

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

Even after almost ten years of investing, I still haven’t quite gotten used to how far we’ve come.

Some single days this year, the value of our portfolios has moved up or down by as much as our entire dividend income for 2017. The numbers are getting ridiculous.

I still don’t see our investments as money. To me they’re more like little workers — some days they do a great job, other days they disappoint. Their main purpose is to push the bars higher in my Google Sheets. The competitive part of me is very grateful, but she is never, ever satisfied.

In previous years I mostly focused on the spreadsheet itself and didn’t watch daily performance that closely. A pure dividend portfolio felt more stable and didn’t require constant attention.

But now that the Google Sheet is finally complete, I suddenly have more time — and because we’ve shifted from 100% dividend investing to including growth stocks, I feel a much stronger need to follow the portfolios in real time.

On red days, it’s an advantage not to see the numbers as money — just fluctuating bars. The same strangely applies to the black days.

I’m not sure if that makes me emotionally detached or just slightly broken. Probably both.

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Really, DN?!

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

Is there no one who proofreads the editorials before they are published?

There is so much wrong in today’s leader that it should be taken down and rewritten. But the worst sentence is this one: “Large profits that would previously have been subject to 30 percent tax were now tax-free.”

Just some paragraph earlier, the editorial correctly describes that both gains and losses on an ISK are subject to a flat-rate tax tied to the government borrowing rate. Some years this rate is low, other years it is higher.

What the critics of ISK (who have clearly never made a single stock transaction) always forget is this: on an ISK you pay the standard tax even when the value of your shares falls — i.e. you lose money and still pay tax.

Unlike a regular share deposit account, where you only pay capital gains tax on actual profits, and losses can be offset against future gains.

If the value of a share drops on an ISK, you still pay tax. You lose money — and pay tax on the loss.

And believe me — far from all share transactions are profitable.

If it were really that simple to get rich on the stock market, every socialist and communist would have invested all their assets there long ago.

Read the full DN editorial here

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That Didn’t Take Long…

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

I’s almost like I jinxed my 80-year-old dad.

Literally one hour after I published my post on X about IT security and how AI is dragging normal people into the tech battlefield, my phone rings. It’s Dad.

He had spent the entire day getting angry calls from strangers accusing him of various things. He was upset, confused, and convinced I could magically fix it over the phone.

After some back and forth I convinced him to go to Täby Centrum. The operator basically shrugged, but the Apple Store was much more helpful. Turns out Dad had been refusing to update his iPhone 16 Pro because “last time I couldn’t find anything afterwards.”

They sent him home with instructions to update. After two more calls from my parents in the evening, I managed to guide them through the update using Mom’s phone as a bridge.

I strongly suspect Dad has been spoofed, which means yesterday’s update probably didn’t solve the real problem.

So yes… it’s only a matter of time before the phone rings again.

Parenting your parents in the age of AI and scams. Exactly what I signed up for.

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This Is How Everyone Can Be Happy with Tax Policy

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

Lower the mandatory taxes — or at least stop raising them. Let every taxpayer keep more money in their wallet. That strengthens purchasing power and drives real economic growth.

At the same time, the Riksdag can open a dedicated bankgiro with a specific OCR number where anyone — completely anonymously — can voluntarily pay additional tax on top of what they are already required to pay under the Income Tax Act (IL) and the Value Added Tax Act (ML).

This voluntary contribution would be a pure supplement to the existing tax system — not a replacement or a new system. Those who genuinely want higher taxes can pay as much extra as they like. Those who prefer to keep more of their earnings can do so without being forced to pay more. Everyone wins.

I can promise you one thing: that account would stay almost completely empty.

Because the people who scream loudest for higher taxes almost never want to pay them themselves — they want everyone else to pay. If their convictions were genuinely a matter of life and death, as they constantly claim, they would have backed this solution long ago.

Proof? A motion in 2013/14 proposing exactly this — Motion 2013/14:Sk226 by Stefan Svanström (KD) — was rejected by the Committee on Taxation . Similar proposals from Moderate MPs in recent years have met the same fate.

The gap between words and deeds is glaring.

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From Socialist BASIC in the 1980s to Google Colab in 2026

/ Liza Dewlar / Leave a comment

The only time I had previously come close to coding was at age 12, when my mother signed us up for a computer course in the early 1980s.

We only managed to attend twice before she discovered it was run by the Social Democrats’ youth organization. We came home talking about “injustice” instead of programming. Classic Socialist BASIC — and that was the end of that.

Forty-plus years later I’m apparently having my second (and possibly last) attempt at coding.

I did exactly what Grok told me and we created several diagrams in Google Colab. It took me an embarrassing number of attempts before anything worked. I’m calling these repeated failures “over-learning” because it sounds better than “I’m slow and technologically challenged.”

My Google Sheets is still the only place I actually feel competent. Everything else is me pretending to be a functional adult who understands what she’s doing.

The learning curve isn’t just steep. It’s humiliating. And yet… here I am.

.

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