Cyprus Tax Calculator is probably the best implementation of the tax calculator that I’ve seen around. It’s dead simple to use, and allows all kinds of calculations – monthly or annually, with or without 13th salary, and reporting overalls, income tax, social insurance deductions, as well as providing tax breakdowns.
Very handy tool for anyone in the job market. ;)
Things I wish someone had told me before I started angel investing blog post shares some insight into what it takes to be an angel investor, and how much failure one will probably go through before getting any kind of success. Like with everything, it takes time, money, and effort to learn the intricacies.
Actually, the needle-in-the-haystack is not quite the right metaphor. There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT, and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them. Because of this, they don’t have trouble raising money. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons people get into angel investing is because they think it’s more fun to be the beggee than the beggor. But the cool kids don’t beg. The cool kids — the ones who really know what they’re doing and have the best chances of succeeding — decide who they allow to invest in their companies. And they want investors who have been around the block, who know what they are doing, who have a thick rolodex of potentially useful contacts, and most importantly, deep enough pockets to do follow-on investments, and thick enough hides not to complain if things go south.
If you want to make money on angel investing, you really have to treat it as a full time job, not because it makes you more likely to pick the winners, but because it makes it more likely that the winners will pick you.
Also, don’t forget that there are also more investing options out there, one of them being etf investing, which is a very profitable option!
If you’re not ready for that, you will be much better off financially buying index funds.
Zyprus.com has this nice Affordability Calculator, which, given a few basic numbers, helps one estimate the price of the house that will comfortably fit into the budget (yeah, those are the words they use). It’s a nice tool for people who have been saving up to buy a property. For me though, no matter what I put, it returns this:
Nothing new here, but it’s always good to get a confirmation from another source.
With Bitcoin on the rise recently (currently priced at $900+), I thought I’d share the link to this article – Bitcoin – Money Decentralization – which provides some insight into how Bitcoin works and some core principles behind it.
The article is written more from the Computer Science perspective rather than an economic/financial one, some of the economic details might be oversimplified.
The two main aspects that make Bitcoin different from a modern monetary systems, like US Dollar or Euro, are the following:
- Decentralization: There is no central entity that prints (mints) money, but rather the money is being mint by the crowd. This makes Bitcoin a decentralized system.
- Anonymity: People who use Bitcoin hope that their identity would not be revealed, in contrast to the usual way we all buy commodity over the internet using our credit card, we have to supply our personal details to be verified against the bank who treats our account.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) published their annual Cyprus tax, facts and figures brochure for the year 2016. It is a handy document to send to friends abroad who are interested in moving to Cyprus or starting a business here.
One thing that I found ironic in this document was the example they used for personal taxation (page 7-8 in the English PDF). The example is for someone with a monthly salary of 5,885 EUR and additional income from rent, etc – a total income of 75,620 EUR per annum. Looking at the average salary in European Union, Cyprus shows 1,833 EUR per month in 2014 and 1,574 EUR per month in 2015.
I hope PwC predicts a huge spike in average salaries in 2016. That would be nice …