Benedikt Stafflinger: SatSheet and nuck nuck

Genesis.

I’m Benedikt, born in 1994, and I come from a perfectly ordinary working family. My mother stayed at home, my father worked at a printing company. We never had much money, but my parents managed it well and gave my brother and me a happy childhood. I am grateful to them for that to this day.

Whenever I wanted a new toy, I often sold old things at the flea market, and later I delivered newspapers.

My first shares.

When I was five, my parents gave me ten Nokia shares. That made me the owner of a tiny piece of a company whose phones everyone knew back then. I was pretty proud of that.

The phones were considered indestructible. The share price, sadly, was not.

Standing on my own feet.

I moved to Munich for my apprenticeship. At times my entire monthly pay went on the dorm. For the cinema or a night out in the bars, I regularly collected deposit bottles. It was a good time all the same.

That is when dividends got hold of me. With Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble I started building my small dividend portfolio. I sold my Nokia shares at a loss of about 70 percent. With the dividends, I still came out close to even. That stuck with me.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”Warren Buffett

DividendeOhneEnde.

In 2016 I started building websites. Two years later my two hobbies turned into a dividend blog. Research during the week, write on Sundays: that added up to 145 company profiles.

That same year I went to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting with my father. Buffett called Bitcoin “probably rat poison squared” there.

Shares were something I could grasp: companies that make things and earn money. Bitcoin was just some internet money. And if Buffett talks about it like that, why would I look any closer?

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Bitcoin didn’t go away.

At some point I thought: this doesn’t seem to be going away. So in February 2021 I set up a Bitcoin savings plan. A small amount every month.

The savings plan just ran blindly in the background. I was still busy with stocks, options and my blog. Bitcoin was now part of my portfolio, but I still didn’t know much more about it.