I finally did it, at the high of my 34 years, I bought an apartment! Investing in real state when you are a Bitcoiner can sound a bit hypocrite, however, buying a property not always as a rational only decision.

I live in Barcelona where the rent prices are insane since the after-pandemic years. Paying rent means freedom, yes, sure, now go find an ideal place, at the ideal price, and that the landlord will choose you instead of the other 100 applicants.

So, to get out of this war on apartments, and landlords, I decided that it would be hard to win this battle and moved to the side of the landlords myself. I believe real-state in Barcelona will only gain value with time, the demand is high, Spain will become the most visited country in the world pretty soon, surpassing France, plus the apartment is a 5 minute walk from the beach and from the metro, this is key.

Now, realizing this dream is not easy, I have been saving for multiple years, investing and being conscious with money in a phase that I could had chosen to YOLO and just enjoy my youth. Unfortunately, saving the money was not the only hard part of the process.

I have all my savings in Brazil and am in the process of transferring everything to Spain. The apartment was paid with these resources, but it was not an easy transfer.

So, there were a few layers that I had to go through to be able to make the payment.

First, I had to send the buying agreement to all of these institutions, to let them know that I was going to need to use MY MONEY and transfer bigger amounts and make international wires. I had to wait on their approval, which took about a week, for them to send me the ok, again, to use MY MONEY.

The second task was to deal with the currency fluctuation and the insane amount of taxes and exchange rate fees from the banks and the wire company. I honestly stopped doing the math at some point, I believe that I could have given up on buying the apartment. Also, to add more emotion to the process, the Brazilian real went from 5.70 for each euro to 6.20 in a matter of a week, insane. DO NOT HAVE YOUR SAVINGS ON WEEK CURRENCIES.

The big day had arrived, I had transfer enough funds to my bank in Spain and now needed to make the payment to the previous owner. Guess what? Even though I had warned the bank the exact date, the exact hour of the payment and they had confirmed with me that everything was ok for the payment to be made, I went to the bank branch and nothing, nobody knew about the transfer, nobody wanted to help, and I was with the owner of the apartment there, looking like a clown. As I hate this kind of situations I shortly started a show and demanded for someone to help me, and told them I was not going to stop talking until someone would help.

One lady at the cue commented with me “we need to be done with banks, we should all be using Bitcoin”, I just fucking loved her comment and told the apartment owner “listen to her, if you were to accept Bitcoin the payment would have been settled already”.

At the end a personal from the bank helped me, basically with a face and the will of someone that was being forced to do something, where at the end, I left a 700 euro fee for the bank to make this transfer….unbelievable.

All this process took me about a month, I don’t remember exactly how many days each step took, but trust me, it was a painfull process.

Say the own accepted Bitcoin as a way of payment, we would have settled the buying in less than 30 minutes, and I would have paid much less on fees and taxes. Maybe when I sell the apartment in a few years.

The moral of the story here is, f*** the banks, and the hope for the adoption of Bitcoin for buying and selling properties abroad.