[lifestyleguru]

So a path to wealth for a normal person is being invested in capital markets but only through a "special" account and assuming that real estate rental or purchase will not eat every leftover from highly taxed monthly salary. This "special" account gives access to all major capital markets?

[flakeoil]

I'm not sure what you are after with you comment, but this account, of which the rules are decided by the authorities, is not that special as every bank and internet trader offers it and it is free and provides low cost Internet trading. And contrary to special pension accounts which exist in many countries, you can take out your money (and add) anytime you want. You just have to pay the tax percentage which is due. So you cannot really add and remove money too often as then you trigger this tax, but once a year is fine.

[johanneskanybal]

It's pretty universal in the developed world to have some type of long term savings tax-scheme. In us it's 401k/roth. In canada it's tfsa. in uk it's isa. isa/401k/roth has pretty low caps. tfsa and isk has no cap.

But yea, considering I pay close to 50% tax it's remarkable at the same time I can speculate in the market, make 500% and pay 1% tax on it. Or that people with actual money pay so little.

[MITSardine]

But 1% is on the total held, not on the capital gains, right?

If that's the case, it affects earnings quite a bit. Say your investments beat inflation by 3 percentage points, you're effectively down to 2 percentage points after tax, so a 33% reduction in income.

[johanneskanybal]

Yea it was better in the years of extremely low rates. 2020-2022 it was 0.375% of total. Now it's up to 0.888% last year. There's some cases where it might be benefitial to use the "normal" account but for average Joe, not having to track every transaction has generally been very benefitial. And as a result 80-90% of adults own some type of stock either directly or through funds/retirement accounts vs the free market utopia us of 62%.