Where I live, aggressive overbidding on asking price is just how buying a home works. You don’t bid the asking price and expect to win — you bid well above it, or you lose the house to someone who did. Sometimes by €100,000 to €150,000 over asking.

The first flat I bought, in December 2022, was listed at €380,000. My financial advisor — genuinely one of the best in the city, someone with a strong track record and no reason to steer me wrong — told me the market required a serious overbid to secure it, at least €50,000 more. I decided to act strategically instead. I quickly profiled the seller: an older woman, and my read was that this was someone selling to be rid of the property quickly, not someone selling in order to buy her next one. I went in at €12,000 over asking, against his advice. I closed at €392,000.

Sometimes your gut feeling is the best advisor. I followed it, and it worked.

Here’s the part that still surprises people outside this market: I financed 100% of it. The standard rule across most of Europe is to finance around 80%, which means saving a 20% down payment — for an average home here, that can mean €80,000 to €100,000 in cash before you even start. That would have been impossible for me. Full financing like this is genuinely rare: it’s the default rule only in a couple of European countries, the Netherlands and Denmark among them, while in the US it exists only as a narrow exception through specific programs, not as a standard option.

My own cash outlay wasn’t a down payment at all. It was €14,120 in notary fees, and nothing else.

There’s one more detail worth knowing if you’re buying here: you’re normally required to place a deposit of 10% of the purchase price into the notary’s account as security — on my flat, that would have been roughly €39,200 sitting locked up until closing. Instead, my advisor arranged a bank guarantee in its place, for about €150. Same security for the seller, a fraction of the cost, and none of my own cash tied up before the deal even closed.

This particular market has also made owning rental property increasingly difficult, especially since 2022. It wasn’t always like this. Until about four years ago, right around when I bought my first apartment, rental properties here made people insanely rich, and flipping a flat was genuinely a strategy people built wealth on — some doubled a property’s value in as little as two years. Transfer tax on a buy-to-let purchase runs several times higher than on a home you’ll live in yourself now — it was 10.4% back when I was navigating this, only recently reduced to 8% starting this year, versus just 2% for an owner-occupied home. Even at the “reduced” rate, that’s still four times what an owner-occupier pays. Rental properties are financed at worse terms, taxed more heavily on an ongoing basis, and regulated more tightly year over year. It’s a big part of why, when I eventually did want a rental property, I bought it in a different country entirely rather than here.

My financial advisor proposed three interest rate scenarios: fully fixed, fully variable, and half-fixed, half-variable, which he recommended.

He based that recommendation on two decades of data. Interest rates in this market had sat near 1% for twenty straight years. Twenty. A variable rate, historically, had been the cheaper half of almost any mortgage you could construct. He wasn’t wrong about the past. Nobody could have been.

I wasn’t comfortable with the variable option, and I was hesitant about the half-and-half split too. I like relying on math I can actually verify before I commit to something. I accepted his advice anyway. This is the moment I should have trusted my gut a second time.

I bought nine months after the Russia-Ukraine war began, which had already pushed interest rates up sharply across the board. My mortgage started with the variable half at 4% and the fixed half locked at 3.53%. The effects of a war can’t be predicted in advance — though someone, somewhere, always ends up positioned to benefit from exactly that unpredictability.

For the next eleven months, I lived in a very specific kind of dread. Every first of the month, I’d open my banking app already braced, because the variable half of my installment kept climbing, with no ceiling I could see, while my income stayed exactly the same. For the first time in my life, I understood what it physically felt like to not be able to breathe — to genuinely choke on financial stress. I never let the feeling take over. I made a decision instead.

Eleven months in, I couldn’t do it anymore. I fixed the variable portion at 4.69%, locking in the pain instead of gambling on it getting worse. That’s the moment this stopped being about “should I invest or pay down debt” and became about survival math instead. I needed to bring an unsustainable installment down, by any legitimate means available, and extra payments were the only lever I had left to pull.

Here’s what that fixed/variable split actually cost me, in numbers instead of dread. On a fully financed €392,000 mortgage, split evenly, each half carried €196,000 in principal.

The fixed half, at 3.53% over 30 years, ran a monthly payment of roughly €883.

The variable half, at 4.69% over the same term, ran roughly €1,015.

Combined, that’s about €1,898 a month — roughly €200 lower than what I was paying just months earlier, at the peak of that eleven-month climb, before extra payments started pulling the balance down.

I started fighting back the only way I knew how. I went into extreme frugality and began making extra payments, aimed directly at the variable half, where every euro would do the most damage to the part of the loan actually hurting me. I sent the first few via a straightforward bank transfer, with a payment reference that could not have been clearer about where the money was supposed to go.

Months later, the variable balance hadn’t moved the way it should have. I called the bank. They’d applied every extra payment to the fixed half instead — the one with the lower interest rate. I asked, genuinely, in what universe someone making extra payments specifically to escape a punishing variable rate would want those payments parked on the lower-rate side instead. They didn’t have an answer that satisfied me. They also didn’t reverse it, and they didn’t reimburse me. In 2023, this felt less like managing a mortgage and more like arguing with a wall that was legally allowed to win.

Their fix was to route future extra payments through their online portal instead of by transfer. Fine. Except once the payments became consistent — around €1,000 a month, plus my annual bonus — their compliance team requested a full picture of my accounts to verify where it was all coming from. Standard procedure, technically. It still landed strangely: apparently, “someone this frugal, redirecting a €15,000 tax refund and a work bonus straight into a mortgage” wasn’t a profile their systems expected to see.

This is where Debt-First FIRE actually comes from. Not from a philosophy I read somewhere and adopted. From eleven months of not being able to breathe on the first of every month, and from the realization that the only lever fully within my control, when everything else felt like it was moving on its own, was how aggressively I paid down what I owed.

If you’re following FIRE content written from the US, it’s worth understanding that Europe adds layers of complexity that rarely make it into the conversation. A 100% financed mortgage is a Dutch and Danish peculiarity, not a European norm — most of the continent still expects that 20% down payment I never had to find. Transfer tax alone can be the difference between 2% and 8% depending on whether a property is your home or your investment, which reshapes the math on ever building a rental portfolio in the first place. Mortgage interest deduction rules, wealth taxes on unrealized investment gains, and LTV limits all vary sharply by country, sometimes changing year to year with a single budget announcement. And because rental properties are penalized this heavily in the Netherlands and Denmark specifically, the model doesn’t scale here the way it can elsewhere. In countries like Germany, investors can run the BRRRR method — buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat — pulling equity back out of one property to fund the next, the same approach Graham Stephan, a YouTuber I’ve followed for four years now, built much of his portfolio on in the US. That kind of compounding, leverage-recycling growth simply isn’t available to me here. None of this shows up in a blog post calculating your FIRE number with a flat 4% withdrawal rate and a US tax system in the background. It should. It’s exactly the kind of variable that decided, for eleven very real months, whether I could breathe.

If there’s one practical takeaway I’d leave you with, it’s this: house hack, and keep house hacking, for longer than feels comfortable. Living in a shared flat for a few years before buying isn’t a compromise you settle for until you can afford better — it’s the fastest legitimate way I know to close the gap between what you earn and what a notary bill or a down payment actually costs in a market like this. Every euro you’re not spending on a place entirely your own is a euro that can sit in a fund earmarked for closing costs, or compound while you wait for the right property to overbid on strategically instead of desperately. And it doesn’t have to stop once you own something. I still live in a shared flat today, years into this journey, with two other people, because the math still works in my favor: lower personal housing cost, faster extra payments, faster equity, faster progress toward whatever version of FIRE you’re building toward. It’s not glamorous. It was never supposed to be. But if eleven months of dread taught me anything, it’s that the fastest way through this isn’t the version that looks most like independence from the outside — it’s the version that actually gets you there.