The FromUs blog
Notes on giving, investing, money, and parenting. Written by Ben & Kia, on the days when the baby naps.
Why €25 a month beats one big birthday gift
The grandparent who sends €25 every month for eighteen years gives more than the one who hands €600 once. Compounding plus discipline plus time.
The €5 gift you'd love, vs the €20 gift you settled for
You see the perfect little thing. It costs €5. But the parents are friends, you can't show up with a €5 toy. So you spend €20 on something nobody actually wanted. The hardest-working money in gift-giving is the gap between those two.
Kid fatigue after the 20th present (and the polite lie all three of us tell)
A four-year-old halfway through a pile of birthday gifts, glassy-eyed and ripping paper. The giver sees the kid doesn't want it. The kid wants to play. The parent wants gratitude. We all pretend this is fine.
Why active investors lose to a fund that does nothing
Sixty years of data say the same thing. The professional pickers, on average, lose to a fund that just owns the market. Here's why FromUs is built on the boring side.
How twelve years of buying one boring fund let me build FromUs
I was let go on a Tuesday morning. The reason I didn't panic was a standing order I set up in my early twenties and almost never looked at.
What Warren Buffett actually recommends to his own widow
The world's most famous active investor doesn't want his wife to pick stocks. He wants her to buy the index and hold it. So do we, for your kid.
A small mountain of polyester, and the alternative
We didn't build FromUs as an environmental project. But it's hard to think about gifts in 2026 and not think about what happens to them. A few numbers, then an alternative.
The €400 bracelet that cost me several thousand
I bought it at 22 and sold it at 24 for a quarter of the price. Sixteen years on, the same euros would have been worth more than 2.5x. I want our daughter to know the trade before she's old enough to make it.
Compound interest, the quiet magic that fits on a napkin
Interest earning interest earning interest. It sounds small. Over eighteen years, it's the most outrageous force in personal finance. Here's the napkin version.
The toy mountain is a coordination problem, not bad taste
Every parent-to-be ends up with the same pile of duplicated, well-meant stuff. It isn't anyone's fault. It's a coordination failure, and wedding lists already solved it.
What a €100 gift today is worth on their 18th birthday
If a single contribution of €100 sits in a global ETF from a child birth, here is what it actually becomes, and what that buys.