Finances: Supporting Sweden and Europe
We’re tried to alter our habits to try to send more of our income towards goods and services that result in a healthier Sweden or a healthier EU. To do this we make small changes to avoid investing in aggressive regimes, and unethical companies, or unethical persons. The goal isn’t to try to be perfect but rather to improve over time and so help contribute to a wider movement.
It’s a position that has been increasingly common in Sweden since this time last year. The aim of this article isn’t to justify that position or debate politics, but to instead explain the mechanics of how such a choice can be enacted.
Changing General Purchasing Behaviour
Avoiding a large central Amazon is tricky because of the convenience, but there’s usually some Swedish retailer I’ve not heard of until I search using a Swedish price comparison site that has the same product at a competitive price. there are also large sellers like Clas Ohlsen, Jula.se and biltema.
Reusing products reduces consumption. We buy second-hand from sites such as blocket.se and tradera.se which are similar in use to ebay. Where we are, there are also a lot of local “loppis” stores, which are small second hand shops.
Avoiding brands like Tesla is easy enough because, bluntly, we don’t have the disposable income to be the target market for new cars. We try to use second hand cars that are in the price category of being reliable and not having significant body rust.
The decisions can get complicated when it’s an American firm with a local presence (manufacturing, packaging) because it’s employing locals, so the alternative needs to also benefit Sweden, as opposed to another overseas company with jobs offshore.
Supermarket Products
Avoiding American goods in the supermarkets depends on brand awareness and the labelling. In the government-owned alcohol stores (Systembolaget) a flag is next to the price label on the shelf next to each bottle which is helpful. This isn’t the case in the supermarkets we use currently. At the moment we have to pick up and read each label. However, thanks to some Danish and Canadian app developers, there are also now some phone apps that can be pointed at the shelf product and it will list if there is an American association with the product. Example apps are udenusa, “Made O’Meter“, and “detrumpify yourself”.
Kelloggs and Coke/Pepsi are the more obvious and common American brands, but it’s also kinder on the wallet to buy the store-brand local equivalent or Swedish brands like Trocadero or Zingo, or other European brands. Sometimes avoiding specific countries or companies like Nestle is tricky because they have so many brands. Avoiding the chocolate section of the supermarket avoids a lot of problems, and chocolate is quite expensive nowadays anyway.
Avoiding Gillette is a great idea. Going old-school, a standard traditional razor handle, shave bars, and a pack of blades pays for itself quite quickly.
Switching Financial Investments
Sweden has ISK investment accounts , which are roughly similar to the concept of UK stocks and shares ISAs. It allows investing savings in the stock market with automatic tax deductions. It’s tax free for the first 300kkr (about 27,800 euro, 24,200 GBP or 32,345USD).
The traditional advice used to be to invest a portion in global funds, and then the remainder in more specific higher risks. Typically the global funds make use of the large US technical companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.
But to protest American political moves, some have moved sold global funds, and invested in European funds and Swedish businesses. I did this with my emergency fund, and it has worked out really well over the last year.
- Common European funds include Storebrand Europe A SEK.
- There are various Swedish specific funds, one common example is SEB Swedish Value Fund
- Common Swedish companies include SAAB, and Lundin Gold that were successful this past year. SAAB due to interest from countries look for alternatives to US dependence, and the gold industry due to countries selling dollar and US bond investments and investing in gold. It’s not clear what the future holds for these however.
- A long shot was CTEK who are a publicly traded Swedish company and are a well known battery charger manufacturer. As 12v car charging is declining with the advent of electric cars, the stock price had slowly sunk. This made the shares cheap to buy, but a high risk because a company without a future direction can disappear completely. But they’ve since started producing electric car changers and so they’re on the rise again.
Software
The IT-side comes down to choosing software, choosing services, and reducing data exposure online. It’s a big subject so the following is a summary only.
For software, I’m using Linux to replace Microsoft operating systems on my devices. I’ve been using Linux a long time transitioning to a 100% Linux environment is a lot easier for myself. Ubuntu is a common distribution, SuSE is another, but choosing a distribution is a topic in of itself.
One “blocker” I can think of is that a lot of online exams are delivered by a single vendor that doesn’t allow Linux. Specifically, taking online remote exams with Pearson VUE currently requires MS Windows or MAC, so I might have to have a dedicated low powered machine for exams, but I can sort that out just before an actual exam. It’s a good idea to have a separate clean machine anyway, as the exam proctor gets access to your machine during your exam. So giving them a blank machine is best for your privacy.
To replace MS Office, my shortlist of free alternatives is libreoffice, onlyoffice, and Calligra.
For small business switches and routers, Mikrotik (Latvia) make some great devices. For 12v options in camper vans and similar, Teltonika (Lithuania) make great mobile routers.
Online Services
For online services it’s a complicated balance of hosting location, company behaviour, cost, device support, and the quality of the service. To help, there’s a few different sites listing common IT services and products and their EU alternatives. One is https://european-alternatives.eu/
I’ve been able to cancel my Google services, and switched to Proton for email some time ago. Since then, Proton has had some controversy so there might be better choices now.
It’s best to avoid VPN or antivirus from American or Russian companies. An example of a Swedish VPN is Mullvad.
For an AI that claims not to track your inputs, lumo is good.
For chat programs, Signal is the more private alternative to WhatsApp or Google Chat.
For cloud file storage alternatives include
- Tresorit (Swiss)
- Icedrive (Gibraltar)
- Jottacloud (Norway)
- Storegate (Swedish-located but more expensive)
Data Exposure
Your personal data security isn’t purely what you decide to share on a blog or in photos. It’s also the information about who you are friends with, and who they are friends with. It’s information about when you logged on, from which locations, and who else logged in from the same locations at the same time.
Ideally you don’t want to be on Facebook, as you are the product being data-mined, sold, and manipulated. It’s difficult in northern Sweden however as the older generations and public services communicate almost entirely on Facebook, including for organising events and for mentioning incidents that have occurred. It’s hard to suggest an alternative however, as the main requirement is the critical mass of people to be using the alternate platform,
Some risks are unavoidable. The Swedish armed forces, and the Swedish police use Palantir which is not a great situation in the current political climate, since the US regime likely now has access to significant data on Swedish citizens via Palantir. The datasharing agreements individual countries have had in the past has been misused to target allies.
Payments, Charities and Donations
Sweden has an alternative payment system to the credit card companies, which is called Swish. I can pay with Swish in most shops and can send individual people money using it. The merchants fees for using the system stay within the country as opposed to the more global credit card companies.
The Swish payment system also provides a curated list of charities that can be donated to using the service
There are some interesting Swedish Kickstarter campaigns. In contrast, a lot of the Gofundme projects that I reviewed seemed to be questionable.
As in the UK, support for Ukraine against Russia is a big thing, especially as Russia has long been an aggressor versus Sweden. There is a vetted list of charities people can donate to.
Domestic Electricity Generation
The start of the Ukraine conflict and disruption to Russian natural gas supply to Europe, made a lot of countries realise that electrical overproduction or dependence has a strategic effect. Each domestic solar installation reduces demand on the grid during the daytime, and each battery installation smooths that effect. Domestic solar installations are not a golden bullet to electricity problems, as the winters are always going to be dark and cold, but they reduce dependency on other generation facilities, and increase resilience to short-term outages.
European countries export and import from their neighbours. It’s possible to watch near-realtime maps of this. Here is one such site:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
Swedens biggest demands are sales to Finland in the north and Denmark in the south. Lesser amounts are exported to Germany and parts of Norway.
Other
It’s possible to go further into other large topics like local community assistance or the general concept of representing the country culturally. But these are big topics and moving away from the topic of financially supporting a country, which was what I wanted to cover in this post. For completeness, the following topics might be of interest for self research if you want to do things along these lines:
- Civil preparedness, voluntary fire service (see below), or voluntary (home guard) duty (Citizens only)
- Paying taxes, starting a business that brings money into the country
- Donating blood (see below)
- Art, culture, and tourism
It’s possible for immigrants to give blood but good Swedish skills are required for the donation centres in the north – this is so the medical questionnaire is correctly understood. More information here: https://geblod.nu/other-languages/english/
If your Swedish is great and you meet other criteria, there’s usually local volunteer fire service opportunities too. This is similar to the UK, where volunteers have to be within a certain distance of the fire station when on call. More details here: https://blideltidsbrandman.nu/vad-behoevs/
A recent example of cultural representation in the north of Sweden, is Jonna Jinton who is now a little famous via YouTube, and her popular international shop, linked below:
