You are Marta Ibarra, head of operations at a Madrid logistics group. A former colleague is asking you for €50,000 to close his company's round on Friday, and you have never invested in a company that is not listed. Before you answer him, on Monday 11 January 2027 you must decide how much money you will set aside for investing in new companies over the next three years.
The situation
You are 43 and earn about €110,000 a year before tax at Transportes Valcardo. Your liquid savings are €200,000: €30,000 in an emergency fund, six months of your spending of about €5,000 a month, and €170,000 in index funds. Those funds are your yardstick: at 5% a year, each euro becomes about €1.40 in seven years.
On Sunday, at a quarter past eleven at night, Iker Urbistondo, with whom you worked for six years, messaged you. He is closing the pre-seed round of Reservela, a booking app for small restaurants: €300,000 at a €4 million valuation, and he is €50,000 short. Reservela has two founders and no revenue yet; by your reckoning, a reasonable price for a company with no revenue would be closer to €2.5 million. This morning a second message arrived: "I'm sending you the deck. We close on Friday."
You know the basics of this kind of investing: more than half of all cheques are lost or barely recovered, and a few return ten or thirty times the money. The shares cannot be sold when you need the cash. There is a state income-tax deduction of 50% of what you subscribe in new companies, with conditions and capped at the state share of your tax, about €15,000 a year. And Reservela will not be the only one: over the coming weeks other proposals will reach you, some through an angel network.
Nobody is forcing you. If you decide nothing, the €170,000 stays in the funds, the cushion untouched, and Iker closes his round with other investors or without them. But you want to start, and you want to do it with a plan rather than a Sunday-night message.