Investing in Denmark (2024) - Best Plan For Most People

Hey Friends — In this article, I am going to tell you the easiest and most effective Denmark-specific investment plan for most people. Updated to 2024 as well.

I’ve built an investment portfolio of well over 1m kr in stocks and funds, and this is the exact setup I use. It will be especially relevant for those who want a set-it-and-forget approach but still want the most profit possible.

The setup has two principles, and then three actions. Let’s go.

1- Invest Every Month // Black Divider

If you want your money to compound, you need to invest every month. Investing is a long game. I’ve invested from 10 to sometimes 50% of my take-home income every single month for years — and only now, years after, I can start to see big money.
If you’ve 20K to spare, by all means — invest 20K. But, for most people, my recommendation is that you pick a number that is reasonable for you, that won’t hurt your lifestyle - if it’s 500 kr, or 1.000 kr - that’s fine.
What you want to do here is to build the habit of investing — to frame yourself as “Yes, I’m an investor”.
If you can, of course, go high - 5K-10K is a reasonable number for most expats in Denmark, for instance. But, again, you can start small and grow as you go along.

2- Invest Automatically

I strong recommend you make your investments automatic. Specifically, what you want is a setup that:
- Each month, the day after your salary comes in, you’ve an automatic transfer from your bank account to your investment accounts. It takes one minute to setup that in Nordea or Danske, for instance.
- Then, you want your investment accounts also to invest automatically. Specifically, you want a setup that once the money comes to your brokers, it’s automatically used to buy a specific fund or stock you specified in advance.
- I recommend Nordnet for Stocks to do that, and more on that in a minute.
The idea here is to invest without even thinking about it. (To have it as a process running in the background every month).
- I guarantee that if you don’t do it automatically you’ll either a) not do this every month, or b) spend way too much time thinking about it.
You also want your taxes to be done automatically, and for that I recommend to use a Denmark-based broker such as Nordnet or Saxo that does all the calculations and information sharing with SKAT automatically for you as well.

That said…

3- Maximize Your Aktiesparekonto

Denmark is the worst place in the world to make money as an investor. It has the highest investment gains taxes in the world, and in many cases you pay taxes on your gains even if you never sell your investments.
Hence, my best tip would be: don’t live in Denmark.
But alas you’re living here, so let’s move on…
In Denmark, the best setup is to, first, maximize your Aktiesparekonto.
Aktiesparekonto are special investment accounts where you pay only 17% in capital gains vs. 27 to 42% on the normal accounts.
- This means that if your stocks went up by 1000 kr, you’ll pay 170 kr in taxes, instead of 270 to 420 kr. (Yep, 420 kr out of a 100 kr gain in taxes. Ouch).
So in this context, 17% is great - but the ASK have three catches:
- First - There’s a limit to how much capital you can add to your ASK. In 2024 that is 135.900 kr. If your account grows over that, great — but you can’t deposit more if you’re over that limit.
- Second - In the ASKs, you get to pay taxes even if you don’t realize your gains. So, say you buy Apple stock and it goes up by 1000 kr. Even if you never sold that stock you’ll need to pay 17% of that 1000 kr gain at the end of the year. That sucks and that type of taxation is unique to Denmark but it’s still a better deal than the alternatives.
- Third - Because the ASK is such a Denmark-specific setup, it’s only Danish brokers like Nordnet, Saxo or Nordea etc that have this. You can’t open an ASK with Revolut or Degiro or eToro.
For the ASK, I recommend you buy stocks or funds that are on the more riskier end (i.e. more chance of profit). For instance, I have mostly tech stocks in my ASK as those have tended to perform best over the past years and I want to pay 17% vs. 27-42% on the gains.
If you’ve not maxed out your ASK, all your investing kroner should go that way. Max it out ASAP. There’s no automatic buys in the ASK as there are for normal accounts but both Nordnet and Saxo have low fees for buying.

BTW - If you want to learn more about investing, I made a totally free email course where I guide you through this and a lot more. You can check it out, link in the video description.

4- Use Nordnet’s Månedsopsparing with Index Funds

Once you maxed out your ASK, setup a Månedsopsparing Account in Nordnet. This is an account that will do the auto investing we talked about — and I made a video explaining the setup linked above. It used to be free to do this but now there’s a small monthly fee.
I recommend most people to invest in index funds and don’t bother with picking stocks. Index funds have low fees and regularly beat even the fanciest investors.
- Specifically, go with funds that cover a wide set of the markets - e.g. the top 500 Stocks in the US, Top 1000 worldwide, etc.
Taxes for this are complicated. In short, you’ll pay 27% for the first 61K you’ve in gains and 42% on everything over that. There are no loopholes.
But, be aware, because it’s Denmark, you’ll also pay unrealized gains directly or indirectly to all your index funds each year. I made a graphic you can see here and start to get confused about all the rules.
Still, all things considered, this is the best option.

5- Invest In Yourself

You are your biggest asset, and there’s no tax on your growth - (at least no directly), so I recommend you and everyone watching to set some money aside to regularly invest in yourself. This can come in multiple ways: