Savings in several countries and currencies
A foreign holding has two engines: what the asset does in its own currency, and what that currency does against yours. Your return is both, multiplied.
A fund bought in dollars, a savings account left behind in złoty, a deposit for a flat sitting in euros, maybe some bitcoin. Every one of them has a number attached, and none of those numbers can be added to the next one as they stand.
One total needs one currency
Pick the currency you actually live in and convert everything into it. That is your base currency, and in Valnivo every headline figure is expressed in it. The conversion is the easy part today. The interesting part is what happens to it over the years.
A foreign holding has two engines, not one
The asset leg. What the investment does in its own currency: a fund compounding, an account paying interest, a property revaluing.
The currency leg. What that currency does against yours. Over long periods Valnivo moves it with the inflation gap between the two countries, so a currency from a higher-inflation country slowly loses ground and a low-inflation one gains.
Your return is both legs multiplied together. A fund that gains 6% in a currency that slips 2% against yours has given you roughly 4%. This is why two people holding the identical fund can end up with genuinely different outcomes: they spend different money.
The trap: counting the same risk twice
Cryptocurrency is where this goes wrong most easily. For modelling purposes, Valnivo treats a crypto-denominated holding as a currency exposure rather than giving it a second, independent volatility term: you own 0.3 of a coin, its price against your money is treated as an exchange rate, and all of its movement is put on the currency leg. This is a modelling choice made to keep the arithmetic consistent, not a statement about what a coin is or how it should be held.
If you then also give the holding its own volatility, you have charged the same risk twice and the spread of outcomes comes out far too wide. Valnivo forces the volatility of a crypto-denominated holding to zero for exactly this reason. Whatever return you leave on such a holding is read as a yield paid in units, which is what staking actually is.
Why a bad year should hit everything at once
Simulating each holding independently quietly flatters your portfolio, because bad draws in one place get cancelled by good draws in another and the downside averages itself away. Real markets do not work like that. Valnivo draws one market shock per month, scales it by each asset class's sensitivity, and adds a smaller amount of movement specific to each holding. A bad month is a bad month across the board, which is the point of holding a range at all.
What is deliberately missing
- No tax, anywhere. No capital gains, no dividend withholding, no tax-sheltered wrappers.
- Currency shocks are drawn independently of market shocks. In a genuine risk-off month they are not.
- Correlation is a single market factor with a sensitivity per asset class, not a full matrix.
- No property-specific modelling: a flat is a holding with a return and a volatility like any other.
How to set this up in the app
On the Savings screen, give every account and investment its own country and currency rather than converting them by hand into one. Enter crypto by quantity. Set your base currency once, under Settings. The Future screen then reports the range of outcomes and a breakdown by country at the horizon, so you can see how much of your future depends on a currency that is not the one you buy food in.
Run it on your own figures
Valnivo is a free financial planning tool: it turns what you earn and spend into a picture of your finances 10, 20 and 30 years out, and shows what changes if you save more, stop earlier, or prices rise faster. It holds a rate of inflation for every country you use and a rate for every currency, so the arithmetic on this page runs on your numbers instead of an example. Nothing leaves your device unless you choose to sign in.