The story behind Stazora
Hi, I’m Dani Engelsman. I’m 23, and I built Stazora to be the platform I wish I had when I started investing.
I grew up in a middle-class home where financial freedom was not a topic at the table. In my family and among the people around me, hardly anyone dealt with finance or investing, simply because nobody had the knowledge. I wanted something different. I wanted to understand how to build and keep wealth, and how to make my money work for me instead of leaving it only in a savings account.
My education is in the digital world. I finished the MBO 4 programme in E-Commerce at Deltion College in Zwolle, and from October 2026 I am in the first year of the E-Commerce bachelor’s programme at Windesheim. My drive to understand finance and my longer-term ambition to study Tax, Finance and Advice come from first-hand experience instead.
In late 2021 I made my first investments. At first the returns looked good, but there was a catch: I had chosen a broker with a complicated fee structure. Over time those costs stacked up and quietly took most of my gains. Watching my results get eaten by costs I had barely noticed was so demotivating that I stopped investing two years later.
That expensive lesson became the foundation of Stazora. I combined my background in e-commerce with my interest in investing to build this site. The mission is simple: an accessible, all-in-one guide for people who are starting to invest and want to learn how markets actually work, without stepping into the same costly traps.
If you take one thing away from this site, let it be our core principle: facts over advice. We lay out the data, the tools and the plain reality of investing. What you do with it is up to you. Stazora puts the facts on the table, but your judgment is always final.
Every figure on Stazora comes from the fund provider’s or broker’s own documents and carries the month it was checked. How we write and check explains the method.
What this site does
Stazora has nine tools. All of them run in your own browser, and each page is available in Dutch and English:
- ETF calculator: what ongoing fund costs (TER) add up to over the years.
- Compounding calculator: how a monthly amount can grow over time.
- ETF cost comparison: the difference in euros between two cost levels.
- Purchasing power calculator: what an amount is worth after inflation.
- Market crash simulator: what a fall in the market does to a portfolio.
- Emergency fund calculator: how long it takes to build a buffer of a number of months of spending.
- Reach a target amount: how long it can take, or what monthly amount it takes, to reach a target.
- Investment timing: a sum at once or spread out, or the same monthly amount now or later.
- Portfolio mix: the blended ongoing cost (TER) of an amount split across two to four example ETFs.
How the ETF calculator works is explained on How the ETF Calculator works.
What this site does not do
The results are an illustration. Next to the calculator it says:
Investing involves risk of loss. The figures presented by this calculator are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute financial advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
There are no accounts, and the site does not fetch live market prices.
How the broker list is put together
Below the calculator is a list of brokers. With it, it says:
This list shows brokers that serve retail investors in the Netherlands. The order is alphabetical and the same for every fund, regardless of any compensation.
This is not personal advice or a recommendation. Fees can change: always check the provider’s current terms.
The fees on the cards come from the brokers’ own websites and carry a date. If they are older than 90 days, a warning is shown.
How Stazora is funded
Stazora earns nothing at the moment. The site has applied to show ads from Google AdSense; when they run, they sit in a labelled box after the content. Affiliate links are not used; in future the site may use them. Neither ads nor links ever change the order of the broker list, which is alphabetical. How ads use cookies is on the privacy page.
How we write and check
I bring together the fund providers’ own documents and the regulators’ guidance into one plain summary, and I check every page against those sources before it goes live. Every article carries my name and the date it was last updated. Every amount in a worked example comes from the same calculator you use here.
Under the title, each explanation page shows when it was last updated.
- Primary sources. Fund costs (TER), ISINs and fund facts come from the fund provider’s own documents, such as the key information document (KID) and the factsheet. Broker fees come from the broker’s own price list. A source line under a figure names the document and the month it was checked.
- Check dates. Broker fees on the cards carry the date they were checked. If that date is more than 90 days old, the card shows a warning, so you know to look at the broker’s current terms yourself.
- No forecasts. Returns in the tools are an illustrative assumption, not a forecast. Tax amounts are not given, because they change; the pages link to the Belastingdienst instead.
- Corrections. A reported mistake is checked against the original source. If it is wrong, the page is corrected and its updated date changes.
Spotted a mistake or something out of date? Let me know at the address below.
Contact
Questions or feedback? Email hello@stazora.com.