Month: December 2023

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What to do with USD in Romania?

It turns out that it is very difficult to do something useful in Romania with US Dollars and below I’d like to share my experience on this matter.

A while ago I worked at a company which offered RSU(Restricted Stock Units) as a form of employee benefits. After a certain period of time, the stock was transferred to me, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. I decided to sell the it, because the company stock appreciated quite a lot and I wasn’t sure the price will would remain like that for a long time. I ended up with a bunch of US Dollars in my US broker account and I somehow had to figure out how to get them in Romania, the country where I lived, so I could actually benefit from them.

The US broker offered two options to transfer the money to a bank. I could either transfer them to an USD account with no additional fee, or convert the USD to a certain currency, for a rather high fee. I didn’t want to pay a fee for converting them either to EUR or RON(Romanian currency) which were the only two currencies in which I had accounts in my own country, but I didn’t had an USD account either.

After asking several banks in Romania if they offered an account in USD, it turned out I didn’t had that many options. I found a bank which offered an account in USD but it had a monthly maintenance fees, and the conversion from USD to RON was very bad. As you probably already figured out, I hate paying fees so at that time, my options were not looking so good.

In the end I chose to risk it and go with Revolut which offered a free USD account, even if I heard some horror stories with accounts being blocked. I reached out to support and inform them that a larger payment would arrive in my account. I asked them if they need any documents to prove where the money originated from. They said it was ok and I didn’t had to send anything. This way I hoped to avoid my account to be blocked. I finally issued the transfer from the US broker to my Revolut account. It took almost two weeks, but in the end the money arrived in my account and I felt relieved that the entire adventure was over!

Next step was to figure out what to do with my nice and shiny pile of… virtual $$$ 🤑

I did the only logical thing in this situation, create a list of pros/cons 🤣

Pros:

  • Increase diversity of the cash I owned
  • Avoid currency conversion fees when buying financial instruments or goods denominated in USD

Cons:

  • Difficult to find a bank in Romania that offers an USD account without additional fees to keep the money for a longer period of time
  • Limited availability of USD deposits
  • Transfers between USD accounts took a long time and had high fees compared to SEPA transfers in EUR
  • Almost no products in Europe are sold in USD
  • Exchange rate to other currency at banks were very bad

I ended up using once again Revolut. As part of the free standard plan I could exchange every month with no fee and at a decent rate, up to the equivalent of 5000 RON from USD.

I don’t know if this was the best decision but it was the best I could find with the available information at that time. Feel free to leave a comment with what you have done in a similar situation.

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How I started my HomeLab

Initially I started my adventure in building an HomeLab on an old laptop, where I installed Proxmox and did some testing with several VM’s and HomeAssistant.

It probably would have been enough if it didn’t had two annoying issues. Every couple of days, the laptop froze and I had to manually reboot it. The second issue was that BIOS did not support resuming to the last power state in case of a power shortage. I couldn’t run the laptop for more then a few days without having to physically interact with it which meant I didn’t have a reliable server for running services or home automation.

After struggling with this setup for a couple of months I decided it was time for an upgrade.

I spent several weeks researching online about best practices in hardware builds for an HomeLab. I read blogs, joined several groups dedicated to this topic on Reddit and Facebook. The more time I spent researching, the more I got frustrated of how easy it was for people living in US, Germany or UK to access all kind of second hand server-grade equipment at heavily discounted price. I either had to make a compromise and buy consumer grade equipment, spent extra money on shipping tax to order it outside of my own country, or get lucky and find a good deal in my own country.

In the end, it payed off to be patient, because I got lucky and found a complete system for sale locally. I asked for opinions on Reddit before committing to buying it, and everybody said it was overkill for what I wanted to run in my HomeLab. In the end, I chose to disregarded their advices and went with my gut feeling. I payed for the entire PC around 800$ and now I had the equipment needed to fulfill any project I wanted.

My future server was a beast:

  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 v3, 2.6Ghz, 8 cores, 16 threads
  • Motherboard: ASUS Z10pe-d8
  • RAM: 192 GB Kingston DDR4 2400MHz with ECC
  • PSU: 750W Segotep 80+ Platinum
  • Black case

The PC was sold without any storage or optical units. I didn’t need any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM for what I intended to use it, but I had to do something for storage. I added 3 spare HDD’s from old laptops I had laying around. Two drives of 1 TB each were configured in ZFS mirror RAID to have some kind of redundancy for my critical data. The third HDD was a smaller one, around 750 GB and I decided to use it to store less important data, like tv shows and movies. For the host operating system I bought a 1TB M.2 2280 consumer SSD from SWORDFISH. The final purchase was an 1 GB Ethernet PCIe card which I planed to passthrough to a VM running a dedicated firewall.

Having all the necessary hardware it was time to second phase into the wonderfull world of building and maintaining a HomeLab, installing the needed software.

Over time, the HomeLab grew by adding IoT devices, Wifi range extender, climate control, UPS, printer and other equipment. Most of the hardware is housed in a rack, mounted on a wall under the staircase in my house. The rack is located in a separate room which I use as a closet. This helps a lot to reduce the discomfort caused by noise and heat. At least once a year, I unplug the equipment and clean it with compressed air.

I chose Proxmox as the host operating system used for virtualization with various services running in multiple VM’s. Initially I started with VM’s running a firewall, local DNS, various docker containers and a few more test servers. The software, services and the overall architecture of my my HomeLab are constantly adapting and evolving when I find some kind of software or an equipment which adds value to my HomeLab.

I think overall it was a good decision to start my own HomeLab even if the journey is not an easy one. I gained a lot of experience and I added a lot of functionalities which bring value. I learned the importance of having a robust system and the effort it takes to maintain it. I learned the important of documentation and this is the reason why I put so much effort into setting up this repository. Besides having cool functionalities, I maintaining a HomeLab builds a set of skills which are valuable in other aspects of my life.

My only regret is that I couldn’t convince any of my friends or family to become interested in this stuff. Everyone I talked with thinks what I do is cool, but they don’t want to get into it. Because of this it’s been a rather lonley journey.

The most important thing I learned along the way, was that no matter how awesome my HomeLab is, if the Internet is my house is down because of my stuff, I’m screwed! 🙂