A Bit About Me
I’m Cristina Gil Gallo: an industrial engineer by training, a technology consultant by profession, an investor and a lifelong learner.
I’ve always been curious about how things work, and I seem to have an appetite for leaving my comfort zone. When something catches my attention, I go deep into it. Over the years that has meant becoming an SAP consultant, going freelance, moving countries more than once, learning to invest, international taxes, figuring out how property business works in the UK and Spain including auctions, and, right now, building a business of my own, very much a work in progress.
I don’t have all the answers, but I enjoy understanding things properly, breaking them down, testing ideas, learning from experience, and documenting. Lately that curiosity keeps circling back to money: how people earn it, invest it, keep more of it, and how to build a retirement that doesn’t depend on the state alone.
Valencia → Madrid → Heidelberg → Bath
Diaries, moves and a few financial crimes along the way. Cristina Guiri did not appear overnight.
The script
- Around age 6, my father gave me my first diary. I wrote regularly for more than a decade, to vent, to think, to survive childhood and adolescence on paper.
- I grew up in a family with very traditional ideas. The plan was clear: be good, be sensible, don’t make waves. Good grades at school. Industrial Engineering (MSc), also with good grades. Payroll job. Every box ticked.
- I bought my first home, my main residence. In hindsight, a small financial crime, but back then it was simply what you were supposed to do.
- On paper I had done everything right, and yet something kept feeling missing. I had this restless itch to take on the world, to comerme el mundo, but somehow family and tradition quietly held me back.
The first taste of freedom
- I went freelance. Terrified at first; I have not looked back. No more explaining in interviews why I was leaving, I could simply choose what came next.
- Going freelance in my field, I nearly doubled the income I’d had in Valencia. For the first time I lived more relaxed: there was always money for dinners out, the groceries, clothes if I liked them, without checking my balance first. In Valencia I’d been a bit of a balance-checker.
- I bought a storage room. Financially it wasn’t a great investment either, but it did the job.
- In 2015 I lost my sister Mónica. I began writing her a public letter every year, on the anniversary of her death, and those letters became a way to stop and ask myself an uncomfortable question: am I actually living the life I want to live?
One suitcase, no network
- A German company offered me freelance work. Living abroad was on my bucket list, so I said yes.
- I landed with a suitcase, zero friends, zero support, and a language I did not speak. Not easy, but social media helped me meet the right people at the right time.
- Here I roughly doubled my income again and, for the first time, started to accumulate. I decided I had to learn how to invest, and I started travelling more too.
- I made my first investments through a bank. Best choice at the time: I had no financial education. Not the best choice in hindsight, still better than leaving money idle.
Too many tabs open
- During the pandemic I had to cut my income in half to stay in the market.
- In 2020 I started Sapsapiens, a blog about SAP. Useful for learning to publish online; not exactly thrilling. Over time I realised SAP alone would not keep me writing.
- I learned about ETFs and started investing myself. Then options contracts. I learned a great deal about international taxes, personal and corporate.
- In Bath I learned to do property investing properly, under both UK and Spanish rules, and found the two markets are completely different. I share my actual investments and deals here too.
- I also fell for a property scam, but managed to recover all of my money, and learned a lot about how to get it back in situations like that.
- I became a mother and had an existential crisis.
- Now: Cristina Guiri and Iberova, side projects for the moment. I want the freedom to be a present mother and to leave my daughter what I learn, but also to prove, mostly to myself, that there are more options than the script allows. More than anything, this feels like coming back to writing, and I’m excited. Sharing it publicly: the good, the bad, and the parts still in progress.
Why the Name “Cristina Guiri”?
Cristina is my name. Guiri is a Spanish word for a foreigner, or more affectionately, for someone navigating life as a curious outsider. Technically it applies to tourists. I’ve been using it loosely for about a decade.
Moving across three countries meant learning to navigate different systems, tax rules, pension schemes and cultural assumptions about money, usually without a manual. That outsider perspective turned out to be useful.
Cristina Guiri is a way of saying: explore the world, keep your mind open, expand your options. There is life outside the environment you grew up in, outside its assumptions, its defaults, and the story you were handed.
Things I want to do with this life
For most of my twenties I had a long list of things I wanted to do, and never actually did. In my thirties, something shifted. I started living late, but better late than never. I’ve been ticking things off ever since.
- Go skydivingI even got the licence and jumped on my own for a year.
- Be able to run without dyingI ended up doing three half marathons in two months. I was always rubbish at that.
- Fly over the jungle on a zipline in Costa Rica
- Solo travellingI did it across Europe and Asia. Sorry, mum, you didn’t know.
- Visit JapanThird time lucky: I cancelled the first trip because of Covid and the second because I became a mother a month before we were due to fly. My daughter spent her first birthday in Japan.
- Travel a lot28 countries and counting.
- Live in LondonRight now I am only near it.
- Visit at least one country on every continentAfrica and Oceania are still on the list. Australia and South Africa will probably come soon.
- Take a sabbatical year to travel the world
- Become fluent in EnglishSometimes I am even more fluent in English than in Spanish.
- Speak English with a British or neutral accentRight now, before I finish my first sentence, people already know I’m Spanish.
- Become a motherFor many years it felt impossible. My daughter was a miracle that arrived when I turned 40.
- Enough mostly passive income that working becomes a choice
- Build my own businessThe companies I’ve owned so far were my solo trading business.
- Do a real estate deal where you refinance and get all your capital back
If you’re reading this one day, hi, sweetie. This was always for you.