Glossary
The words you come across in Scotis, explained briefly and in plain language. The same list is in the app.
- Net worth
- Everything you own (investments, savings, home, other assets) minus your mortgage and other loans.
- Home equity
- The value of your home minus the mortgage still outstanding on it.
- Box 3
- The part of income tax that covers savings and investments. You pay tax on a notional (deemed) return, not on what you actually earned.
- Heffingsvrij vermogen (tax-free allowance)
- The amount on which you pay no Box 3 tax. In 2026: €59,357 per person, or €118,714 with a fiscal partner.
- Deemed return
- The return the Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Administration) assumes: a fixed percentage for each type of asset (for example 6% for investments).
- Counter-evidence (tegenbewijs)
- Was your actual return lower than the deemed return? Then you can prove it and pay tax on your actual return instead.
- ETF
- An investment fund that is traded on the stock exchange and usually tracks an index, such as 'all world shares'. A single ETF often holds hundreds of companies.
- ETF look-through
- Shows which companies, countries and sectors you are actually invested in through your ETFs.
- Dividend
- A share of the profit that a company pays out to its shareholders.
- Return (TWR)
- Time-weighted return: how well your investments performed, regardless of when you added money. Useful for comparing with an index.
- Return (MWR)
- Money-weighted return: what your euros actually earned, taking into account when you put them in.
- Index
- A basket of shares that represents 'the market', such as the MSCI World or the AEX. Used as a benchmark.
- Spread
- Dividing your money across many companies, countries and types of asset, so that a single setback hurts less.
- Rebalancing
- Bringing your allocation back to the percentages you chose yourself, for example 80% shares and 20% bonds.
- Gross and net
- Gross is before tax and contributions; net is what you keep.
- AOW
- The Dutch state pension, paid from AOW age. The amount depends on whether you live alone or with someone.
- Tax credit (heffingskorting)
- A reduction in the tax you have to pay. On a low income, it can cancel out all of your tax.
- Zvw contribution
- The income-related contribution under the Health Insurance Act (Zvw), about 5% of your income above a threshold.
- Annuity mortgage
- A mortgage where you pay roughly the same amount each month: mostly interest at first, mostly repayment later on.
- Inflation
- Rising prices: the same euro buys less later on.
- Real return
- Return minus inflation. This shows how much your money really grows, in today’s euros.
- FIRE
- Financial Independence, Retire Early: building up enough wealth that you no longer need to work to cover your spending.
- 4% rule
- A rule of thumb: if you withdraw 4% of your wealth each year, in historical scenarios it usually lasts around 30 years. Hence: annual spending × 25.
- Scenario
- One possible course of the future in a simulation. Not a prediction: it shows what could happen under certain assumptions.
- Price key
- A free code from a price data provider that Scotis uses to fetch the current prices of your investments.
- Sync
- Sharing your data, encrypted, between your own devices or with your partner. The server only ever sees unreadable data.
- Recovery code
- A code that is created only on your device. If you lose your password, you use it to choose a new one.
- Encryption (AES-256)
- Your data is made unreadable with a key derived from your password. Without that key, it is gibberish.