Portfolio Update April 2021

Welcome to already the third monthly update about my passive income portfolio. Although my entire investment portfolio includes a variety of asset classes including stocks, ETFs, P2P loans, precious metals, crypto currencies and cash, I mainly focus on the passive income producing assets in this monthly update: P2P investments and dividend stocks and ETFs.

My main goal is to reach a monthly passive income of €1500 so I could live of my investments and can call myself financially independent and don’t need to rely on a day job which keeps me in one specific location.

In April I received a passive income of €436,08 from all my investments. €276,65 came from interest of P2P loans and €159,43 consisted of dividend payments from stocks and ETFs.

P2P Lending Portfolio

As I discussed in my previous updates the stability has returned in the P2P market after some difficulties last year so in recent months I have again increased my investments in P2P loans. In April I added another €750 in total.

Mintos

My monthly return from Mintos keeps growing and in April I received €113,97 in interest. I haven’t made any changes in my auto-invest settings for a while as everything seems to work well. During March I added another €500 to my account to accelerate the growth as I feel confident in Mintos as a platform.

Mintos also published some numbers which are showing that the volume of loans funded on the platform are growing. In Q1 the total volume grew with 26% to €375.180.649 compared to Q4 of 2020 which I see as a positive sign that the market is recovering.

At the same time Mintos also acknowledges that some of the lending companies have either repurchased part of their loans or decreased their supply of new loans on the platform because they have found other ways to attract investors. I believe this is part of a general trend where more loan originators are either starting their own platform or offering their loans on multiple P2P platforms.

In my opinion this is not a bad thing, but rather stresses the importance for investors to pay more attention to the lending companies and their credibility and financial numbers, rather than only looking at the platform on which the loans are listed.

EstateGuru

EstateGuru offers investments in real estate which I believe is a great diversification in my portfolio. In April I received €78,44 in interest, slightly less compared to last month (€85,75).

I still only invest manually on EstateGuru as I’d like to review the projects before making an investment decision and I don’t invest in every project. The downside of this is that it takes me more time than I spend on other platforms. Because of the volume of my investments, almost every day some money is being paid back, so I need to login every day to see if there is money uninvested and if there are projects I would like to participate in. However, I still prefer this over the auto-invest as this also prevents me from investing too many times in the same project via different stage loans.

Last month I tried my first investment on the secondary market. I noticed that all the loans are listed at a small premium, but it could still be a good alternative if there are not enough suitable projects on the primary market. I now only paid €0.25 extra for this project so the result would still be good.

EstateGuru has recently published some statistics which show a record total value of new loans in March at €21,5 million which made the total outstanding loan value peak at €140 million. In my opinion these number show a positive sign of their growth.

Another positive thing to mention is that they keep improving the platform and recently anounced some new features. I’m personally happy with the improved account statements as this provides better insights into my portfolio.

IUVO Group

In April my income from IUVO Group was €33,75, which was only slightly less than the €34,75 in March, which was one day longer.

There was another promotion to receive a cashback of 0,75% for new deposits made in April, but looking at the current share in my P2P portfolio, I wasn’t planning to increase my investments in IUVO Group, so I decided not to avail of the campaign.

There’s not much more to mention at this point as my investments seem to perform well without any issues and the returns seem to be stable.

Bondora Go&Grow

I only invest in Bondora Go&Grow which represents 93% of all investments on the Bondora platform, according to their report. According to the same report, the total amount of investments is growing with double digits, which is another sign of the recovery of the P2P market.

In April I received €15,03 in interest and decided to add another €250 to my account, making Bondora now my 4th largest P2P platorm.

Peerberry

From PeerBerry I received €22,21 in interest in April, slightly less than the €26,81 in March.

In my last post I mentioned the new mobile app and the fact that I was pleasantly surprised about the amount of functionalities in its first release. On their blog, PeerBerry mentioned a few improvements and already announced a few more functionalities that they are working on, including a live chat and push notifications. To me this shows that they are working hard to be innovative and create a good user experience.

Meanwhile, the Aventus Group, the group of loan originators that PeerBerry works with, has published their Q1 results which look very impressive. The total loan portfolio (including the loan originators that don’t work with PeerBerry) grew with 70% year-on-year. Also the profit and number of employees grew substantially, which not only shows the recovery of the P2P market, but also how the Aventus Group is claiming their share of the market, which is a very positive sign for PeerBerry as a platform.

The last thing I want to mention is that PeerBerry just announced that one of their board members, Igoris Trofimovas, became a 50% shareholder. Although I don’t really understand why Aventus Group sold PeerBerry to two individuals a while ago, I think this is positive news. I like the fact that someone who is actively involved in the business buys shares of the company and therefore has its own money at stake.

Viainvest

In April I received €13,25 in interest from Viainvest, a slight drop from €14,36 in March.

I mentioned earlier that I faced some cash drag so the uninvested money was probably the cause of the slightly lower return. To fix the problem I increased the maximum amount per loan from €10 to €20 in my auto-invest settings. This solved the cash drag problem straight away and I haven’t had any issues since then.

Stocks & ETFs

In April I received a total of €159,43 in dividend payments from my stocks and ETF portfolio. I also continue to invest more in this asset class to increase the amount of dividend payments.

As usual I won’t go deeper into my stock and ETF portfolio here, but I’m thinking about creating some content about my strategy and choices so we as an investment community can learn from each other.

How I buy my stocks

For most of the stocks in my buy and hold strategy, I use DeGiro as a broker. DeGiro has among the lowest fees and is very user friendly. If you want to start trading via DeGiro you can use this link to sign up so you and I both get €20 off our trading fees.

Final words

I hope you appreciate this update. I know my posts have been very similar and to the point every month but I will create more diverse content in the coming months. Soon I will also announce some big news, so stay tuned…