Portfolio Update March 2021

Spring is in the air

March is already over…which means I’ve been working from home for more than a year already. It’s been a tough year for many, but personally I’ve also seen the opportunity of having more time at hand when everything is closed. That’s for example how I got the idea to start this blog.

Although the lockdowns have had a big impact on traveling, there’s another good thing to mention about the pandemic: a big push for remote working. To me it clearly shows that many jobs can be done from anywhere, and I truly hope that this will have a lasting impact. This is definitely a topic I will elaborate more on in another post.

But first back to business. In March I received €277,28 in interest from my Peer-to-Peer investments and €195,34 in dividends from stocks and ETFs. With a total passive income of €472,62 I’m currently at 31.5% of my goal to have a monthly passive income of €1500 that I could potentially live off.

P2P Lending Portfolio

During March I invested another €1250 in Peer-to-Peer loans and received a total of €277,28 in interest, a slight increase from €275,39 in February.

Mintos

The interest payments from Mintos grew slightly from €99,87 last month to €100,89 in March. Since I’m using the auto-invest option I currently keep my hands off any manual investing or secondary market transactions. Because the system seems to work just fine at the moment I don’t see any reason for changes.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I feel confident in Mintos as a platform and already planned to increase my investments, so during March I added another €1000.

Although the funds ‘in recorvery’ haven’t changed I really appreciate the direction Mintos is taking in providing more transparency. A few days ago I received a personalized email from Mintos about this for the first time. The email contained a breakdown of my funds in recovery per loan originator, including how much had been recovered to date. This is in addition to the general updates on Mintos’ dedicated Funds in Recovery Page. Nevertheless, in the end only the results matter, so I’ll keep a close eye on the progression.

EstateGuru

My income from EstateGuru has increased slightly from €84,78 in February to €85,75 in March.

I’m not a big fan of the auto-invest option on EstateGuru as it has only limited selection criteria. I also prefer to manually check out each project before I make a decision to invest or not.

Over the last few months I noticed an increase in late payments and defaulted loans in my portfolio. According to EstateGuru’s own data their overall default rate increased slightly to 7,7%. With 7 defaulted projects out of my 212 projects I’m still far below the average but I’ll keep a close eye on how this develops. So far I’ve seen 2 defaulted projects from which my investment funds were fully recovered since I started investing on EstateGuru in December 2019.

IUVO Group

My income from IUVO Group dropped from €46,14 last month to €34,45 but without the €15 one-off bonus I received in February the actual interest grew by €3,31.

I’m using the auto-invest on the IUVO Group platform and since the results are good I currently don’t see any need for changes. My money is always invested and all my loans are backed with a buy-back guarentee.

IUVO Group is currently running another promotion with an additional 0.75% bonus for Easy Credit loans. Although this can be a great extra return, I’m usually hesitant with bonuses for individual loan originators and prefer to do additional research why they need additional capital before trusting my money with them. I honestly haven’t had enough time to do a thorough research and the offer sounded to complicated to me (you had to set up a separate auto-invest for this loan originator) so I decided to neglect this offer.

Peerberry

In March I received €26,81 in interest from PeerBerry, up from €21,83 in February. I’m happy with the growing results and I’m also experiencing less cash drag than I had in the past.

The biggest news about PeerBerry is the recent launch of the mobile app. The technical developments are one of the most important reasons I’m interested in fintech and why I’m investing in P2P loans. So it’s probably not a surprise that I was happy to try out the new app. I was honestly surprised about the functionalities implemented in the first version. The Mintos app for example, has been available for more than a year, and despite improvements, you can still only invest via the web browser. PeerBerry has made this available straight away.

Bondora Go&Grow

Bondora has returned €15,02 in March, up from €11,06 in February. Due to the simplicity of the system, I saw the daily interest payments go up immediately after I deposited another €250 last month. So the return isn’t dependent on when a specific loan gets repaid, making the income stream really stable.

In March I decided to add another €250 to my Bondora Go&Grow account so I’m expecting the return to further increase next month.

Viainvest

The interest payments from Viainvest grew from €11,71 in February to €14,36 in March.

My investments in the Viainvest platform have been working well so far, but during the last weeks it was the first time I experienced some cash drag for a longer time. Any cash not invested will have an effect on the return so I hope this is just temporary. Unfortunately I’m not able to invest manually since there are rarely any loans available for manual investing on Viainvest. Normally this is not a problem because the auto-invest will pick up any loans quickly but at the moment the demand seems to be higher than the supply of loans. More on this in the next update.

Stocks & ETFs

A well diversified investment portfolio should always include stocks and or ETFs in my opinion. Apart from any dividend payments the stock markets have always gone up in value over the long term.

I have a variety of individual stocks and ETFs which brought me a dividend of €195,34 in March, a big increase from €78,41 in February. Although I did add some funds, the biggest difference comes from seasonality, as many stocks tend to pay their dividends in the last month of the quarter.

I’m currently adding more money into ETFs as I find it easier to stay diversified when scaling up and it prevents me from picking the wrong stocks or investing too much money into a single company.

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

This was only my second portolio update on my brand new blog, but I hope you appreciate it. I have a lot more ideas for more topics related to investing, early retirement and other ways to reach location and financial independence. More content will follow soon and don’t hesitate to leave a comment or let me know in which topics you are interested.