Portfolio Update May 2021

Welcome to my May update regarding my investment portfolio and the passive income I received from my investments. Below I will give a detailed breakdown of the €636 in passive income I received in May but first an important personal update.

I’m quitting my job!!!

Since I started this blog my goal has always been clear: build up an investment portfolio that produces enough passive income to live off, so I can quit my job and travel the world. Obviously I’m not there yet… I have a full-time job that pays my bills and helps me fund my investment portfolio with a significant amount every month.

Yet I decided to quit my job before I reached my goals. So why? The short answer is…time. Getting this blog off the ground takes time and considering it’s only one of multiple business ideas I want to pursue I reached a point where I decided to just go for it.

Being an overthinking introvert, I didn’t come up with this overnight. I will definitely write a separate post about my decision and how I will fit this into my long-term financial plan. I will also have much more time to write about my new ventures in the coming months. The most important result for me is that I will now have the time to work on the things I like and can do this when I want, and wherever I want. So soon I will already reach one of my main goals: location independency.

My Passive Income in May

May has been the best month so far when it comes to my monthly passive income. In total I received €635,69 in passive income returns, from which €245,68 came from P2P loans and €390,01 from dividend payments. This means that I already reached 42,4% of my monthly passive income goal of €1500 in May.

P2P Lending Portfolio

Similar to last month, at the beginning of May I added another €750 to my Peer-to-Peer investment portfolio. At the end of May my portfolio looked as follows:

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Mintos

At the beginning of May I added another €500 to my Mintos account and in total I received €101,09 in interest in May. Apart from that I didn’t make any changes since the auto-invest is working fine at the moment.

Mintos also gave an update on their blog, in which they confirm that the default rates of loans has reverted back to pre-covid levels, which is a good sign of the recovery of the P2P market. Especially short-term and personal loans saw a big increase in default rates when the pandemic broke out last year. As a result, many loan originators have tightened their lending criteria, resulting in an overal better loan performance, according to Mintos.

Personally I think that the pandemic had a much needed reality check on the entire P2P market as some bad loan originators were shaken out of the market. Hopefully this will also have a lasting effect on the health of loan portfolios, more transparency and further regulation of the P2P market.

Lastly, Mintos also reported that, despite a slowdown in their growth last year, they reached a new milestone of over 400.000 registered users on their plaform in April this year.

EstateGuru

On EstateGuru my portfolio grew with €53,49 in May, a lot less than in previous months.

Although I haven’t added any more funds to my EstateGuru account since I reached my investment goal of €10k, I keep receiving back payments every few days that I need to reinvest again. I noticed I had more difficulties finding enough interesting projects to invest in over the last months.

I’m not really comfortable with the autoinvest options, so I still invest manually, which also means that I sometimes miss out on projects. Especially the smaller investments below €100k are usually fully invested immediately by people who have the auto-invest turned on. What EstateGuru could really improve is to send out the email notifications of new projects earlier. I noticed many times that I only receive an email hours after a new project is placed online and most of the time it’s already fully funded by then.

One way I now try to invest my money faster is to increase the investment per project to €100 or more.

After looking more closely at the secondary market I also decided to invest in a few project there in May. At the secondary market you basically take over a project from another investor, who usually asks a premium on top of the initial principle. Depending on the interest payment schedule, this premium usually includes some compensation for the interest for the period from the start or the previous interest payment to the date of the sale on the secondary market. Because of this compensation, I basically paid a few investors interest that hadn’t been paid out by the borrowers yet. This upfront payment reduced my account value but this willbe paid back by the borrower on the scheduled due date. This is the main reason why my May income was much lower, but this will increase the interest payments in future months.

IUVO Group

From IUVO Group I received €32,72 in interest in May. IUVO Group might not be the biggest P2P plaform in Europe, but they are doing very well. On average I managed to get higher interest rates than for example on Mintos. I have never had any issues since I started investing early last year and my money has always been fully invested (no cash drag).

IUVO Group has just announced a new bonus offer to get a 1% cashback for existing investors who increase their investment with €2000 or more. I’m not sure yet if this is interesting enough so I will have to think about this. It’s a significant amount and since the offer is valid until the end of the year, I’m not in a hurry. I definitely first want to do more research on IUVO Group and it’s loan originators before I make a decision.

Bondora Go&Grow

In May I added another €250 to my Bondora Go&Grow account and received an interest of €17,49.

The return with Bondora Go&Grow is not the highest in the P2P market but since it is very steady I will continue to invest to grow my return. Inspired by some other P2P investors I have now set myself the psychological goal to receive €1 a day from my Bondora Go&Grow portfolio and in order to do so I will continue to add €250 a month until I reach this goal. 

Peerberry

In May I received €24,76 in interest on PeerBerry. I didn’t add any money or make any changes to my auto-invest settings.

Meanwhile PeerBerry shows significant signs of growth and reported a record number of new clients in April. A downside however, is a slight reduction in the average interest rates on the platform. In the end the interest rates in the P2P market are determined by supply and demand and it looks like interest rates are slightly down on most platforms.

Viainvest

From Viainvest I received €16,13 in interest in May. Also here I didn’t add any funds but I did make a slight change to my auto-invest settings.

Although I increased the maximum amount per loan already from €10 to €20 in April, at the start of May I faced some cash drag again, so I further increased the amount to €30 per loan.

Stocks & ETFs

In May I received a whopping €390,01 in divident payments from my investments in individual stocks and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), the largest amount I ever received. Here’s a breakdown of the dividends I received:

I’ve kept on investing more money in some stocks, but mostly ETFs in the past months and will continue to do so to further increase my income from dividend payouts.

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

That’s it for now. I have one more month to keep myself busy with my full-time job, while I’m also preparing for the big change in my life. I can’t wait to share more about my journey, so talk soon!

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