Portfolio Update November 2021

This month I’m happy to share that I’ve added a new P2P platform to my portfolio and that I’ve also added a third category of income streams: crypto lending.  Off course I will also give a detailed breakdown of all passive income from my investments in November and I’ll discuss any relevant news regarding the platforms I’m invested in. 

My Passive Income in November

After two months of exceptionally high levels, my passive income dropped to €645,77 in November. This is actually much more in line with the steady growth trend of earlier this year as you can see in the graph below. I got €306,53 from my investments in Peer-to-Peer loans and €337,21 in dividends from stocks and ETFs. Barely visible on the graph is another €2,03 from crypto lending, my newly added investments which are still in its infancy fase, but more on that later.

Due to the year-on-year income growth for November, the 12 months trailing average keeps going up. This is now at €580,26 so I’m now at 39% of my goal of €1500 of passive income per month.

P2P Lending Portfolio

In November I received a total of €306,53 in interest from my P2P investments. I also invested another €1350 so by the end of November my portfolio had grown to €44.310,80.

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Mintos

On Mintos I received €93,23 in interest and at the beginning of November I also did a deposit of €500. In my previous update I mentioned that I wanted to bring my Mintos account up to €20.000 but I will pause that plan for now. Despite an overall decline in interest in the entire P2P market my Mintos autoinvest continued to work fine but by the end of October and throughout November I started to face some serious cash drag. I’ve since made some changes to my autoinvest settings and I will continue to do some testing before I will make any further deposits or withdrawals.

I’m overall very happy with Mintos, but since this is by far my largest investment in P2P,  I need to make sure I’m getting the right return. Uninvested money or too low interest rates have a negative effect on the return so I need to make sure I keep a balance between the risks and rewards that I can live with. It’s too early to draw conclusions so I haven’t yet made any decision whether I will increase my stake or do some rebalancing of my portfolio. 

EstateGuru

On EstateGuru I got €108,21 in interest payments in November. I’m still investing manually and as I continue to see plenty of interesting projects being offered on the platform I have no issues to keep my money invested.

In November EstateGuru reported a second defaulted project with capital loss for investors. A loan from 2019 (before I started investing) in Latvia had defaulted and the proceeds from the sale of the collateral failed to cover all investor claims, resulting in a 23,9% capital loss for investors in this project.

I don’t believe this is something to worry about as these cases are very incidental and still the majority of the capital has been recovered. EstateGuru has an overall default rate of 8% which I believe is at least normal if not actually low. Most of the defaulted projects result in a full recovery of funds, although some patience is required.

So far I’ve had 22 defaulted loans myself, but 8 of them got fully recovered so far, so only 14 are still in default as you can see in the screenshot of my dashboard. So let’s compare this with the total number of projects I’ve invested in so far: 262 repaid + 169 outstanding + 8 recovered = 439 projects. So my default rate since I started investing on EstateGuru in December 2019 is 22 / 439 = 5%. So better than the overall average rate of 8%. So far soo good I would say!

Bondora Go&Grow

In November Bondora raised the monthly maximum amount you can deposit in your Go&Grow account from €400 to €1000. I grabbed to opportunity and made a deposit of €750 so I could finally reach the goal I had set for myself to earn €1 a day from Bondora Go&Grow. As you can see in my statement I did succeed in this, so happy days!

By the end of November I reached a total of €29,32 in interest on my Bondora Go&Grow account, bringing the total value to €5611,77.

IUVO Group

On IUVO Group I earned €31,24 in interest in November.

Peerberry

On PeerBerry I received €29,03 in interest in November.

PeerBerry recently celebrated 4 years of being operational and with that they have published some impressive growth numbers again. In a year’s time, the volume of loans funded has doubled and the total outstanding portfolio has even more than trippled. Some really impressive growth if you ask me!

Viainvest

On Viainvest I received €15,33 in interest in November.

Robocash

In my last update I already wrote that I had shortlisted a few platforms as I wanted to add at least one more platform to further diversify my portfolio. After doing extensive research I decided to continue to the testing phase with Robocash. Here are some of the reasons why I picked this platform:

• High returns of up to 12%.
• Part of Robocash Group and only list loans from this group of loan originators.
• It’s an established platform with a few years of experience (launched in 2017).
• They are profitable, which is backed up by audited financial statements.
• Easy to use, only 4 loan originators and simple set up of autoinvest.
• A signup cashback bonus of 1.5%.

The opening of the account was easy and after the usual verification steps I deposited €100 as a test first. I never go in big from the start as I first want to get a feeling for the platform, the type of loans and actually test if everything actually works and lives up to my expectations.

I’ve set up the autoinvest and the €100 was invested within a few hours, after which I stopped the autoinvest again, so after some of the loans are paid back I can test the withdrawal process. I’m still at this step of the testing phases and have received €0,17 in interest so far.

Instead of going through this journey by myself and keeping my cards closed until I’m 100% convinced about the platform I decided to share these steps as well. I believe one can never be 100% sure anyway, even after years of investing on a platform and I think it’s valuable to other investors to be open and share the steps I take to test out a new platform.

P2P bonus offers

Do you want to invest in the P2P platforms that I discussed above? Make sure to check which platforms currently offer a bonus for new signups. You’re not only doing yourself a favor but by using my links you are also supporting my blog so I can continue to create more valuable content.

Stocks & ETFs

In November I received a total of €337,21 in dividends from my investments in stocks and ETFs. Here is a break down of the numbers:

* Realty Income has spun-off a part of its business which is now a newly listed company called Orion Office REIT. Every shareholder received 1 share of the new entity for every 10 shares of Realty Income owned. There was no clarity whether the new company would pay any dividends, but even if they would, the amount would be negligible since I only received 4 shares. Since I had no intention to keep or buy more share of Orion Office I decided to cash out the shares and reinvested the proceeds elsewhere. To me the result is similar to a cash dividend, since I got income from cashing out part of the business assets of Realty Income, while still keeping the same amount of shares.
** Similar to above, IBM has spun-off a business unit which is now publicly listed as Kyndryl. I received 4 shares in Kyndryl which I cashed out, while still keeping my 20 shares in IBM.

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.

Crypto Lending

It’s been on my bucket list for a while, but I’ve finally added this new investment vehicle to my portfolio: crypto currency lending. I’m not going into a lenghthy debate about why I invested in crytocurrencies in the first place (I’ll save that for another time.). I’ve already started buying some small amounts of Bitcoin a few years ago and have later added a small part of Etherium as well. I’m staying far away from 99% of the altcoins and shitcoins and I’m not in it for a pump & dump game.

I basically keep a part of my investment portfolio in crypto as a hedge against inflation, to be more diversified, and because of the longterm potential and growing market cap of this asset class. But at the same time I’m also invested in precious metals for similar reasons and I also keep a part in cash as a buffer and to have some liquidity available to act quickly when opportunities arise.

The problem is that these assets partly serve the same purpose and together form a large part of my entire investment portfolio which is not bringing in any cashflow, which contrasts my focus on cashflow generating investments in the stock market and P2P lending. Lending out a part of my crypto assets for interest payments is agreat solution in my opinion.

I’ve wanted to do this for a while but I felt I lacked the proper understanding of the risks and technicalities and I didn’t have enough time to educate myself on this. The best advise with investing is always: when you don’t understand something, stay away!

Over the last months I’ve done some extensive research and selected three platforms to put to the testing phase: Celsius, YouHodler and BlockFi. The interest rates offered vary and can change from time to time. At the moment the following rates are being offered:

Some limitation apply to these rates (e.g. BlockFi has a tiered system with lower interest rates of larger deposists) and interest payout dates vary per platform as well. Payouts are in crypto so in order to measure my income in euro values I’m calculating the interest received at the exchange rates at the end of each month. So far, I’ve tested some smaller deposits of Bitcoin which have resulted in the following interest payments in November:

Risks of crypto lending

I’m not going to do a full review here (that’s for another time) but I’d like to stress that lending out crypto is not  like your savings account at a licensed bank. Similar to P2P lending, you could risk losing it all if something goes wrong. This is why I would never lend out my entire crypto holdings. I’m only planning to lend out a part of it and I also deliberately spread it across three platforms to diversify the risks.

Another important risk with crypto lending is called the risk of impermanent loss. Since cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, the value of your holding in fiat currency (e.g. euro) can fluctuate a lot. If you are for example paid an interest of 6.2% in Bitcoin, but the euro value of Bitcoin goes down with 10% the value of your portfolio is actually down because of this impermanent loss. For me this is a risk I’m willing to take because I’m in it for the long term and I’m not planning to sell any of my crypto positions in the short term anyway. I also want to add that the same can occur when investing in dividend stocks. Years ago I bought some shares in IBM which have since gone down, but I never sold and I’m still collecting the dividends which are part of my passive income stream.

Final words

Even though I really like to go much deeper on certain topics and create more content apart  from the portfolio updates, my biggest priority has been to get more of my capital invested. This takes time and effort to do research without immediate benefits, but with inflation skyrocketing I really want my money working for me. I’ll thank myself later when I’m reaping the benefits. This also gives me so much more knowledge and ideas that I will have a lot more to share here as well.

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