Portfolio Update October 2021

My 90 days in Albania went by very fast and by now I’ve reached the Greek captial of Athens, from where I’m sharing my portfolio update for the month of October.

Apart from my regular passive income and portfolio updates I’m also discussing some news around Mintos and PeerBerry, a new feature of EstateGuru, and the a new product offering from IUVO Group.

My Passive Income in October

After a massive jump in September, my total passive income made another jump to €1.086,38 in October. My income from investements in Peer to Peer loans grew to a record €345,37 while the dividend payments from stocks and ETFs also reached a record €741,01.

I know the income can fluctuate a lot from month to month due to seasonality and payment schedules, which is why I introduced the 12 months trailing average in my previous monthly update. This measures the average income over the last 12 months so this is a better indicator to measure the longterm income growth.

In October the trailing 12 months average income number grew to €557,04 which means I’m currently at 37% towards my goal of €1500 in monthly passive income.

P2P Lending Portfolio

In October I received €345,37 in interest from my P2P investments, which is the highest monthly amount I received so far. I also invested another €900 at the beginning of the month, so my total portfolio in P2P loans grew to €42.065,26.

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Mintos

My income from Mintos grew to €148,30 in October. Since I want to bring my stake in Mintos up to €20.000 over the next few months I also deposited €500 at the beginning of the month.

Following the earlier announcement that Mintos obtained the investment firm license, we’re still waiting for the first notes to appear to start replacing loans on the platform. I’m looking forward to this development, but there’s no news yet around specific dates.

Meanwhile CEO Martins Sulte announced in an interview that Mintos will introduce personal IBAN accounts next year, which they can do now that they have officially obtained the electronic institution license. In the same interview Sulte also mentioned that the plans to introduce personal debit cards has been paused, because they feel there is not enough demand for active use of such a product yet. To me this decision makes total sense with so much competition from online and neo banks and personally I would rather have the funds on my Mintos account fully invested and work for me, than to have another bank account with money sitting there, waiting to be spent in a debit card transaction. But as Sulte said, the plan has just been paused, so the debit card might still be introduced some time in the future.

EstateGuru

From EstateGuru I received €91,02 in October. A few months ago I made some remarks about having to increase the amount per investment in order to keep my money invested. This has since improved a lot and I’ve seen a lot more interesting projects available lately, even more than I could invest in. It’s a tough challenge to keep the right balance between attracting lenders and investors when growing a P2P platform as they need to keep the offers attractive and competitive for both parties, so kudos for the EstateGuru team for managing to improve on this.

EstateGuru also just introduced their new instant exit program, which makes it possible to cash out by selling your loan claim back to EstateGuru directly, without having to place it on the secondary market. Sounds to good to be true, right? Well…there are indeed a couple of caveats that make this offer unattractive to me.

First of all, the option is currently only available for loans from the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and availability is subject to EstateGuru having enough funds available from other recovered loans. So this option is not available for all loans, and might not be available at all at certain times. You can see this if you go to your portfolio and there is a shopping cart icon next to the loan. If you click on this icon you can sell it on the secondary market, but if the instant exit option is available, you can see the option there as well.

The biggest disadvantage however, is the discounted price of -35% you’ll get back. That’s a major loss and a big price to pay for instant cash. Especially if you want to cash out quickly in order to move fast by quickly reallocating funds to something more interesting, for example because of a stock (market) crash you want to profit from.

With a 35% loss I’m almost certainly ruling out that I will ever use it, because I always keep enough cash in my emergency fund and only invest money I don’t necessarily need. But it’s great to see EstateGuru innovating with new features and options to stay on top of market demands.

Another positive thing I want to mention is that EstateGuru‘s country manager for Finland, Matti Vansen,  shared his own investment portfolio in a blog post. In my opinion it’s always a good sign if key people in an organization are investing significant amounts of their own money.

Bondora Go&Grow

At the beginning of October I deposited another €400 to my Bondora Go&Grow account. Throughout the month I received €27,56 in interest, which equals €0,89 per day, so I’m getting close to my goal of receiveing €1 daily from Bondora Go&Grow.

IUVO Group

From IUVO Group I received a total of €37,98 in interest payments in October. I didn’t make any changes or deposits.

There was also news from IUVO Group as they introduced a new product offering: IuvoUp. The idea is very simple and comparable to Bondora’s Go&Grow in that you don’t have to pick loans or set autoinvest criteria yourself, but you invest your money at a fixed interest rate. This sounds interesting, but there are some caveats.

The difference with Bondora Go&Grow is that with IuvoUp you can only invest in Bulgarian Lev (BGN) and for a fixed term of either 6 or 12 months. You can still withdraw up to 1000 BGN (~€511) monthly before the end of the term, but this will be subject to a 0,5% fee.

The interest rates are very disappointing as you only get 3% (annually) for a 6 months deposit and 4% (annually) for a 12 month deposit. That’s still more than any bank offers, but in the world of P2P investing even the 6,75% that Bondora Go&Grow offers is considered low. There is also a maximum of 5.000 BGN (~€2556) you can invest in each strategy, so 10.000 BGN (~€5112) in total.

So to me IuvoUp is not interesting enough to consider, especially with all the additional complications of currency conversion, fixed terms and the maximum deposit and withdrawal amounts.

Peerberry

In October I received €24,68 in interest from my investments on PeerBerry.

In my last update I mentioned that PeerBerry had withdrawn from the licensing process in Latvia and now they are moving ahead by shifting their operations to Croatia, where PeerBerry already has an existing entity (PeerBerry d.o.o.).  For investors not much is changing, except for a new User Agreement and Privacy Policy that you need to accept and the bank details for deposts have changed.

Viainvest

In October I received €15,83 in interest from Viainvest . I didn’t make any changes and there’s no further news yet regarding the next steps after Viainvest obtained their investment firm license.

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

After a record amount of dividend in September, my dividend income rose to another high in October: €741,01. Here’s an overview of the stocks and ETFs and the dividend payments I received from these.

In October I invested some additional money in ETFs I already own, thereby applying the principle of cost averaging while further increasing my dividend income. I also added some shares of Realty Income to my portfolio. This company is investing in commercial real estate with a steady income stream and is paying its dividend on a monthly basis. For me this is a great alternative to a direct investment in real estate, which is has become much harder to realize due to my new nomadic lifestyle.

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

The end of the year is already approaching and by february it will already be a year ago since I started sharing my portfolio on this blog. However, I’ve been investing in P2P loans already for almost 2 years now, so I believe I gained more than enough experience to write some more in-depth reviews of the platforms I’ve been using so that’s what I will do in the upcoming months.

I also want to expand my P2P portfolio with an additional platform and I’m currently considering Lendermarket, Robocash or Bondster. I’m open to your suggestions and feedback on those platforms so let me know what you think in the comments below. I’ll definitely share my choice and experience in the future as well so we can help each other and keep the investor community interactive.

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